Kevin Fair
Goodbye Analog!
February 2, 2008 at 9:47 pm | Technology | View Comments |
I have been on a mission recently to digitize everything analog in my life. Where once this was impractical due to expensive technology and disk space, this has now become unimpractical (eat that spell-checker!) and pretty inexpensive.
So, what do I mean by digitize everything analog? One word – pictures, videos and music (eat that grammar-checker!).
So, why do I want to digitize everything?
A. Digital content doesn’t degrade, nor does it get destroyed in a fire or flood (provided that you practice safe backups).
2. Analog content cannot easily be shared.
iii. Digital content doesn’t take up very much space (this is important when you have kind of a small house)
I had a few vhs tapes that I wanted to copy to DVD. I had done this a short while ago through a guy who did it for only $6.00 per tape. He closed up his business so I went looking elsewhere. The other local place was charging $30.00 for the first tape, and $15 for each tape after that. Aside from the fact that I don’t understand that pricing model I felt that $75 for 4 tapes seemed a little high. So, I thought there has to be a better way. Turns out that there was…
I found a video capture device selling for $80 ($160 minus $80 rebate) that will accept any analog AV input (e.g. component, s-video, coax) and convert to digital, including the software to create dvds with menus, chapters etc. The rebate is still available, follow the link above. So, to recap, I can do as many tapes as I want for $5 more than it would take to do 4. As a bonus, this device is also a tv tuner and DVR so that I could watch and record TV on the computer.
(I know some people who already know about this are saying “Duh! Where have you been? This stuff’s been around for a while.” I’m not sure it has been so damn cheap though.)
Another thought occurred to me which makes this device that much more valuable than I thought it was. I can hook up my turntable to this and capture all of the music that I have on vinyl. (For those of you younger than 30, let me explain turntable and vinyl… Actually never mind, you don’t need to know.) There is music that I haven’t even been able to find in digital form, and would have gladly (sort-of) paid for it had I found it. So, as I write this, I am listening to, and ripping, music that I might not have ever listened to again otherwise.
My father has lots of old slides that I’d love to see again, especially since I probably slept through the first time I saw them. I told him about this scanner and he decided to give it a go. I’ve had a chance to try it for scanning about 4 rolls of negatives and, for the price it works pretty well. It’s not professional quality, but with a little digital cleanup work you can get a decent scan. Even if you were just using it as a means to store a digital backup that is not as easily destroyed as physical media it’s worth the money. I plan to either get my own, or borrow it once and a while. I’d love a professional quality scanner, but $99 seems like my kind of price.
A while back I bought a 500Gb hard drive for about $130 for backups (one of the necessary realities of going all digital). I’ve also backed up everything I have so far to DVD (23 of them) and put those in the safe. Next time I see a good deal on hard drives I think I will get another so that it can be stored in the safe which would just be easier and safer than what I’ve got now.
Gotta pause for a minute here. The LP is finished. Back in a sec while I switch albums…
Okay, I’m back. Just replaced Streetnicks by the Shuffle Demons with True Stories by Talking Heads. Where was I? Oh yeah.
Now that I have my content in digital form, it’s now time to share it. I am using my account on Flickr for sharing photographs, and My Photos on Facebook for sharing snapshots. I’ve set up a channel on YouTube and I recently posted a lot of videos (mostly old 8mm videos that my Dad recorded onto VHS which I have now tranferred to digital).
The applications I am using are: WinDVD Creator for video capture and editing (it came with the device and works pretty well), Spin It Again for capturing music from LPs, and I don’t recall the app that came with the scanner but it worked pretty well (though not very intuitive – what do you expect for $99 all-in).
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