I remember your website along with a few others. Long before YouTube came along. I appreciated the multiple angles & when the whole train was recorded & not just at the crossings.
3 years ago | 0
I think the tape imperfections give a fun charm to the footage. A reminder of a bygone time. Your stuff is incredible!
3 years ago | 2
Come to think of it, I too have been wondering why some of the clips seem a little redundant. Very interesting to know why.
3 years ago | 0
Who cares, it's great stuff!!! Also John, do you have any suggestions for getting MiniDV onto the computer without FireWire? I have a bunch that I want to get onto the computer to edit and don't have an available PCI slot
3 years ago | 0
oaksmodelrr
A recent comment mentioned the fact that some of the same trains are featured on multiple videos, and I wanted to address this, and other issues, for those who are not familiar with my previous videos.
I used multiple cameras to get different angles: typically zoom approach, close up approach, broad side, close going away, zoom going away (sometimes had 5 cameras). When looking at a old photo, film or video, I often wondered what was just out of frame to the left or right or even behind the camera, so when I was filming, I tried to capture as much as possible.
When I started uploading videos to the web over 20 years ago, there were limited software and storage options, and upload/download speeds were nothing like today. Because of these limitations, I would edit together the footage from the multiple cameras into one short video in low quality MPEG1 format to keep it small, even for dialup users. You can see the difference if you look at my older videos.
Oh, and if you don't know what dialup is, go ask your parents.
And you may notice that some of the footage suffers from tracking problems as cameras and tapes had intermittent issues like dew, dust, bad alignment and general wear, eventually wore out all my cameras from use. Over the years, I have used 2 VHS, 1 S-VHS, 3 VHS-C, 1 Hi8, 5 Digital8 and 4 MiniDV. I still have several VCR's and a MiniDV player that I used to convert my tapes.
And of course magnetic tape ages as well, so as a public service announcement, if you have any, get them captured to digital sooner rather than later.
I am available if you have any questions regarding DIY low cost digital capture options.
John
3 years ago | [YT] | 23