When I decided to use my dad’s 2005 camcorder to film my music video… I never thought about how I’d get the video footage.
The camcorder records everything into a tape. My dad had told me that he lost the cable which connects the camera to a laptop.
When the time came to get the videos, I thought I could find and purchase a new cable online. But I had no idea which cable it was.
I brought the camcorder to school, and asked my teacher to bring her old camcorder (also sony) and its cable, to see if I could use it. But it turns out it wasn’t the same model.
In the worst case scenario I thought I’d take the tape to a shop and pay to get it digitized.
Luckily! My dad found the cable he told me he’d lost, and we were able to retrieve the footage. He still also had his old laptop (windows XP), which had the correct entry for the cable too (because modern laptops don’t have that anymore). We used windows movie maker to record the footage digitally. It took ages because the footage had to be played in live time in order to be recorded.
Once that was done, it was a struggle to get the right file type for the digitized video: because this ancient laptop converted it into a .wmv video file which is unplayable by literally any computer nowadays. Luckily I found a way to change the file type through the old computer.
The quality of the digital video is awful (320p), which I also didn’t think about when I was recording. But the desaturated colours that the camera achieves give it the beautiful vintage look that I was looking for.
Overall, I learnt a lot from using the camcorder and I’m glad I used it. However, for a future project, I would probably use a better quality camera (preferably still old -though maybe from 2010 rather than 2005) so that the footage is larger and not as grainy, and I would achieve the desaturated vintage look through colour editing in post-production.
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