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I imagine almost everybody has had some experience with making “movies” of their kids or some other life event. My first experience with movie making was with a Bell & Howell, 8mm manual (wind up) camera.

You put in a roll of film, wound up the camera and pressed the button while looking through the view finder. If I remember correctly, my father had to load and unload the camera, because it had to be done in the closet where it was completely dark and I did not know how to do that. The film came in a foil package and had to be sent back in another special foil pack to keep out the light.

These were pretty primitive and the quality was not so hot. Mistakes were made. Shooting into the sun was not a good thing. Shooting in the shade was not much better. Through trial and error we finally got some fair movies of the family in the 50s and 60s.

One day I noticed a small dial on the camera that could be adjusted and asked my dad about it. He said it controlled the number of frames per second the camera took. So old smarty me decided to lower the number so I could get more on a roll of film. I have always been frugal. Little did I know, the projector ran at a constant speed. If you do the math, this means that what you get is the effect of fast forwarding a video. You may have to consult with an actuary to figure that one out. It took me a while. I reset the ‘frames per second’ back to normal.

Ok, now fast forward (no pun intended) a few years later to the 80’s. The 8mm and Super 8mm films were getting pretty old and there were not many projectors left around that worked; not to mention getting a bulb for one that did work. Therefore, we sent all our films off to some outfit that converted them to VHS which was then “state of the art”.

Now what happens? Everybody’s got a VHS recorder (camera) and a VHS player on top of their TV. All is well for a while until a few years later when digital cameras came out. By then everything was being recorded digitally and stored on DVDs (discs). Now, what to do with all those converted and newly shot VHS tapes? Many home movie buffs figured out how to interface the VHS with RGB analog cables and everybody started converting their VHS tapes to DVD’s.

Uh Oh! It wasn’t too long before everything was being filmed and shot in digital format. Analog stuff was a thing of the past. Today you will be hard pressed to find a DVD player much less a VHS player that works. FYI – At the Regional Library they have a unit that will convert anything analog to digital and it’s free.

I guess that today’s digital format, which is state of the art, is usually transmitted via the web and if stored it’s likely on Micro SD (secure digital) cards. This is the one that is about the size of your thumbnail. Today you can purchase a Micro SD card that holds 1000 Gigabytes of data. That’s one Terabyte on something smaller than a dime. Wow!

So here’s my story. I just finished several visits to the library, where I converted everything we had, VHS and DVD, to digital and then backed it up on a couple of Micro SD cards. It took a lot of hours to do this. I had to sit and let the VHS run to record all this stuff. The good news is that I did not mind too much since I had not looked at all those movies in quite a while. The bad news is that somebody recorded a bunch of footage that should have never been shot in the first place. My mother made video of mid-west corn fields out the window of a commercial airliner. I skipped over all that. I did not think my grandchildren would be interested.

Bottom line is that almost all the old mediums are no longer supported and all the old players are failing and will never be replaced. Like me, if you are interested in preserving family history, go out and get digitized. You can share those memories with your great-grandchildren from your phone. Even if you aren’t interested, somebody will want to see all this one day. Trust me. The genealogy bud is very contagious.

Columnist Charlie Snelling is an Athens resident who grew up in Carlton.

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