A trip down memory lane

Looking back and preserving for the future

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

When it comes to preserving your own history, ask yourself “Have I looked at everything?”. For me, I was fairly confident that I had looked at everything, but I had forgotten about one thing. In a cupboard, was a box. That box contained tapes, video tapes my parents had recorded from 1997 to 2011.

From holidays my parents took to precious moments of me and my sister growing up. Up until recently, we didn’t have any easy way of watching the contents of them that didn’t involve connecting a video camera (that is almost 30 years old now) to a TV to watch them.

But recently, I discovered (although, probably not new to some people) that there is a way to record the contents of the tapes.

Here’s how I did it:

• If you don’t already have one, you will need a video grabber. This is a USB connection with a composite adapter (red, white and yellow connectors that often are used with older DVD players.) Here is the one I used. (not affiliated!)

• As for software, if you have a Mac of any kind - QuickTime Player is the one you need (which will come preloaded if you have a Mac) If you are a Windows user, I’d recommend using OBS Studio.

So, once you have what you need, how do you go about it?

For Mac:

1. Open ‘QuickTime Player’, when it opens a Finder info will open, but along your top menu, press file - then do new Movie Recording.

   

2. Next, a capture window will open. Below, press the downwards arrow and set the inputs as USB Video Device and USB Digital Audio — these are the inputs for the USB device.

   

3. Then, with the inputs selected, press record. Once you're done recording the footage, that record button will be a stop.

For Windows:

1. Open OBS Studio, and if you're a first-time user, make a scene (although not literally!) and give it a name. [I’m doing this on my Mac as it’ll be the same]

   

2. Then under the sources menu, press the + button and you’ll need to add two sources, an Audio Capture device and a Video Capture device. For each pop-up, choose the name of the device you insert.

   

3. Once you have added them and there is activity on the audio mixer, press ‘start recording’ and then press the same button to stop it. Once it has saved it, at the bottom of the window, it gives a source path to where you can find it. [Although, more often than not, it’ll be the Videos folder]

   

   

   And there you have it! This had been sitting in my drafts for a while so in that time, I have finished recording all of my family’s video tapes and they’re digitally preserved so we don’t lose the memories on them. Please do the same if you have them. I’ll leave you with this, my family, friends, and classmates have always said I’ve been one for technological know-how. Here’s some proof that I started that quite young!

Me in 2004 ‘using’ (although, not really…) a flip phone. :)