Okay, it’s not really time travel. Or is it?

It’s more an excursion into resurrecting old technology, to wit, video tape cassettes. Ah, VHS, the technological marvel of the 1980s, then the standard we all lived by in the 1990s. An entire industry grew around this until it dissolved into relative obscurity in the new century, replaced by DVDs and later even Blu-Ray, both of which have now been displaced by digital streaming.

My wife and I have a daughter, now in her late 30s. She was a dancer. Well, she still is. But growing up in the 1990s, having a committed dance student tended to generate a LOT of video tapes. Figure eleven to twelve years of dance recitals. Then, a substantial number of years included annual performances in The Nutcracker. Then there were rehearsals, especially dress rehearsals. Oh, let me digress. The performances were professionally videotaped, but these tended to include the entire stage. Videotaping the rehearsals allows doting parents to focus on their child. Anyway, we were talking about volume. The Nutcracker company she performed with almost always had two casts giving two students a yearly shot at some of the primary roles. That means TWO videotapes per nutcracker year.

These things have been languishing on a shelf for years and I have recently been convinced to start converting these aging relics to a rather more stable storage medium. I bought a dvd recorder years ago with this very thing in mind. Procrastination took over and alas this was never done. Fast forward to last week and we (my darling bride and me) jointly decided that we shouldn’t put this off any longer because who knows how the heck long VHS tapes will continue to be viable.

Now, there are services that perform these actions for you. They are not cheap. Given the sheer volume, I relented on some of our more precious memories to give the service a try … the total cost for ten tapes approached $150. We probably have at least 40-50 other tapes and the kicker is, many of them are only partially used. Some likely have only a few minutes or 10-20 minute segments. We were pretty awful about marking and using up entire tapes. So I decided I would do most of them myself. For that same $150, I bought a refurbished combo unit from eBay. Luckily it came with a 1 year warranty. I say luckily because I immediately had to send it back because it didn’t work. Now, it’s been returned and I am happily dubbing tapes to disk.

This kind of brings us back to equipment. VHS has been pretty dead for about 20 years. I have an ancient machine that still works, although I hadn’t fired it up for at least that long. I don’t trust it. This is why I bought the other unit. I feel the same about the dvd recorder. It’s at least that old. I also had an old dvd player that’s probably 15 years old. I figured I need that if I want to copy the dvds I make, but I don’t 100% trust it so I just bought a used dvd player as a spare. I’m keeping my eye out for used vhs as well. They simply don’t make low end ones anymore, and the ones they do make are expensive — apparently there are hobbyists the same way there are vinyl record hobbyists. And to make copies you need a TV that works with them. I’m doing this work in my office and I actually use a tv for my computer monitor but it’s a new TV … it only has HDMI inputs. Luckily, I had a spare very small portable tv to use as a monitor. The two dvd recorders have HDMI outputs in addition to the older standards, so I can review on the bigger screen if I need to. There is something one has to remember through all of this: VHS is not the sort of high definition we are all used to these days. What you end up with is lower definition recorded on higher definition medium. Still, it’s tolerable.

Now, why am I dubbing to disk and not directly to digital? Well, for one thing, it works better. I had bought a setup a while back to do that … but it did a poor job of copying the files from the vcr. I found it worked much better from a dvd source. Night and day. It’s also a better archive medium. No one knows how long they’ll last but I’m betting quite a while.

These performance recordings are the easy ones. The VHS camera we bought to film our little darling used VHS-C, which is a smaller version of tape that needs a converter to play in a standard player. The camera has been well stored and seems in good condition so I’m using it as the player to transfer the tapes. We at some point received a mini-dv camera as well. Those tapes always needed to be converted which until now always seemed like such a pain. Well, it still is, but they’re going to dvd as well. We don’t have quite as many tapes because that was supplanted by iPhone recordings. I think that’s going to be another project entirely.

Anyway, this is where I am now, scrounging those little shoved aside yellow/red/white cables stuck in the back of drawers and in unmarked boxes, boxes where I still might also find some misplaced VHS-C or mini dv tape. I still have the two ancient vcr/dvr recorders set up as a reserve, but the newer unit seems to be working well now, and it still has most of its year warranty left.

I reasoned that this is very near what a time traveler has to deal with, fiddling with old technology, in my case relearning skills lost through disuse. And there are surprises. We found a tape we made using a borrowed full-sized VHS camera. One of the oldest tapes we have … 38 years. We hadn’t watched that in nearly that long … it brought tears to my eyes seeing our sweet 1 year old daughter her teen-aged brothers and my lovely darling bride.