These are screen-grabs of a video clip I took of her just before bed one night.

This was probably only a few weeks before we started weaning her off the dummy. I think it took about under a week to get her off it. Poor kid suffering from withdrawals …. But I am proud of her.

Caleb hasn’t been using one; not that we are going to, we’ve managed so far without one, and as much as we can help it we don’t intend to start.

You know I like taking photos of the kids. I also like taking videos of them in action: Those first steps, the changing look(s), them in action in the walker / tricycle / simply playing, their vocab, changing the voice.

I sometimes find myself in a dilemma when various occasions present themselves for such opportunity that I am unable to decide which camera to bring along- the digital cam, which takes far more superior still shots than the built-in stills feature on the videocam; or the videocam, which can take better and longer video footage (is there a plural for dilemma?)

I had started out by purchasing a videocam when Caitlin was born. It was a good “business case justification” to Hot Mummee to spend the money. Once a lifetime event; it’s not for me or all about me; it’s our kids; I can make copies for your parents (oops that reminds me!), etc.

I took lots of Caitlin’s first hours (eg, family visiting the hospital) and subsequent months and years. Then I bought a better Canon S5is still camera, replacing the late-90′s Canon ixus model. It was faster, better quality, better storage, and more versatile. I had come to use and rely on it a lot, taking more pics with it at the same time improving my skills with it (well, I hope).

So much so that I haven’t video-taken Caleb’s birth! I had only used the video feature available on the still camera, which are only in *minutes-long snippets. I did take lots of stills of him though, comparatively a lot more than Caitlin.

* Well that’s not actually entirely true. With enough memory, one could use this camera to take video snippets of up to an hour. Just means having to invest in bigger or multiple SD memory cards. One of the main reasons why I chose to spend the prize money on an Apple Macbook Pro was this: To video edit the footage that I have accumulated through the years, and the snippets taken from the still digital camera is able capable of TV-sized dimensions (ie, 640×480). Having said that though, I admit I am still new to this whole video-editing on a laptop thing. Apple’s iWork suite does go a long way to make all this easy, though.

With the video footage that I have taken with the videocam, I have been transferring them onto DVDs all these years, by using or leeching on whomever has a DVD burner player. It’s been a simple plug-play-burn, so it’s not all that laborious. In fact, recently my dad had bought a Panasonic DVD HDD burner too, and with my Panasonic branded videocam (it was another coincidence of same brand), the player could actually drive the camera- all I had to do was tell the player that, yes, I want to burn the videocam’s tape onto the blank DVD I had just inserted, and come back some 70 minutes later to find it all done.

So what’s all this gotta do with backing them up?

My mistake is that I have been “investing” in medium-level branded blank DVDs. I didn’t realise this was a mistake till I tried playing Disc 3 of my collection (to date I have 17 discs already), one that’s of Caitlin when she was under 1 year old. It just wouldn’t play on my player, nor on my IBM laptop; and today, not even on my super-duper Apple Macbook Pro either! Since I recycle my DV tapes after the footage has been burned on these DVDs, those were my only copies of them! You can imagine my panic when I realised I may have lost those videos forever! This was at a time when I didn’t know much about video technology (that’s not to say that I know lots now, but enough)

Back then I didn’t have anything with computing power for me to toy with video on the PC. What I did was searched and found another PC DVD reader that was able to read Disc 3, and quickly copied over the DVD files onto my external drive- yup, the whole DVD volume as is. Saved them on my external HD ready for future manipulations.

So now that I have the MacBook Pro that has enough grunt power, I have started researching into this area. It’s quite a wide area of codes, mp4, codex, compressions, H2.64, standards, resolutions, frame rates, etc…

To start with, I have found an open source DVD ripping software for the Mac OSX, which I think does a good enough job: Handbrake.

So after digging around for more info, I looked into ripping Disc 3 saved on the external hard drive, and may-as-well do the same for my whole collection.

Here’s a screenshot of the process:

The whole process of ripping DVDs can take up to 2 hours for 1 DVD, because Handbrake also compresses the video as it rips- meaning it will save the video into a new format of smaller file size.

At the very least, this allows me to save the DVDs and its respective footages of 750MB-ish files, which I can quite easily back them up onto PC DVDs; until I research further into video authoring and creating customised home movies, and not just home videos.

I think Gadget Daddy would be more knowledgable in this area since he’s been dabbling in video for a while, and I have a suspicion that Derek too would also be; both of which are Mac users I don’t wanna contact GD yet- he’s swamped with work at the moment. Will research more myself and learn in the process.

Screen grab of Caitlin at the recent Kids Zone visit.

At least now, I have my precious memories backed up in electronic format, and will look for branded blanks for backing them on to!

Phew!