With the invite to her Ruby Wedding anniversary celebrations today came a strict instruction: no presents. "It's not about presents," she said firmly. "It's about getting together (something we do all too infrequently) and having a drink and a chat, and generally enjoying the company."
Well, I've never been one for doing as I'm told, but it was clear that Trish wouldn't appreciate having a lot of money spent. The solution was obvious, and something I've been thinking of doing for quite some time.
A couple of years ago my Mum asked me if it was possible to have Super-8 cine film transferred to video tape. She had hundreds of feet of film that her and my Dad had shot over many years. Family holidays, summer days in the garden, and...the weddings of my two cousins. As a young teenager I'd been the one to do all the editing and splicing of these home movies, combining the individual 50-foot reels into 400-feet chunks - six of which had spent the last 35 years in a box under the bed. Mum wanted to see them again, not least because its almost 14 years since my Dad died and this was her main photographic record of him.
After a brief web search I chose the VT group to perform the conversion. Their website tells a convincing tale of professionalism, top quality equipment, attention to detail and personal care of your memories. For once, their service proved as good as their marketing, and pretty soon the movie reels were back, accompanied by a VHS tape for Mum and a two DVDs for us.
We'd opted for a straight transfer, so the DVDs still contained all the "flashes" between shots where the old Super-8 camera overexposed the film as it sped up at the beginning of the shot and slowed down at the end, all the interminable panoramas from holiday where my Mum had taken the advice of panning slowly a little too much to heart, and so on. So I knew some radical editing was required and added it to my growing to do list. But there were two specific areas I knew I wanted to concentrate on.
One was the holiday footage from the 1960s when our family would holiday in Mablethorpe with my Mum's best friend Eileen, her husband and their daughter Julie. Julie is now grown up (of course!) with family of her own, and her Mum & Dad have since died. She probably hasn't seen this footage in forty years or more and I thought it would be nice to cut a DVD just of the shots where they are included so she can see them again.
The second area was the coverage of both my cousins' weddings. Here, we'd gone to town a little bit. Not surprising as they were both big family events. As well as their own camera M&D borrowed a second, so we had two sets of film from each wedding. This had been spliced together sequentially, with the result that we have always watched guests arriving at the wedding, followed by the photos outside the church, followed by a second set of arrivals and a second set of photos. Finally I had the chance to slice and dice the shots so they followed a natural sequence, as well as doing all the cleaning up of the film. Now with Trisha's impending anniversary I not only had a chance; I had a deadline.
It was lucky I was on holiday this week, with some time to spare between ferrying Neil from papers to bookies to pub, because the whole process took several days. Cleaning the shots, editing them into order, adding wipes between the significant chunks and new digital titles to complement the filmed titles that my Mum, Dad and I had painstakingly shot in the days after the weddings using a variety of home-grown techniques and stop motion video. Then there was all the DVD mastering to get to grips with, as well as taking screen grabs for the cover, and designing the rest of the cover and the sticker for the disc, always using a red theme. It was, after all, a ruby wedding present.The burning process was a little frustrating. The first two attempts refused to play at all, but the third attempt seemed fine and played through OK on our XBox and on my computer.
DVDs wrapped and bowed (I'd made a second copy for Jacqueline and Paul), we set of this afternoon for the do. It was a low-key affair with only the "young" family attending - our respective parents, those that remain alive, are too old to travel long distances now especially for short periods of time and where a return journey the same day is required - but that only added to the party atmosphere. It was great to catch up with all the news, meet my "third cousin" Thomas for the first time (is that the right relationship? I always get confused with cousinhood. He's my cousin's grandson, so I reckon that makes him my third cousin. Gawd knows how many times "removed" he is. Two probably. Who knows. He's a cracker anyway. Says "hello" a lot and always seems to have a cheery smile except when he's trying to steal your cake.) and partake of Trisha's excellent hospitality once more.
The DVDs proved welcome gifts, and for exactly the same reason as I wanted to make them - everyone was tired of seeing two of everything! Unfortunately the public viewing didn't go all that well. On their player, while the first wedding played through OK, the second one started sticking, jumping, pixellating and eventually stopped altogether in freeze-frame. Robin blamed the player but I suspect the burning software isn't correctly compensating for the extra speed of rotation as the head gets farther from the centre. I'll have to try again when I can find a moment.
We left around 7pm. Blythe had homework to finish and Nat had lab reports to write up, and we had at least 90 minutes travelling, so we made our excuses and left. We'd had a lovely relaxing conversational afternoon and evening and a perfect end to our week's holiday, but I will admit to a small twinge of jealousy that Paul is now retired, whereas I have to return to work tomorrow!
2 comments:
I find that some dvds that are burned will play badly in some machines and fine in others. I had a set of promo corrie dvds that worked the first time or two in my old player and on the computer but then started acting up shortly thereafter. I wondered if it was deliberate on the manufacturer's part so i bought a new set of them. Now i've got a new dvd player and they seem to be ok in this one. So it could be the player too, not the dvd itself.
I must admit it played OK in my XBox, and T&R were adamant that their player (which is quite new) would handle DVD-RW, as indeed it did for the first 15 minutes out of ~20.
I would've liked to try playing just the second wedding in case it was some sort of buffering error, but a party's not exactly the place to start doing diagnostics ;o)
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