Earlier last week, I digitized (finally) two of the four VHS tapes that I had been sent a few months ago. These were home movies from 1983, and included some seminal moments from my childhood, including my 8th birthday party, my Pinewood Derby competition, family BBQs and functions, and more! It ended up being about 5 hours of footage, and so I broke it up into 5 DVDs (1 hour each) so as to maintain archival quality. Of great importance and interest are the last two discs: interviews with my grandparents regarding their experience during WWII. I haven’t sat down to watch them all the way through, but these are really important videos, and I’m very glad I got to transfer them so that they can be shared and viewed by the whole family.
It was also an opportunity for me to try out Adobe Encore DVD. I really like the quick drag-and-drop functionality of it, and while I don’t have as much control over certain things as I would with Sonic Scenarist, for simple DVDs, it’s definitely the new tool of choice. Even better was that Adobe Premiere Pro can output a timeline directly into Canopus ProCoder – allowing me to skip a render step where I output the edited video to the hard drive (taking up room) and then encode it. Since I didn’t have extra space for another 5 hours of edited video on the drive, this was an invaluable option! I’ll still prepare my assets in ProCoder, and then author in Encore. Definitely the way to go!