About Keith's Videos
One of my hobbies has been photography, especially movies and videos and I started as a teenager with an 8 mm movie camera and progressed through many changes in technology.
I started in the 1960’s with a 35mm slide camera but I soon became interested in movies. I purchased an 8mm movie camera and the film as bought was actually 16mm wide and was run through the camera and then turned over and run through again. After processing, the two halves were spliced together and returned on a reel ready for projection. Each reel ran for 4 minutes but I bought equipment to edit and splice film together to make a large reel of film. This was a tedious job. The film cost worked out to be $2 per minute so I had to limit my movie making. Over the years I took a lot of family movies and some local events. The cameras of the day needed a light meter to determine the exposure, which then had to be adjusted on the camera. There were telephoto and wide angle lenses, but no zoom lenses and focusing needed to be done manually. The quality from such a small film wasn’t very good but because of the movement, it was viewable, but of course there was no audio.
The next camera recorded on VHS videotape and was a big improvement quality wise and it had a zoom lens and audio as well. However the camera was large and had an accompanying recorder pack that was cumbersome to say the least. Editing could be done between two VHS recorders, however each copy was reduced in quality.
Then came a camera that recorded on the smaller VHSC tape. This was of a much more convenient size, however the lack of quality when editing tapes was still a detriment.
These days my all automatic palm sized digital video camera with the images able to be edited by computer without loss of quality and then produce a DVD or mp4 file, makes my early movie efforts seem quite primitive.
Now of course almost all mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers have a high quality digital camera, however they are restricted by not having an optical zoom lens facility.
Fortunately I can now convert the 8mm and VHS movies to digital format and edit them on the computer with no further loss of quality.
I have taken a lot of family movies and videos and a number of local events and I have now edited and converted those historic movies to the .mp4 format and uploaded the ones of public interest to the YouTube and Vimeo web sites where they are available to watch.
I started in the 1960’s with a 35mm slide camera but I soon became interested in movies. I purchased an 8mm movie camera and the film as bought was actually 16mm wide and was run through the camera and then turned over and run through again. After processing, the two halves were spliced together and returned on a reel ready for projection. Each reel ran for 4 minutes but I bought equipment to edit and splice film together to make a large reel of film. This was a tedious job. The film cost worked out to be $2 per minute so I had to limit my movie making. Over the years I took a lot of family movies and some local events. The cameras of the day needed a light meter to determine the exposure, which then had to be adjusted on the camera. There were telephoto and wide angle lenses, but no zoom lenses and focusing needed to be done manually. The quality from such a small film wasn’t very good but because of the movement, it was viewable, but of course there was no audio.
The next camera recorded on VHS videotape and was a big improvement quality wise and it had a zoom lens and audio as well. However the camera was large and had an accompanying recorder pack that was cumbersome to say the least. Editing could be done between two VHS recorders, however each copy was reduced in quality.
Then came a camera that recorded on the smaller VHSC tape. This was of a much more convenient size, however the lack of quality when editing tapes was still a detriment.
These days my all automatic palm sized digital video camera with the images able to be edited by computer without loss of quality and then produce a DVD or mp4 file, makes my early movie efforts seem quite primitive.
Now of course almost all mobile phones, tablets and laptop computers have a high quality digital camera, however they are restricted by not having an optical zoom lens facility.
Fortunately I can now convert the 8mm and VHS movies to digital format and edit them on the computer with no further loss of quality.
I have taken a lot of family movies and videos and a number of local events and I have now edited and converted those historic movies to the .mp4 format and uploaded the ones of public interest to the YouTube and Vimeo web sites where they are available to watch.