I’m a late adopter, by design, and so I am just getting around to messing with services like Vimeo. There’s some stuff I wanted to put up for various reasons, including just for fun. I’m (still) editing a trailer for my psycho thriller indie feature, ROWS. It will soon be up!

I realized I had a ton of video: everything from movies I’ve worked on in various capacities, to commercials and music videos, to experimental shorts, to my grandfather’s home movies. This presents the challenge of migration over the ever-shifting media formats we’ve enjoyed over the last hundred years. Film, in its various gauges, was democratized by 8mm and Super 8. When consumer video cameras became practical, everyone had to get their 8mm and 16mm stuff onto beta or VHS, via telecine. In my pre-digital professional work, I ended up with a lot of material on 1” or _” videotape. I’d be in a post house working on a commercial or music clip, and while I was at it I would migrate all the old student film and home movie stuff I could find to these formats. The last pre-digital home-movie format I used was HI-8 video. That was a pretty cool format, till digital and FireWire came along.

I wanted to migrate everything, my whole library, to Digital Video, and I did get a lot of it, but one starts to lose track. Digging around in boxes for _” video tapes of 16mm films, or worse yet, dubbing some VHS from a prehistoric video camera onto DV. I mean, I see more Victrolas around than I do _” decks. And I can’t tell you how many home-burned DVD’s I have that won’t play in any of my computers. So, in the age of HD and massive hard drive space, YouTube, Vimeo, and Final Cut Pro, I thought I better work on getting some of my old DV format material onto non-moving-part memory devices and the net-o-sphere. At least that way if your house burns down…

I was surprised to find that I had DV tapes that were five or six years old and seemed to be degrading. Audio drop out, stretchy looking artifacting. It’s all like sand running through your fingers. And once I get everything onto the latest hard-drive/ HD format, then what? At a certain point your hard drives and memory sticks won’t be readable. We’ll have to migrate everything to some kind of super-cloud, and clouds, as we all know, eventually blow away.

Of course, we have the same problem with documents. What good is a Word doc file going to be when they stop making the machines to read them? I already have tons of Word files that my current version of Word refuses to recognize. The files open up into pages of alien symbols and gibberish. The thing about a piece of celluloid film, or a photograph, or a book, you can always read them without a machine. This is one thing I found really false about that movie, THE BOOK OF ELI. In this post-apocalyptic world, the characters are all fighting to the death over the last copy of the Bible. Please. After the end of the world there will be zillions of Bibles laying around, trust me. What there won’t be is functioning iPads, Flip cameras, DV tapes, hard drives, or cloud computers.

— david warfield