Today I managed to finally capture my old film school DV tape. The tape had travelled with me for almost 20 years, from flat to flat and from country to country. I thought it wouldn’t have survived after so long. Tape degrades.
I was about to capture the tape in early 2020 but then covid came along and delayed those plans. I didn’t want to ask someone to capture it for me. I really wanted to enjoy the process of capturing tape just like I did when I was young. In fact, the first time I ever captured video computers weren't powerful enough to transfer live video from a camera. Computers needed a special targa capture card to import each frame individually as a targa sequence.
Finally covid subsided and after keeping an eye on eBay for a long time I found a Canon XM2 in excellent ‘almost new’ condition at a great price. The short film itself was filmed on the XM2’s big brother the XL1S, but the cameras are very similar internally. Video capture is somewhat similar to film scanning. You grab a coffee, set up the equipment, and then diligently perform the job of transferring media manually into the computer.
Connecting the XM2 for capture proved tricky. First, I had to use an old Mac with firewire. Second, Adobe Premiere stopped supporting miniDV capture a few years ago and there was no method to install a version of Premiere old enough that did still support miniDV. QuickTime still does allow firewire capture, but I discovered that the start of the tape had degraded from exposure to air and heat. Because of the damage to the tape, Quicktime was unable to capture video with audio, but it could capture the streams separately!
Capture done, you can see how little detail and resolution we worked with in those days. Imagine if we had 4K or 6K HDR cameras at the time! 🤯 The colours produced by Canon’s 3CCD system were great though. There is hardly any grading applied to the images below, in some scenes none at all.
Screenshots from ‘花’ (‘Hana’) a short film in Japanese that I wrote, shot and directed in film school back in 2001 starring my friend Ryoko who was a news reporter on Nihon TV at the time.
I made a vertical trailer for social media which can be watched below.