Say cheese!! Let’s talk about cameras, especially old ones!!

 Hey hey hey!!

Well… I thought this blog post was going to be cute and short, but when you deal with a relic you haven’t seen since you were a baby, things get complicated. Before I begin ranting, I want to give my biggest thank yous to the one who saves us all in the 21st century, Mr. Google. He knows everything and helped me with the pickle I was in, so shout out to him!!

So… Remember how I said a couple of posts ago that I wanted like a cute and vintage and personal video, hinting at “My So-Called Life.” I honestly thought, and think it is a good idea (I mean at this point I would have to stick to it, right?), which meant pulling out an old camcorder I have, more specifically, the JVC GZ-MG 130u, I believe. This camcorder in my house has a bunch of old home videos of me, which to my mom is solid gold, so I was already nervous to even touch it and felt that I was walking on egg shells. 

I grab my camera, (some may feel old when I say this), but I didn’t know what to do with it. I knew the basics, but I felt scared touching anything else because I didn’t know if something could delete. I clearly wasn’t thinking because I immediately stuck an SD card in the camera and it had ask me to format it, which in my vernacular, does not exist. I just saw that it said it was going to delete everything and I found myself in a huge pickle. So, because of my confusion, I went to Mr. Google for answers. It kept saying it wasn’t going to delete my camera’s content, which is logical as I did end up finding out that my camera is a hard-drive camcorder, aka it has storage built in it. Either way, I tried it again and accidently said yes to formatting the SD card, scaring the literal crap out of me for a second, but also, honestly ended up giving me the boost I needed, as it did just what Mr. Google had said, just delete the stuff in the SD card. 

After I figured that out, I found a couple of cables in the little camera bag we have and plugged it into my laptop to see what was on it or where I could start. This is where I was in my second pickle. I went through the folders where the videos I have were supposed to be (because why not check out some baby videos and export them while I’m at it), and everything was in .mod!!! I almost cried and went bonkers!!! What is .mod supposed to mean!!!!! Besides that, the only thing visible or “open-able” was a starter video that I ended up watching because why not. Picture of me watching said video:

(When it said “World’s First Hard Drive Camcorder,” I almost lost my marbles!! How old is this thing??)

After that debate I had with myself, Mr. Google was there for me yet again. This is where I meet my new favorite thing on the internet, a video converter that is not annoying or has a paywall!! His name is cloudconvert. (Jazz hands)

I set that aside and start looking at what I’m dealing with, the .mod files, that according to a 2007 FAQ on the Apple website that I read, is either useless, bootleg, hard to deal with, or all of the above. I take the risk of starting to export the videos already on the camcorder (my home videos) to see what happens and test how it would be like when the post-production comes and I need to do this. Through the converter I mentioned and my set up… I was able to export!! Ignore my messy set up, but it really took all of this (and the Biscoff cookies) to get to success!! The videos exported really quick and smoothly which I loved, as I, as a rookie, have had to come across some knock-off pages that take an estimated trillion years to export a small video. 

I feel so relieved that I was able to go through with this camera as my project weighed heavily on it (no biggie, no pressure right?). I didn’t want it to be one of those (in my opinion), tacky filters on top of a really good camera because it kind of just ruins the charisma to it. I’m so happy I could scream!! This process was basically a bunch of tedious trial and error, which allowed me to learn a few things and, more so and importantly, how to use this camera!! This will make my production process much smoother now that I know where everything is, as well as post-production, as I now know how to look for them on my laptop, convert and export them!!

Everyday you definitely learn something new! That’s it for me today, happy humpday!

Toodles!