Organizing videos from past years

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My collection of digital photographic files on my hard drive starts in 1998.

Since then I’ve been trying to keep the image files organized by date and event.
 

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Within my PhotoArchive1 folder are more than 63,000 digital images that I’ve taken from 1998 through 2010. This folder is subdivided into folders arranged by year and some folders are further subdivided by month, day and event name.

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Since it’s inception I’ve used Adobe Lightroom to organize and edit most of my photographs. As an ardent user of Lightroom I’ve benefited from the new and powerful features that Adobe continues to add to this software. I’ve spent many, many hours using Lightroom to tag the images and can now easily search for images by date, name, event, category, more.

Two weeks ago as I was going through these older images I realized that I haven’t done a good job organizing the videos that were taken at the same times as the still photos. I’m now reminded that video recording was missing from the digital cameras that I used. It wasn’t until about 2004 that my first digital camera had video capability. These videos were small sized producing 320 x 216 resolution movies. By about 2006, the resolution of my movies jumped to about 640 x 480. Since then resolution has grown by leaps and bounds with many non-professional cameras offering 1920 x 1080 and some even having 4K resolution of 3840 x 2160.

Let’s get back to my past videos. I use Lightroom to easily spot the videos. then I make digital copies of all of these videos with a set of filenames that clearly identifies the date of the recording.

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With Lightroom I’m looking at the contents of the 040523_Birthday folder where I see two videos files – one 9 seconds and another 15 seconds in length. From here I Export a copy of these videos and separately rename them with a prefix of 2004_04_ to make it easy to determine the date taken.

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I repeated the process of Exporting the videos from Lightroom from each folder. This took many hours over a several day period. When I finished, I had processed more than 1150 videos.


Above you can see a group of the renamed exported videos. All of these videos (more than 1000) are now in a single folder that other members of the household can view at their leisure.

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The year and month prefix (in this example 2010_09_) help to put the videos into a chronological context but is not helpful otherwise. However the small thumbnail photo provides a better way to key in on the contents of the video. It’s not perfect, but is certainly a better way than keeping the videos hidden within my PhotoArchive1 folder.

Would you be surprised to learn that I have never viewed many of these videos? Up to now I have concentrated on the still images in my large collection and have largely ignored the videos. With my videos now more organized I am anxious to view these “motion pictures” – some going back almost 20 years.

One of my future missions is to uncover the videos that I took from 2011 to the present.
 
 
Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

Tiny LED Lighting

As I was walking through the WPPI Expo, the display to the right caught my attention. And so I stopped to talk to the rep. Here is a small aquarium filled with water. At the bottom are two small cube devices. Both of them were brightly shining to demonstrate that they are waterproof. The small device is the Litra Torch – a cube about 1-1/2″ in size and weighing a mere 3 ounces. It provides up to 800 Lumens of continuous daylight balanced light but is also adjustable to 450 and 100 Lumens. With it’s 80 degree coverage, it’s usable with most wide angle lenses. The Torch also has a strobe mode – useful for special effects while shooting video. There are a variety of options for mounting the Litra. The body has two standard 1/4-20 tripod sockets. Its back is magnetic for attaching to a metallic surface. For close up work, you can attached the diffuser (see below). It includes a mount when used with a GoPro. Rep Andrew Siminoff showed me a GoPro mounted with a pair of Torches that was set up for video recording (see below right). The Torch is powered by a rechargeable lithium ion battery that provides about 30 minutes of light at the high 800 Lumens setting. Litra also has a set of accessories for the Torch including bicycle mounts, head mounts, several handheld mounts, miniature tripod and filters.

 

The Torch is an accessory that you can literally carry around in your pocket to provide a convenient light source. Suggested price is $80 and includes the diffuser, belt clip, GoPro mount, USB charging cable.

For more information please visit Litra.

 

 

Written by: Arnie Lee

 

 

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For Movies on the Move

For several years now, GoPro has demonstrated the overwhelming popularity of action videos. They have built an empire of a business around its brand.

Sony’s HDR-AS100V and newer, yet slightly smaller HDR-AZ1 cameras are the center of their video system for recording action in the field. Both units pack lots of features into a very compact space: 1080p with image stabilization, stereo sound, high speed recording, 170-degree view, interval recoding, and WiFi and NFC equipped and GPS (AS100V only). They are ruggedized and are waterproof, shockproof, dustproof and freezeproof without having to purchase additional accessories.
This AZ1 which is 2/3 the size of the AS100V, is mounted on a drone. Using an optional Live-View Remote (RM-LVR2V) which straps to your wrist you can control the AZ1, change settings and view the playback from afar.
The included Action Cam Movie Creator software lets edit your footage into complete, quality movies using the special recording features e.g. high speed recording, merging multiple clips into a single clip, etc.

 
 
There are a whole host of accessories for the Action Cam system including various camera mounts and straps for bicycling, surfing, boating, diving, snow sports and skateboarding.

List price for AS100V is $279 and for the AZ1 is $249. For more information, see the Sony ActionCam webpage.
 
 
Written by: Arnie Lee
 
 

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