Moving Pictures & Nostalgia

I don't have many home videos of myself as a kid as we weren't well off enough to afford our own camcorder but I know when my wife and I have our own little rugrats, you can bet I'll have terabytes of video of them playing with puppies, eating cotton candy and talking about Star Wars much to their father's pride.

The crazy thing nowadays is that I don't really think of video in terms of length of time but in how much capacity it will take up in one of my hard drives. It wasn't long ago that we were still using mini-dv tapes and HD video was a high end proposition. Most, if not all, video cameras in big box electronics stores are now memory based (either by memory card or built in hard drive) and promise different resolution options when recording.

An even crazier thing is that I can't see how the quality of these digital recordings will degrade over time. Imagine finding an old VHS tape or maybe a recording from a super 8 camera. You know you've seen these play out on TV, the fuzzy lines, the skipped frames, the washed out colors... analog technology at its nostalgic finest. I know when I see video with those degraded characteristics, I think to myself: Wow, that's an old recording from a long time ago.

In 30 years when I play back video I captured with my digital device (camera, phone, camcorder) it will look exactly the same as when it was recorded. Will that detract from the nostalgia? I mean, I will see in the video that the clothes are old. The haircuts were old. The faces were younger. But the video will look the same as when it was recorded. The video won't feel old.

Who knows? Maybe pixelation will replace film dust and faded hues. Maybe our children will feel nostalgia through out of place pixels. Shoot, maybe we'll have holograms by then. Or there will be an analog renaissance, at least through video filters in software programs that mimic the characteristics of degraded film. I suppose in the end it doesn't matter. The memory captured on these moving, talking pictures is nostalgia enough.

Photo from Flickr by: Goodimages