When researching the history of Video in DIY Media (or as Wikipedia is so fond of calling it, Citizen Media or Participatory Media), most popular accounts start with the release of the BMC-110 betamax movie camcorder by Sony in 1983. This is the first consumer Camcorder, it seems like a logical place to start. It isn’t a logical place to start and most popular accounts are wrong. This isn’t surprising, we’re bad at this kind of thing, and pretty much always have been. So, today, I want to spend a few bits talking about the first consumer video camera and tape recorder, the Sony Portapak released in 1967, and the DIY Media Revolution that the US has largely forgotten.

The silent film The Mark of Zorro was released 100 years ago today. Last year I did a review of The Mark of Zorro (1920), and in that review I commented that if we could find a good HD transfer, it would be a perfect candidate to deOldify. I haven’t found an HD copy yet, but I did find a nice sharp DVD transfer that I kicked off for DeOldification this morning.

As I mentioned in my last post about DeOldify, my results so far have been Mixed. I’m learning what makes a good candidate for DeOldification, and what kinds of problems the system of DeOldifying will work around, versus the kinds of problems that stop it from working. Here are the results of my recent experiments:

Whew, what a year! I bought a computer in March with the intent of using it to do some video processing and film preservation work. Then … well, this year happened. Last night, I finally finished setting it up, and I now have a great video editing rig (well, aside from the slow hdd, but we’ll deal with that next week), and I’ve started playing with some automated post-processing. Today, I’d like to show you DeOldify.

I have a bunch of tiny DOS computers for sale (among other things) and some of the DOS machines are super weird, so I wanted to take a minute to talk about them, their strengths, and the kinds of flaws, compromises, and limitations that only Early 90s computers have.