Hockley Heights Gazette

Some of the pictures I have posted on the blog have been quite sharp, but these
two are disturbingly blurry - why is that? Well, perhaps it is their convoluted
pathway to your computer. Firstly, they don't come from a crisp digital camera,
but from a video camera (which relies on movement to create an illusion of
crispness). Then, they have been uploaded to a dvd recorder/player and burned,
as a mpeg file, to a dvd-rw. Then, transferred to the computer, they are the
product of a form of screenshot as the video is displayed. Finally, I attempt
some cleanup work with a photo editor to de-interlace and sharpen as much as
possible. If you compare them to the shot of me in the conservatory, you will
see a clear difference (nice pun, eh?)

What I am excited about in this process, is not the production of crappy photos
of the rental in Wickford, but the fact that you can digitise your old videos
and stream a staggering number of stills from them for your photo album, even if
they are a bit blurry.

Next post I will display a couple of examples - family videos taken on VIDEO-8 of
the kids, then converted to DVD and finally "snapped" as described above, with
the addition of some post-production effects. I'm interested to know if anyone
else thinks this is pretty damn cool!