I was chatting with Carrie today and she was wondering if I had video of something funny Rob did years ago. It made me go down the rabbit hole of my videos.
On Google Photos I simply typed in ‘search all videos’ and I scrolled to the beginning and it all started in 2003.
That really made me think for a bit. It’s been 20 years since I had the ability to record digital videos in the palm of my hand.
Now, it may have been available to others a bit before then. In professional circles, we all know that Star Wars Episode II – Attack of the Clones was filmed digitally and was a big deal in convincing movie theaters to get digital projectors instead of the old film projectors. George Lucas was always on the forefront of technology.
But it wasn’t until 2003 that I had a digital camera capable of taking videos. We’re not talking about large videos here…one of the first videos I have recorded is 0.3MP, 640×480 resolution. Nowadays that would probably take up 0.00000001% of the memory on my phone but back then you didn’t really take a lot of long videos. Probably a 2 minute video would fill up your entire memory card!
It’s such a mindtrip to think about that technology and how great it was, but not so great at the same time. Camcorders had better resolution and storage capabilities but a digital camera could fit in your pocket and you had this really tiny screen to check out the photos and the videos you just snapped. Heaven forbid you actually wanted to print those out. The resolution to do so wouldn’t be there for a few years.
It’s pretty amazing that I have twenty second snippets of my life starting from 2003. I know for a fact that I don’t have all of them as an external hard drive broke on me and I lost all my photos and videos. I could only manage to salvage whatever I had uploaded to Flickr and I don’t think they allowed videos back then. I have a feeling I had some stuff backed up on CD-Rs and managed to salvage some stuff or get it from friends whom I shared photos/videos with.
It’s really wild to think about what we had to deal with back then to capture, watch and store video back then. The lighting was always horrible with the videos taken in the pubs. Why did we even bother? But it was always great fun to go home at the end of the night and review all the photos and videos that were taken that night.
I look at what my kids now have in terms of capturing video…a camera that can capture 4K images and videos. Storage space in a cloud. The ability to share these videos with friends.
I will definitely say that I lived in a great era of technology where each year offered radical advancements in technology. Nowadays a new iPhone just offers…a better camera? Is that it? What else is there to write home about? This reminds me of how I was trying to convince Vero to buy a new Mac Mini the other day and she asked “So what can it do that our existing one can’t?” and I really couldn’t answer her other than ‘it can do things faster’. Even technology in the past decade hasn’t been inspiring.
Until the virtual reality revolution occurs, I’ll be enjoying looking back at all those 640×480 video snippets.
One of the first videos taken with my camera. It’s great to hear Matt struggle with the fact that you can’t zoom while the video was recording. You can even hear him clicking the zoom button back and forth.