Why VHS, you ask?

We want to get Gloria to sing at here own memorial service.  I mean, that shouldn't be too much to ask, should it?

Back in the day, when I was still shooting family video, I did, occasionally, have an opportunity to record Gloria when she was rehearsing for some performance.  Sometimes I could shoot her performance, from the back of the church or off to the side, if I could find a place where I wasn't in the way.  At one point I collected all of the bits I could find of Gloria singing.  I filled three VHS tapes, about two hours each, so that's six hours in total.  The stuff ranges from about 1995 to roughly 2004, when I wasn't doing as much video taping, and was just getting short clips from the digital cameras.  Now, of course, I'm only getting little snips from my phone at times.  (There is one song from 1991, but that was before I got either a videocamera or a digital phone, so I suspect it was shot by Larry Barker.)

At one point, probably around 2004-ish, I started copying the VHS tapes that I had made of family videos to DVD.  I had a Toshiba VCR/DVR combo that did dubbing from one to the other.  Then the VHS side of that machine gave up, and I got another, again a Toshiba, the DVR620KC model.  Again, I started to do some copying, but it required a commitment of about three hour to do every tape, and it didn't seem that important at the time, and life got in the way.  After all, I still had the tapes, and the machine, and could start up the project again at any time.

So then came the move, and then Gloria died, and then, in planning the memorial, somebody said why don't we have Gloria sing, for the special music?

So, I found one box of tapes that K&L had moved, but none of the music tapes, or any of the general family videos of events that I had copied the singing from.  Had they gone missing?  Been thrown out?  And I couldn't find the manual for the VCR/DVR, either.

L finally found the missing VHS tapes (oh joy!), *and* the manual for the VCR/DVR (oh rapture!), but we found that "Gloria's greatest hits" was not among those already converted to DVD (oh rats), but we found a DVD of Gloria playing with R and T (glad to see her and missing her all at the same time), but we did find the three VHS tapes (and therefore six hours) of Gloria singing (yay!), but then I found that the VCR/DVR (or, at least, the VHS side of it) had, again, died (MASSIVE downer).

So then comes a search for various options.  Can we find anyone in the Vancouver area who repairs VHS equipment?  (Couldn't seem to find any.)  I've even asked people in the movie industry, and nobody seems to know anyone who does that type of repair.

There does seem to be someone in Vancouver who offers to do VHS to DVD conversions, but he charges $30 per hour of tape, which would mean almost $200 just for the tapes of Gloria singing (and around $4,000 for the whole video conversion project), and he also seems to operate out his basement in a house near Vancouver City Hall.  (There also seems to be someone who does the same out of Ladner, and apparently London Drugs offers the service, but so far I haven't got prices from them.)

K came up with some options for buying VHS, and one outfit (again, seemingly a home operation, although a bit slicker, and with a Website) that seemed to be promising VHS players that you could use to convert to DVD, but, when you actually got down to the details, they seem to be including a device to copy the tapes to your computer, and then you can do your own DVD burning.  Still, they had a machine advertised for $99, so I bought it.  (With shipping and conversion it came to $150.72 in Canadian currency.  I put it on a credit card I got recently that I don't plan to use much, just in case it was a form of phishing scam.  If it's not a scam, it should show up on Monday.)

She also found some other options for VHS players and combo machines, but all of them are old, or refurbished, and don't have much in the way of documentation or specification details.  And all are very expensive, now being collectors items.  I found a couple of my old DVR620KC machines: originally I paid less than $200 for it, one was $500 and one was $800.

She also found someone in the Vancouver area who was offering conversion.  He was charging $20 per tape, which was cheaper than the guy near City Hall.  However, it was a conversion to USB.  Since the church wants whatever we do find playable through PowerPoint (no, I don't know why), this seemed an option.  I've had him convert the three "singing" tapes.  I'm not *really* thrilled with the quality of the video.  (He knows what the project is for, and offered, for additional cost, to "edit" the sound on selected pieces, if we wish, to remove background noise.)

In the meantime, a friend in Vancouver has offered a VHS player.  Another has offered to lend me a DVD burner.  Another, from Minnesota, has actually bought a VHS player (at a thrift store) and is Fedexing it here to Vancouver!

I now have three .MP4 files, between three and four gigabytes each, on my computer (and copied to as many many USB sticks as I could find, and uploaded to YouTube and Google Drive, as backup) (I'm not a BCP and emergency management expert for nothing).  Now I need to do something with them.  Video is not my field.  I need video editing software.  I need to know how to *use* the video editing software.  An awful lot of people are throwing quick "fixes" in my direction, with no explanation or details, that, when I waste time looking into them, don't actually address any of the problems that I'm facing.  Somebody suggested the video editor that comes included/built in to Windows.  Unfortunately, as well as being completely opaque to use, it doesn't deal with .MP4 files.  (Yes, I can do a Google search for "video editing software Windows."  But how many of those results will be useful, and how many actual malware?)  The guy who copied the tapes to .MP4 files on the USB suggested iMovie.  But I'm much less familiar with the Mac than Windows, so I'm a bit nervous about that.  However, at the moment that may be my only choice.  (No, I don't currently have a Linux machine, and I don't have time, right now, in the midst of all this, to set one up.)

This is all very stressful.  Not just the extra work, with a deadline before the memorial service.  I'm having to seek out options, ask for advice, and learn all kinds of new stuff.  And I'm feeling guilty about possibly failing.  After all, this is my field, right?  I'm a geek, a techie, a "beard."  I always felt guilty, whenever Gloria had a problem with the computer and I couldn't fix it.  So now, we want to do this one last thing for Gloria, and I can't make it work?  How guilty and useless does that make me feel?

(I've put one of the USB sticks into the TV, and I'm listening through all the files to list all the songs on them.  Right now Gloria is singing "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child."  Somehow that is really fitting to what I'm feeling right now ...)