[SOLVED] Emotional Support Needed to Edit Family Videos!

[kenj66]

Hey, I'm not kidding! A while back I started editing 20 years of family videos using Shotcut and technically everything is working quite well. But, what I have found is that the first grandchild gets entire video tapes FULL of every single gurgle, whine and burp but after a half-dozen grandchildren, with the first ones now having children of their own, the video being shot now is minimal. The trouble is - I am having trouble deleting hours of precious video, all the while knowing my family audience would never sit through that much fluff! What to do? You see, this is not a technical problem. It is an emotional problem - and that is what I am asking help for.

I am posting here in my favorite Mint forum because I am running Mint 17.3 AND I couldn't find any family friendly video maker forums to ask this somewhat silly question. Hopefully, some of you Linux Mint enthusiasts also edit home video and have had to deal with this problem. Advice?

-=Ken=-

[catweazel]

Archive to an external drive and put it in a safe place.

[MintBean]

Archive to an external drive and put it in a safe place.

Said from the heart!

[kenj66]

Archive to an external drive and put it in a safe place.

Wow, just save it all, huh

Well, thinking about it, that would certainly postpone the decision for a while. And, it would get the video off of the aging video tapes. A couple years ago I digitized my daughter's 25 year old 8mm video tapes and I found two of them had "disintegrated" so much they couldn't be played. My Hi_8 tapes are getting close to that now.

-=Ken=-

[catweazel]

Said from the heart!

... a swinging brick on a rope.

[catweazel]

Archive to an external drive and put it in a safe place.

Wow, just save it all, huh:?:

-=Ken=-

Well, you can save it all if you like. It's best to have a backup. If your HDD goes down you've lost the lot without a backup. Another alternative is to invest in a bigger HDD and put the original in a safe place.

[MintBean]

We likes our backups round these parts kenj. Preferably in triplicate!

[catweazel]

We likes our backups round these parts kenj. Preferably in triplicate!

+1

Never mind the expense... I mirror a hardware RAID 0 set two 2 hardware RAID10 sets... without extensive backups data loss is a soul destroying experience.

[kenj66]

Hey, thanks for weighing in on this tough subject. I posted in the Chat section since I knew the subject was only half serious.

I hadn't thought of preserving everything I have although at 11 MB/Hour I think it all could fit into a 256 GB flash drive. Then, I could let my heirs decide what they wanted to keep!

Really, though, what I was wondering was - how do you trim 90 percent of a priceless (to us) video of your grand child and send it to the bit bucket? I know it simply needs to be done - but I just can't make that decision yet. And, no one I know really wants to wade through 256 GB of family video. I'll get over it

-=Ken=-

[Spearmint2]

Every moment grows more precious as the years pass. Save it all. Once gone, you can never get it back. Sure, make some abbreviated versions to share with family now, but keep it all for them later.

[kenj66]

OK, I plan to capture and store it all! Then, make short excerpts, telling my heirs, "All the rest is in the can. Check it out someday." Rather than making DVDs I will make mp4 files that ought to be commonly accessible for years to come.

Incidentally, I came across a term, attributed supposedly to Hemmingway - "kill your babies" or sometimes "kill your darlings." It is a technique or discipline professional writers need to take in order to avoid needlessly wordy prose and now video editors need to avoid needlessly boring videos.

Interesting! If I keep EVERYTHING then I won't feel so bad about making much shorter videos. I feel so much better

Thanks again

-=Ken=-