Learned Something Today

I was working on getting videos off of the video camera and off my hard drive this weekend since I noticed that the files were starting to take up LOTS of space. As I was burning them, I noticed a couple of things I never realized before. My camera saves the files on the camera, and downloads them as .vob files. Unfortunately, these don’t convert in any meaningful way to be burned to a DVD. After researching this problem years ago I found something that said I just need to rename them as .mpg files and they are good to go. I found out this weekend that isn’t exactly true.

When I record things, I have the camera set up to film in the 16:9 aspect ratio. However, when I convert the files and burn them to DVD, they are always in a 4:3 aspect ratio. This makes the images look squeezed and distorted (in my opinion). I always figured I made a mistake when I filmed it, and did it in 4:3 by mistake. When I was attempting to burn the latest batch of DVDs, I noticed that strangely ALL the videos were in 4:3, so before burning them, I decided to try playing them on my laptop first. When I played them, they were in the correct 16:9 ratio. Which begs the question, what is going on?

I discovered that when the files are converted and moved into the program I use to burn them to DVD, they lose whatever formatting there is on them and puts them into 4:3 ratio automatically. After a bit of researching, I learned that this is fixable by simply going into each one and manually correcting the setting back to the proper aspect ratio and they will burn to the DVD in 16:9 wide screen. Unfortunately, I have just been loading all our home movies for the last 7 or 8 years automatically without looking at the aspect ratios, so everything was burned in the 4:3 ratio. I suppose it’s not really a problem, just a little distorted when you try to watch them. I guess I can live with it, and I’ll just fix it going forward.

Another thing I noticed was that they DVDs don’t look like they are in HD, even though the setting on the camera is to record them in that way. So I will have to look a little more deeply at that. Finally, I noticed that it might be time to start thinking about getting a new digital video camera. The max resolution is 720p. Taking video on Kris’s iPhone records it in 1080p. So the quality ends up being higher with an iPhone? I suppose the camera is 10 years old this fall, and technology is always changing. That is one of the bad things about technology though.