Recently I had 40 mini-dv home video tapes digitally transferred onto a thumb drive.  Ever since my Sony camera stopped working, my wife and I were unable to view this large collection of our family’s lives from 2003 to 2011, the prime time of our boys’ childhoods.

Now we are re-living birthdays, Christmases, summer vacations and graduations.  For us empty nesters, watching these scenes is like finding the Fountain of Youth.  Look how young we were!  Look how fat I was!  How adorable the boys were!

One of the best benefits of having videos digitized is the ease of navigation.  No longer do I have to stop the video camera, press “forward” or “rewind” with the sound of the physical tape whirring while searching for a particular scene.  Now, all it takes is a quick “sliding” of the status bar to navigate through a video in lightning speed.

All the years when I chronicled my family’s history, I didn’t take the time to write down on each video every segment shot.  Sure, I copied down the year and maybe one or two main notes like “trip to Canada,” but in the midst of the hustle and bustle of daily life of rearing two young boys, I didn’t have the energy to go through each minute of a 60-minute video and document the dozens of scenes captured on each tape.

While the physical act of digitizing went smoothly via my local camera store, scrutinizing all the material, all 2,400 minutes of it, pausing frequently to type a description and time stamp of each segment, took hours resulting in a 12-page single-page document.

Decades ago when home movies were captured on 2 and ½ minute rolls of film, projecting them on a screen to show people was simple and short.  In all the years of shooting videotape, however, I have never gathered loved ones around the TV to watch a full hour of a day at Disneyland, something even I wouldn’t have the patience for.  Without the physical limits of film which required a proficient cameraman who could edit while filming, the limitless aspects of video fosters laziness as people shoot hours of an event from start to finish.  Have you ever watched a feature film shot in real time?  With few exceptions, it’s excruciating.

And so, my game plan with the help of my youngest son who’s adept at video editing is to produce 15-minute highlight reels so I can finally share in small chunks slices of our past.

In scouring through this material, it is surprising to discover in-between the major videos of events candid scenes I captured every so often just by walking around the house.  There’s Ben in the den rehearsing an oral for a school project where he’s pretending to be a vacuum cleaner commenting on what he’s “eating.”  There’s Max lying on the carpet in his room reading aloud to himself a Diary of a Wimpy Kid book unaware I was in the doorway taping him.  There’s my wife reading her own book (silently) at the dining room table not conscious of my presence.  

There are even times when I appear in the videos usually when Ben took the camera.  I recall those times when he did, how I instructed him how to properly hold the camera and not film silly things, but now I look back and, boy, do I wish he would have shot more videos.   Those are the most beautiful scenes because they are so natural and reveals normal everyday moments.

There are bittersweet scenes as well of watching our sons play together when they were younger, how close they used to be.  Seeing them appear again as children, Ben twirling Max in the living room to the “Beauty and the Beast” song.   

And then the teary moments of viewing my mother’s last Mother’s Day or Christmas when her health had declined, though at the time we didn’t know it would be her last celebrations.  And that’s the most profound takeaway from looking at old videos:  how fast life disappears and how essential to absorb each day we have.