This is a fun one. On You Tube under the key word of Wheaton Experience there video of some college students being interviewed that claims to be from 1992, the camera man verbally lists the date.  In 1992 could you just lug around a video camera and were they accessible?  What about the blonde girl, is that a wig (an interesting re-creation of 1992 hair styles?).  Just food for thought.

Um, yeeeessssss, you could lug around a video camera and yes, they were accessible in 1992.  Why in the world wouldn’t they be??  They just weren’t as compact as they are now…

By the way, welcome!  One thing folks will probably ask is that you include links in your posts, like so.

I’ve included the link to the video you mentioned.

By the way, that looks like the girl’s real hair, not a wig.  And yes, that’s pretty much what hairstyles were like in the early 90s.

Consider that my 50+ year old father has movies of himself as a child.... black and white mind you… but still movies

They were on reel to reel format… then transferred to VHS..  easy enough to digitize from there.

The 90’s was only 10 years ago…

I have video of myself and my two sisters dating about 1985 or so. The handycam craze *started* in the early 90s, with the things becoming compact and cheap enough for any sports dad to afford. Before that, the TV newscrews had the shoulder-mount video that brought the ‘roving reporter’ to our living rooms every night. Before *that* you had handheld Super-8 film cameras and a tape recorder. There’s no reason to think the video couldn’t be made in the 90s.

In point of fact, you could even have concealable video cameras back then. My ex-stepmother works for a detective agency, and I recall seeing ads for some of the gear come through. An ordinary wristwatch, with a lens built in and thin wires leading up the sleeve to a micro-cassette VCR the size of a wallet. Disgustingly expensive - think ‘Porsche’ - for thirty seconds of video, but when it would break a case, it was well worth it.

Now, of course, it’s certainly possible to *fake* a video from the 90s. Certainly easy enough to locate functional technology to do the recording.

About the mid-80s I was working on a project using hand-held video cameras not much bigger than a cine-8. The video was then fed through a digital framestore, synchronised to the output of a desktop PC and displayed as a composite image of the video footage and a real-time 3D graphical analysis of same.

Then after work, I’d climb into my four-seater bouldersmobile, shout “yabba-dabba-do-o”, and start peddling myself home with my feet!

If you are interested in what still and movie cameras were available then, I suggest you check out the Canon Camera Museum (http://www.canon.com/camera-museum/), which lists all of Canon’s cameras by category and date.

[Edit: The SHARP ViewCam, launched in 1992.]

Hey, I had that camera!

Well if you email the owner of the site where I got the image maybe he’ll give it back to you.

Robin Bobcat - 30 April 2008 11:59 PM

I have video of myself and my two sisters dating…

Were you dating your two sisters, or were they just dating each other?

Charybdis - 01 May 2008 07:03 AM

Robin Bobcat - 30 April 2008 11:59 PM

I have video of myself and my two sisters dating…

Were you dating your two sisters, or were they just dating each other?

You beat me to that

That hair is out of control!

Thanks for the welcome Crafty Dragon!  Thanks for showing how stuff can be linked up.  Shows you how much I know about that kind of stuff.  Still learning.

Would it be pretty easy to transfer what must have been video tape to CD or DVD?  (I can’t imagine you could transfer video tape directly to a computer hard drive?)

The Brain - 09 May 2008 06:37 PM

Would it be pretty easy to transfer what must have been video tape to CD or DVD?

Yes.  There are companies that will do that.  It is very easy (with the right equipment).

(I can’t imagine you could transfer video tape directly to a computer hard drive?)

Again, very easy with the right equipment.  You just need a tape player with an output that can be plugged into a computer USB port.  Plus the correct type of software to be able to read it (and hopefully be able to clean it up a little bit).