The DSVP Blog
We’ve been meaning to do this for ages.
The one saving grace about writing this blog is that twenty people won’t be shouting at me that I am on Mute.
I think it is safe to say that my blog writing has become almost as regular as the Queen’s Christmas message, once a year, which of course is not what the business mentors and Google gurus want to hear. Yes it has been over a year since our first lockdown during which time I learnt that furlough is not a distance used in horse racing and Zoom is not just a control on a video camera lens. For me during the first lockdown, I became inspired – not by Joe Wickes but by James Martin and safe to say we had some great food, before starting some serious dieting. Although our holiday plans were scuppered, we did manage a July break in Seahouses, Northumberland to see the Puffins and Seals off the Farne Islands, before driving across to Dumfries and Galloway to meet the wild goats of Galloway. Wild my foot! As soon as they caught sight of a Braeburn apple coming out of the cool box, twenty made a beeline (or should that be Goatline) to the car park fence to be hand fed apples. They were like pussycats.
“We’ve been meaning to do this for ages”, has been a very common phrase I have heard over the last 12 months. I have had so many phone calls and emails requesting video and cine transfers, not just locally but from far and wide. I think it is fair to say that every format has come in for transfer, VHS, Betamax, Video8, Hi8, Digital 8, DV, DVCam, HDV and the legacy broadcast machines of Umatic, Betacam and Digital Betacam have also not been idle.
Cine transfer again covered all film formats, 8mm, 9.5mm and 16mm and some of the films transferred even dated back to the 30s and 40s, whilst the majority were more “recent” namely from the 60s, 70s and 80s. One major change has been that 80% of all the transfers now go to USB as opposed to DVD. I still do both, so it’s not a problem.
Of course the downside is that some of the work I do ground to a halt, namely production work, pro theatre, conferences etc but the hope is that this will start to pick up again later in the year. My thoughts go out to all those in the theatre and events industry, whose work has been at a standstill for over a year. Truly heart-breaking.
Finally, I have to share what was for me, the most terrifying experience of the last year. My wife asked me to cut her hair. Mincing around like Nicky Clarke, asking whether she would like a cup of tea and whether she was going anywhere nice for her holiday, I slipped comfortably into the role. However after ten minutes of using my beard and hair trimmer to tidy up the back for her, I had removed enough hair to almost cover a sixpence, such was my reticence to mess it up. My short excursion into the world of ladies hairstyling came to an abrupt end, when she realised her hair had probably grown longer whilst she had been sat there.
I don’t offer any hairdressing services but if it’s to do with video production, I may well be able to help.
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