JETache November 2001

Editorial

Sorry for not putting together an issue in August. Actually it has been hard to put together this one too! It would be good to get some more contributions coming in. Maureen at the Office has been trying to feed me articles from papers, but I have been a little worried about issues of copyright and many of the articles you may well have already read any way. One recent one that she sent me about a name-sake of mine (Anthony) and his adventures with the Ikebana club had me reminiscing as I perused some of the photos. I thought how remarkably familiar the pictures were. How many of you have got almost identical photos of you amidst a group of uniform clad high school students? Standing in some form of Japanese attire (yukatta), in a minshuku or ryokan somewhere? I was part of an endeavour to make a briefing video for new recruits to Nagano, and we felt hamstrung in describing the circumstances that new JET would find themselves in because they were all so remarkably varied. We all ended up having such individual experiences and yet the photos and written recalls all end up so hauntingly similar! Then a few days ago I got sent an email picture of an Evening class that I had taught, with their new JET teacher. This is 3 years since I was there and there are the same old faces which makes me sigh "natsukashi" (great word that, one of those words like {ichi-}man, and assatte that we should adopt into English, but I digress). It was not so much the sight of my old class that struck me, but how it fitted into the realm of all the other photos that get published by returnees.

I have a huge collection of photos and videos from my trip. Like many of you, they have not had much attention recently (read that whichever way). But I am especially aware that I need to do something with the video material. If you have video material yourself, be aware that it is not a permanent medium. It ages, becomes brittle, and more to the point the equipment becomes obsolete! I desperately need to get into my 8mm tapes and edit them down into viewable sequences. Then I need to dub them onto a newer format to retain them. My camera won’t last much longer, and I certainly won’t be buying one that is compatible with the recording system of the old Hi8 systems. Everything is digital these days and rightly so. But that means that when my video camera packs in I have lost the 50 hours of material that is represented on those tapes. Do I really want it lost forever? Do you want to lose yours? And editing down that amount of material is not going to be easy on time... there certainly seem to be plenty of other pressing things to do! In many ways the old 8mm movie film was much more economical. My mother took movie film of my family when we were kids and the camera of the day could only manage 30 second to 1 minutes takes, one side of the film only lasted 4 minutes (they used half a side of 16mm film which was later sliced in half during processing). This meant that you were conservative in shooting and had a smaller amount of material to edit. Nowadays with 2 hour tapes and the battery capacity to fill the entire tape with one take, we can end up with so much stuff that we never get around to editing it. And yet without editing it into digestible chunks we can never show it, and it sits in the closet unwatched.

I confess I have put off doing any editing in the hope that I could eventually do so on computer, rather than crash editing between two video machines. It seems that the software has almost come of age but I am not impressed with the video capture quality of the hardware as yet. They seem to have bypassed that with the jump to new digital cameras which can feed direct into the computer rather that be converted by some specific additional hardware. So I may have to resort to trickery to get it done. I’ve heard the easiest way these day of getting your old videos ready to edit on a computer is to dub them onto a digital camera and input them from there into your computer for editing. Means you have to invest in a camera though. Anyway don’t let the chance slip by. Soon it might be too late.