Chinese New Year marks the first chapter of a Holiday DVD I produce annually. I began this as a 2005 New Year's resolution, after converting some old home videos from the 90's to DVD. I realized that there was a large gap. We consistently captured family occasions from 1990-1995, then stopped because the old Hi-8 camera was on its last legs. We did buy a new Digital-8 camera to replace it in 2000, but really just used that for vacations. In 2005, I found a very portable DivX camera on sale and made the resolution to get the home videos going again. The DivX camera just made things easier because it was small enough to fit into my pocket, so there was no excuse for not having it with me. It saved directly to the built-in hard drive, so I didn't have to spend time doing the video capture. It wasn't great though. The quality didn't match DV and it was difficult for my programs to read the format properly (it was probably some custom version of DivX 4.0). I eventually found a way around it by converting to MPEG-1 first, then upconverting to MPEG-2 for DVD.
The 2008 edition will have a number of changes. First of all, I'm pushing for the DV format and will make extra effort to lug around the larger camera. I'm going more after the better quality than portability now that I've created a number of nice looking vacation DVDs on iMovie/iDVD. Holidays 2008 will also be the first 16:9 video I shoot as more and more people are moving over to widescreen LCDs.
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