So, What Is A SONY HVR-200 Anyway?

Glad you asked. It’s a very simple mechanism that can either sit on a flat surface or be mounted to a tripod. Two motors allow it to rotate horizontally, 360º, and vertically up and down. You can’t go 360º vertically, not that you’d want to, but I was disappointed at its limited tilt range.

Both axes are controlled with a remote. The remote lets you adjust the speed for the pan function and set it up to pan automatically. Like I said, it’s a very simple mechanism, but it’s very well built and durable.

I had no idea such a thing existed until that night last week, when I was scrolling through eBay looking for old cameras. In the results for an HVC-2800, I came across this Sony HVR-200. It was listed for $50, but I couldn’t justify spending another $50 after having just purchased two old video cameras, half of which were broken, but I kept my eye on it.

There was another one listed on eBay as well, but they wanted like $250 for it. People think that just because something is old, it’s worth a lot of money. I didn’t even want to pay $50 for one, so I didn’t give the more expensive listing a second glance.

It’s A Rare Find Indeed

I wanted to find out more about the HVR-200, so I did a search and found hardly anything, but I did find a video about it. Just one. This guy was doing some maintenance on one, and he explained that he bought it new back in the 80s when he was a videographer.

He said he bought it because sometimes he would do weddings in a church and not be allowed to stand by the camera, so he bought the HVR-200 so he could sit down and control the pan and tilt. He also had a remote for the camera, so he could start and stop recording and zoom in and out.

Seeing this video and watching how easy it was to fix the loose belts, I was sold. I went straight back to eBay and bought it. I don’t know why this stupid little thing excites me so much, but it does. And I know they have high-tech ones that will pan, tilt, and slide, and you can program them to repeat the same movements over and over, but they’re not $50, and they don’t have that cool, 80s, retro mojo either.

Now, maybe if I can stop buying old cameras and accessories for a minute, I can actually use them to make some videos.

The post I Bought A Sony HVR-200 appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.

So, I dropped Bonnie off – actually, I rode with her to a friends house on the other end of town, and then I rode back home by myself – and then, while I was sitting here trying to decide how to spend my evening, I saw an ad on Craigslist for some LED video bulbs. The ad didn’t jump out at me at first because I wasn’t really sure what it was offering. The ad said the seller had 20 bulbs they were offering at $12 a piece, but it was in the free section. That’s when I noticed that the ad was two months old. They must have given up on trying to sell the bulbs.

So, I sent an email asking if I could pick them up this evening. I didn’t even know how many bulbs I was picking up. Within just a few minutes, I had completely forgotten about the ad and the email I had sent. I was watching Youtube videos and doing other things, and I eventually saw a reply to my email sitting in my inbox. It said that they had just put all of the bulbs, along with two fixtures (whatever they were) in the dumpster behind a Korean Church. I jumped in the car and hurried as fast as I could to get to that dumpster before anyone else beat me to it. It was 6 p.m. on a Saturday night, and I really believed that junkers like me were descending on that dumpster from all over the county. I thought I was wasting my time.

When I got to the Korean Church, there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere around. I don’t know what I was thinking. I pulled 24 Large LED bulbs – brand new in their boxes – from the dumpster, along with four funky-ass homemade light fixtures. They were just 6 inch junction boxes with 8 Edison sockets mounted to the sides with two plugs coming out of the top. I don’t know what they’re for, but they make a hell of a lot of light.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with them, but when the time is right, I’ll know.

The post An Uneventful Day Became An Epic Evening! appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.

I know I sound like an out-of-touch, curmudgeonly, troglodytic Luddite when I say that I hope TikTok is gone for good, but I’m not. I was actually early to TikTok. It was the only trend that I’ve ever been on time for, let alone early. I was even on TikTok before my Gen Z kids. I downloaded the app in December of 2018, and I loved it. It was fresh and original and just like Vine before it, full of creativity.

There were creators who would spend hours elaborately applying makeup and prosthetics to create original characters and then make a series of videos as that character. Then, they would wake up the next day and create a whole new character. I admired their dedication and imagination. And the dancers! I envy anyone who can move and control their body like a talented dancer. I especially enjoyed watching all of the shuffle videos. No amount of slow-down tutorials could help me grasp that movement.

But then, in April of 2019, Jimmy Fallon and The Roots popped up on my FYP, and I thought to myself, Well, this app is dead. Once the celebrities find out about an app, the plumbers, pressurewashers, and landscapers aren’t far behind. Before long, your parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles are on there, using it wrong.

Hindsight And All that

Obviously, I was wrong. If COVID hadn’t happened, though, would I still have been wrong? I’m not so sure. I closed the app in April 2019 and didn’t open it up again until May 2020, and omg, how it had changed. The creativity was gone. It had no spirit, no edge, and no originality. Now, it was nothing but people pontificating in their parked cars.

I get it. The only privacy most people have access to in the course of their day is in their car. But for fucks sake, has everyone become so narcissistic that they can’t be bothered to think about their audience and create an aesthetic experience for their viewers? Of course, most viewers probably aren’t even looking at their screens while the videos are playing, which is why they’re not bothered. Apparently, it works, though, because these videos are rewarded by the algorithm, prompting more and more people to make bad videos.

Even the creators who had put so much thought, time, and effort into their videos a year earlier were now just talking to their cameras. And, of course, there were oh so many landscapers, plumbers, and pressure washers. Then came the trend of uploading pressure-washing videos with totally unrelated audio. The app was truly ruined. I’m sure a lot of my disdain for TikTok comes from my healthy, adult attention span.

My Eyes Are Here, Pal

My biggest peeve about TikTok, though, was the vertical format. I don’t know about TikTok’s other 170,000,000 users in the United States, but my eyes sit next to each other, horizontally on my face. They are not situated one above the other. Watching vertical video is like trying to look through the gap between boards in a fence. It’s unnatural and wrong. During the Woolsey Fire in 2018, I drove by a bunch of people taking pictures of the fire across the valley through the filthy windshields of their cars, and they were all holding their phones vertically. Those are gonna be some award-winning pics, I thought to myself as I drove by.

Shorts: The GoBots Of Short-Form Vertical Video

YouTube Shorts is even worse because it’s just recycled TikTok’s and clips from movies and TV shows. Movies that were shot in a 16:9 aspect ratio and meant to be viewed on a giant movie theater screen are cropped and edited for a 9:16 phone screen. And the people editing them can’t even be bothered to edit them well. Instead of cutting from one character to another, they slowly pan between them, so the whole time one person is talking, all we see is the background of the set until they come into view just as they finish talking. You’re uploading someone else’s work, and you can’t even put forth the effort to edit it well?

It’s Not Really Goodbye, After All

TikTok, unfortunately, is not gone for good. They didn’t even have to shut down the app last night. The Biden Administration said they would not enforce the law banning Byte Dance from operating in the U.S. That means that no one made Byte Dance shut down TikTok. It punished itself. I’m sure the incoming Trump Administration made a deal with Byte Dance to kill TikTok today so that he could resurrect it when he becomes president tomorrow and be the hero for so many drug-addled, ADHD, Gen Z dopamine addicts.

Bonnie was in Starbucks this morning, and the two baristas were lamenting how sad the world is today without TikTok. One of them said, “But Trump said he’ll bring it back, so it’s not gone for good!” Everything is politics now. Even an app that started as a platform for teenage girls to shake their asses at the camera.

Fuck Me!

I couldn’t even finish writing this post before TikTok was reinstated.

Are we great again yet?

The post TikTok Is Banned In The U.S.A. And I’m Glad appeared first on Retro Active Lifestyle.