MicroMV & me

Only just found this, need to check for new videos more often! I dug out my old Sony IP220e (https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/support/camcorders-and-video-cameras-tape-camcorders/dcr-ip220e) a fews ago along with all my old MicroMV tapes, i bought it here in the UK in 2002. I loved the 220e as it did superb still shots as well, although onto sony's long dead proprietary memory stick format! I'll have a look at how you got the data off, I still have a vm running windows xp just to run Pinnacle Studrio with MicroMV support!

One of my favorite things about your videos is that you were into the same obscure razor edge tech I was during the Oughts. I have the Sony CD camera. It was critical in documenting things at a time where digital cameras were barely up to par and held only 12 pictures or so.

I've been a supporter for some time now, and it's because of episodes like this that make me glad I am. Origin stories are wonderful.

Large man. There he is. RIP Gibbs :(

Great video, I enjoyed it a lot! Have you seen this Cathode Ray Dude video where he gets a Sony camcorder/laptop hybrid that runs Movie Shaker? You can see a lot of how that software worked and it's pretty interesting! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zB-BRBmv34k

Watching this again now that it's out there earning its keep. The church bells -- 3-5 -- means there is a fire at fire alarm box number 35. Or at least that's what it would have meant had you recorded that clip in the Boston, Mass, area in the late 1800s, when the alarm boxes were sounded out on church bells. Eventually, they just transmitted them to a device *in* the firehouses and everyone who wasn't a fireman slept better. Thanks, also, for including the clip of the Ed Sullivan Theater marquee. Big DL fan so appreciated seeing it. This is still a great origin story, by the way. :-)

I'd expect capture/editing software that worked with HDV would likely (also m2t, just higher res) would likely work fine with it. E.g. HDVSplit for capture, reading/editing the files should work in most things (e.g Resolve, even Final Cut Pro, you just have to rename the m2t files to m2ts for some stupid reason for the latter)... Should give much better quality than the MP4 transcodes. I've been eyeing a used microMV package on a local auction site to play with hoping it goes down at some point, guy's still asking for a bit too much for it...

Any chance of uploading one of those M2T files to archive.org? I am very surprised that there were so many issues editing the files, and dubious that "VidCoder" was retaining the full quality of the video.

Ahhh, a trip down memory lane. While watching, I grabbed my old faithful IP7E off the shelf and marvelled at the engineering - if your uMV recorder dies and you need to borrow one for tape copying - just sayin'.. I also had a wee play with my PC1000E - now THAT's the camera I wanted and couldn't afford. It's the size of a regular pocket miniDV camera but 3 sensor and bucket-loads of semi-pro features. I got that off eBay for next to nothing (dead battery) a few years back, lovely machine. But, as you say, nothing stands still and today's phones would put a lot of studio gear from the 70s and even the 80s to shame..

" ...dropping more frames than a drunken snooker player" 🤣

Loved the “Avatar Sequel” comment 👍🏻 Nearly made me choke on my coffee in laughter 🤣

Isn't it such a modern delight to come across a well-organized user interface on an electronic device? I was in complete simpatico with you when you were celebrating the virtues of the camcorder's thoughtful OS for screen placement. I get the sense that by off chance I were to meet the designer we'd get on rather well, like he'd be "my" kind of people. VS, whoever designed the interface for HP printer displays. Ugh! Probably the sort of person who eats half a french fry or uses a spoon with an ice cream cone.

How fantastic, great to hear your personal story coupled with yet another format I wasn't familiar with (although that's not too uncommon I'm afraid!). One of my favourite videos you've done, I'd say!

So many parallels to my story, although I invested in Sony 8mm. Got a camcorder as a graduation present in '86, used it for years, then upgraded to a new model when a buddy happened to work at Columbia House and got a great deal (Sony owned them). BTW, I also bought Sony's 100-DVD changer that day, along with their laserdisc player (love employee discounts). I invested in Vegas as well (before Sony bought them out), and it was already crap. I still use my Sony cam as a middleman from VHS to my Mac, with the Firewire to Thunderbolt dongle.

FYI Mat; the mobile app updated and your page now looks like this: https://ibb.co/HHCmWjy

Great video Mat i realy enjoyed it

What a beautiful bit of engineering that was. Thanks for this Matt, had never come across it before, just what I’m looking for from a Techmoan video 😀.

I enjoyed this for several reasons. I love the random shots of the early 2000s (my high school years). I also have grown to love Sony's miniature tech thanks to your channel. And the story of this was great. Glad you walked in that store that day! My little brother and I started making videos on MiniDV and I have one of our tapes still here. Just need to get a camera to watch them with. Though it is likely full of cringeworthy clips of our teenage stupidity. The oldest video on my youtube channel was captured on MiniDV.

Great vid! Don’t know why I enjoy deep dives into failed formats (aside from the fact that it was very engaging and well done) but I do. 2004 time capsule was fun too - Xibit cameo and Lost billboards really takes me back to simpler times

p.s. daisy chain of Apple dongles deserves 👏👏👏

Nice story! And a rare format, I never heard of it before!

This like your superhero origin story! I really fun video. You have some great time capsule clips in there. Always a videographer at heart apparently. No comments to add edit-wise. But I have to get my "old man" comment in about how BORING tech is today. Essentially that entire part of society is gone forever and now it's been reduced to generic functionality. The thrill of the new has been completely eliminated. The only time I get excited about tech any more is finding something old at the thrift shop. Thank you very much for this channel. Continues to be a lot of fun and information.

Wonderful video, as always. I was given an old Sony videoHI8 'handycam vision' camcorder, several years ago, and I still use it. I record mostly Halloween parades with it, with the associated quality. It's much more of a full-size version, of course, but it still works. I've NEVER seen a video tape format THAT small before, at least not here in the states. Nice how it got you started in your current path in life. Kudos!

I really enjoyed this one. Cheers, Mat.

Well done video, Mat. I especially enjoyed the personal connection in this one! My favorite Techmoan episode in a long while.

Old tech, an obsolete and obscure media format - it must be Techmoan. Nice video and funny how your life can hinge on those moments.

Not a format I'd heard of, as I've never been a big video-taker! One day, I'll get to New York. One day. Sigh.

Yo dawg! I heard you like your MicroMV cameras... so I put a MicroMV camera in your MicroMV camera in a MicroMV camera...

Pocket-sized cameras that cost nothing to operate have created an explosion of super-talented filmmakers. I watch YT videos posted by people in their teens and twenties who are just showing off their latest sewing or crafting projects and I'm kind of blown away by how perfect the storytelling is. I mean, no wonder: these generations literally grew up with video cameras and nonlinear editing software. They learned how to communicate via video at the same time they were learning to communicate, period. I remember having to explain word processing to my English teacher when I was a kid, and how it's impossible for me to think in terms of this "outline," "first draft," "Second draft..." system that he'd been teaching for thirty years. I learned to write using digital tools that let me just have fun and mess around with words. Same thing with millennials and gen-z when it comes to learning to tell stories with video.

A full on James Burke “Connections” TV episode. Brilliant!!! Well done you!!!

Great video! The quality of that mpeg2 standard-def widescreen footage is really surprisingly good, especially compared to some standard-definition videos that are posted on some YouTube channels that are apparently grabbed with a potato. I had the DCR-PC7E, the European version of the DCR-PC7 that you're showing in the Sony catalog(?) with someone holding it all wrong. European camcorders can't record from FireWire or analog inputs because if they could, they would be regarded as Video Recorder and they would cost extra because of import tax, but fortunately there was a hack to fix that. The camcorder cost me 3200 Dutch Guiders, which would be 2235 Euros now, after correcting for inflation. My first tape has a recording of me, telling my dad the price I paid. I also have a recording from my first trip to the USA where a Japanese lady offered to take a picture of me and my wife, and also said it was a "nice camela" while it was recording. I have to say I'm jealous of your MicroMV camcorder; I wanted to buy one around 2002 or so, but I couldn't afford one because I was between jobs. I finally got a job at a place where the boss gave everyone a MiniDVD camcorder for Christmas, when MicroMV recorders had already pretty much disappeared. And guess what, the MiniDVD NTSC camcorder in 2003 was actually worse quality than my 1998 camcorder from Europe. And my PC7E was less bulky too. I eventually gave the MiniDVD camcorder to my stepson so he could make recordings of our then-newborn granddaughter. I still have the PC7E and I actually recently used it to copy some tapes to my computer, with a FireWire ExpressCard from Amazon (no need for any of those converter cables like you have). I was surprised that it was still easy to grab video from MiniDV, including date/time codes, and I had no trouble with dropped frames or anything. By the way for MicroMV I would have converted the MPEG 2 transport stream files to MPEG 2 program streams. That way the files would be converted losslessly and the conversion might have worked much faster. And the files would have been just as playable as those MP4 files you have now. Just maybe a little bigger.

You might be surprised to learn what interests Sony. And if they have any business-sense, - They'll consider your commentary here. You've made excellent suggestions from real-world use cases. That's valuable feedback. A couple of years ago, Sony replied to an e-mail I'd sent regarding the MDR V-6 Headphones they have made for decades. Sony seemed genuinely interested with the feedback. If you had a pair of V6's, - you know why so many people & thousands of studio engineers loved them.

I've found the best software for capturing MicroMV footage is an older version of Sony Vegas (logically enough). Set it to HDV mode and it works perfectly, automatically splitting the video into clips according to the scenes on the tape. It spits out .M2T (MPEG2 Transport stream) files which contain the raw data coming off the tape. After they discontinued MicroMV, Sony did find a way to miniaturize a MiniDV camcorder a lot further than previously possible, resulting in the DCR-PC55, which was about the same size as their MicroMV Handycams, despite using the larger MiniDV tape. Unfortunately, as my video about it showed, the video quality from the DCR-PC55 is rather lackluster. And right around the time that Sony was giving up on MicroMV in late 2003, Panasonic introduced the first pocket-sized SD card camcorder, the D-Snap SV-AV100, which I've also done a video about. It's packed with features and also records DVD-quality MPEG2 video, but was hampered by the high cost and limited recording length of SD cards at the time. Sony, meanwhile, dragged their feet and didn't introduce their first flash-memory (Memory Stick)-based camcorders until 2009!

"Schrödinger's camcorder" - LOLROFPMP!

I wonder if that tape ended up getting put back together :P I’m glad that dongle chain worked. I retired my Drobo 2nd gen which I used off FireWire which is kind of sad too now that I think about it :P

This was a great video, I loved this and so did 12 year old me. I longed for some kind of video camera my whole life but never got one. Playing with VHS Cameras circa 1992 in Primary school I always pestered my parents to get one but dad had no interest in filming our holidays! And they weren't exactly cheap. I had video editing software on my Atari ST in 1993 that was meant to work with a capture card (that I didn't have) but I loved playing with the editor and the included sample files on floppy disc in postage stamp resolution. Mid 2000s I had a digital still camera that also took video but the video it took was of potato quality (similar to the Memory Stick video on your MicroMV camera I guess). It wasn't until the iPhone 3GS was in my pocket that I could really take video, at whim, in good quality that I could edit on my then-new iMac in iMovie. It wasn't long after that I took it to YouTube and started my channel around 2011. "Dropped more frames than a drunken snooker player!"

I'm sure a lot of your viewers identify with this, liking formats for their own sake and potential as opposed to whatever's popular or easy at the time, though they are often one in the same! I would like to share my experience with the Micro 4/3rds camera format. I'm getting deja vu here so I might have shared some of this before. The Olympus Pen E-P1 was like nothing on the market when it came out. It was tiny, legitimately pocketable in that it could fit in your jeans pocket, and it could interchange lenses, providing the same quality DSLR images as, well, a few DSLRs. Over the next few years, the small format of the sensor and short flange back distance showed that professional quality cameras could be made small-ish, and they sold well. And non professional quality cameras could use the format to make professional looking photos, and nobody would know the difference. In fact, when the E-P3 came to market in 2011, 2 years after the E-P1, it wasn't just one of the smallest interchangable lens cameras, it was the fastest focusing camera. Period. These things have performance to back them up. By 2013, Panasonic had released the Lumix GM1, the smallest interchangeable lens camera available. Still. It's still the smallest, and it isn't close. This is also micro 4/3rds. Panasonic was also creating small "pancake" lenses. They haven't done one since then. After this time, micro 4/3rds cameras just kinda stuck to 2 sizes, the small professional size and the pocketable size, but not the ultrapocketable size, like shirt pocket size. Unfortunately in the mean time, other manufacturers have seen what Olympus and Panasonic did with Micro 4/3rds and miniaturized their large sensor cameras to be nearly as small as Micro 4/3rds. Examine the following. https://bit.ly/3grExRI This link shows a size comparison between the smallest full frame sized camera, the Sigma FP, with a 35mm f/1.8 lens, and the pocketable size current Olympus camera, the Pen E-P7, with an Olympus 17mm f/1.2 lens. The Olympus lens is optically superior and has weather sealing, but for facebook posts, these two will provide virtually identical looking results. The small one is the Panasonic GM1 and the Panasonic 20mm f/1.7. It's not going to look quite as good, but it's going to look very close, and it will it in your shirt pocket. Where is that innovation? What is going on! Why haven't we had a small camera in 10 flipping years? Isn't that why we all bought into the format? (Though I will admit the lenses are much cheaper) If it continues to go this way, in a few years there will be Youtube videos talking about the promise of Micro 4/3rds and then them abandoning the promise to make similar cameras to everyone else with an inferior sensor size (leading to typically slightly worse quality). Like if Micro MV started allowing people to make small cameras, and then stopped. That's what's happening to Micro 4/3rds! Sad times.

My adventures with consumer camcorders ended with a Sony Hi8 that I used up until around 2010 when smart phones started to give higher quality video than the 480p widescreen it managed. The videos I shot still look pretty decent today. I didn't have to mess with Sony Vegas, I just used a cheap USB video capture device to copy the analog stream over.

This was a really good episode, I really enjoyed the insight in to the channels humble beginnings. It was also really great to hear Mat's passion. 👍

6:40 We had similar experiences when we took a newly purchased Sharp Viewcam to the USA in 1998. Back then the idea of having a screen instead of a viewfinder was novel. Coincidentally the Elvis Impersonator / Ghostbusters Extra at 13:40 appears to be using one. Video editing was a real pain back then. I spent £100s trying to get a working setup, and by the time I was getting watchable results I was so fed up with it I ended up just running the tapes into a Panasonic DVD recorder.

fascinating insight -very enjoyable, thanks, as always, for taking the time to make :)

Thank god for Sainsburys is all I'm gonna say. (Never thought those words would cross my lips though)

Very enjoyable video. I had Hi8 and MiniDV cameras (which fortunately I can still access the tapes of) but wasn't even aware of MicroMV, you learn something new every day.

Great video, I never got a Micro MV camera but happily used a Sony DCR-PC3 MiniDV camera from 1999 until about 2005. I have recently ripped all the footage from my tapes using a PC application called WinDV, which certainly seemed easier than what you've had to do. Although I had the luxury of a desktop PC and a PCI Firewire card.

This is a great video! I never heard of micromv before, so learned something about that, but the story behind Techmoan is even more interesting! I was in my late teens in the 00s, and was quite interested in what was going on back then, as was my dad but as camcorders go, we never made it past the hi8 format before stopping with filming stuff untill the smartphone era! Thank you for a great video!

In 2005 I got a little Mustek digital video camera called the DV5500, it produced awful quality video and crashed a lot. Had I known about MicroMV, I could've maybe got a used camera and had much better success recording with it. Sadly I never came across MicroMV at all until now, thank you for introducing me to it.

Fascinating story well shared👍. Thankfully you did go into Sainsbury's that day.....

Mat, this was an absolute delight! I've been waiting for your MicroMV video for so long. I remember asking about it a few years ago on one of the Patreon posts and you said that it's coming one day. Bear with me, personal story coming up. I've never had MicroMV. I don't remember ever seeing one in person (I live in Israel). When I read about it online I was so excited about the miniaturization and wished I'd had one. I had Parker Lewis-esque dreams of walking around school with a colorful buttoned shirt and a MicroMV camcorder in my shirt pocket. But those dreams were never to materialize. My granddad, to whom I owe my photography and AV obsession, always had the latest and greatest camcorders. When he bought a MiniDV he handed me down his Video8. When he bought a newer MiniDV he handed me his old one. And of course he also bought the TG3 eventually, but by that time he had gotten old enough to never really having any use for it (stopped traveling). Fast forward to 2019, and a friend of mine came across a DCR-IP7 and gave it to me. I was really happy to finally use a MicroMV camcorder. It still works and the battery even holds a charge. It's got a FireWire port on it, so no dock needed either. It's now on display in my living room and I adore it :) Sorry for rambling. Your video made my weekend and I had to let it out.

Actually kind of interested to see a full-length, narrated video of Mr. & Mrs. Moan's 2004? trip to NYC and FLA cruise. Maybe if enough of the patrons nag him for it, he'll give in. Now I'm reminded of Monty Python's sketch about "Holiday Snaps" but I think Mat's holiday videos might make for interesting viewing, although Mat--or the Mrs. will undoubtedly have the final word on that.

And the video-making bar gets raised even higher. Absolutely fantastic video. The tech angle is great, and the personal insight is really interesting. Thanks, Mat.

Great video and I enjoyed hearing your story. Appreciated the note about Super 8 and associated costs 20 years prior

It's always interesting to reflect back on the little moments in your life that end up changing everything. - I really liked this one, your enthusiasm for the subject shines through. The approach you took with this, weaving the history and tech information in with the story of how it affected your life, was very engaging. And it's apparent why this one took a while to put together, that was a lot of editing! Cheers :-)

Interesting to see Mat's "Origin Story." This is another enjoyable and informative video that fits right in with Mat's other videos on obsolete tech, in which we find very cool devices that were built using ingenious methods. Be they intricate mechanical devices, electromechanical, or electronic. Things like Victrolas, 33 & 45 RPM records, CDs, Micro MVs, Walkman, MiniDisc--they are all fascinating devices that have been overtaken by all the digital stuff nowadays. Of course, when Victrolas came out, there were people who bemoaned the idea that no one needed to learn to play musical instruments anymore, so some things never change.

Great origin story well told. Bravo!

So this is an origin story. How Mat got bit by a radioactive MicroMV and turned into Techmoanman, with amazing archival abilities and the ability to sniff out rare formats on eBay.

This video has shifted my life paradigm - I absolutely love it. Micro MV what eh? I really love all the tiny and miniature mechanical technologies prior to today's chips, chips and more chips. The video quality is much better than I would have expected. When you explained your cameras of the past, it reminded me fondly of this video: https://youtu.be/qNwkdXiAP0w&t=1m12s The work you took putting all of this together is amazing. A drawback for me, though, is where is our young actor/narrator Mat in that footage? *sigh* I enjoyed your comedic comments throughout this video, as well. Thank you to the store that sold this camera on 50% mark down in 2004. 🧡 Thank you to you, too. I'd thank Sony, too, but they quickly dumbed down their camcorders for no good reason.

Really enjoyed this video!

Mat I never heard of this format. I remember MiniDV and found a crude program to get the tape content onto the PC as raw data until my friend Kevin with a posh Mac said "give it here" and it just worked like yours did. He just put the files on a USB memory stick. It's good reminder to re-backup my old tapes. Time to did out the Mac Mini. Best wishes.

Stopping halfway through just to note that the most likely reason for the church bells excessive ringing is that it's actually an alarm system that warns people nearby that it has detected an unusual old man on the grounds recording a video using an unusual old camera.😉

“Have this finger amputated- or something”. I found that the funniest line. And also the reference to Sliding Doors, the film. If that was intentional. Was it? Great video. Your enthusiasm is truly inspiring. Thanks.

I absolutely loved this, as a video nerd turned professional, who’d just moved to New York City as a college kid at the time you shot that. I skipped MicroMV entirely, and am a little shocked at how good it looked, especially in low light. While capturing might be a bear nowadays, those MPEG-2 transport streams should actually be directly editable in Adobe Premiere (although you may need to manually rename the file suffix to .m2ts). That transcoder appears to have done quite a nice job deinterlacing the video, though, so that is definitely a sensible choice, especially if you don’t use Premiere.

It belongs in a museum! Not because it's old and obsolete, but for its historical significance as the camera that gave us Techmoan.