Helping My Neighbor Restore Old Videos: A Black and White to Color Video Project
A few months ago, my neighbor Sarah asked if I could help her with something tech-related. She's in her seventies, and like many people her age, she has boxes of old family videos that she can't really watch anymore. Either the VCR broke years ago, or the tapes have degraded so much that the footage is barely visible. We've become friendly during the pandemic - she lives alone and I've been helping her with errands and technology stuff. So when she mentioned wanting to see some videos of her late husband, I said sure, let's figure something out. The problem was that even when we managed to get the tapes digitized using a friend's video capture device, most of the footage was in poor shape. Some tapes had completely lost their color over the decades. Others were recorded on equipment that only captured black and white to begin with. Sarah told me these videos were from the 1970s and 80s - her wedding, the birth of her children, family vacations. She said somethin...