After a 40-min convo with an American prof with extensive research experience in VN, I am now sufficiently worried that my miniDVs might not make their way out of the country. He warned me about the hassles of Vietnamese censorship with the example that a previous collection of his audiotapes (10 hrs of recorded interviews) was totally rejected because a segment of his material included farmers going off on rants abt 'f'ing Americans' in the ol' war days and their effects on cropping methods. Anything tiptoe-ing towards the realm of the political would trigger alarm. He advised that I should make digital file copies of all my footage.
Basically I think he's right. When I leave VN, airport security/immigration will require that I have a certificate of permission fr a local official in order for me to depart with the tapes. I could cross my fingers and hope no one notices the tapes during the scanning. Or I could send off my tapes to be reviewed by the local Foreign Affairs Office to get the right paperwork, risking their disapproval if they deem anything 'sensitive.' I don't think I have anything that would raise eyebrows but who knows. My researcher contact thinks, "better safe than sorry." That means I should make backups but I'm not sure how to proceed. All I have is my camera pack and my MacBook (with no external hard drive, no blank DVDs, etc). I hear that I can take my tapes to a place that does wedding videos and just pay to have them convert the material to digital files and then I can mix the discs in with random entertainment CDs and DVDs, which no one is likely to notice. Will that work? If I somehow lose my original tapes, will I be able to work with the digital files upon return? How does that affect the image/sound quality? I'm basically clueless abt this technical talk.
The other option is to send the tapes back early with my bf, who leaves town in two days. Because he is a 'backpacking' Westerner the airport officials will probably pay less attention. The only problem with that is that I am not done recording (abt 5 more hours to go) and would like to have the footage to review in order to draft my script for the next week and a half left of work here. I'm not sure this is the best option.
Sorry for the long-winded explanation; if anyone has suggestions/clarifications, I'd appreciate it. Also, how come no one else seems to have encountered this bureaucratic mess? Surely I'm not the only one shooting under the watchful eye of a touchy political regime?
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Can the local video place make digital duplicates of your tapes onto new DV tapes, so that you would end up with two identical copies of each tape? [[[***Note that this requires that two DV decks (or cameras) be connected by FireWire cables, and NOT with analog video and audio cables (e.g. RCA).*** ]]] That would be the best option. Then you could send copies home with your bf (if there's time; they must be copied in real-time however, so it sounds like you had better hurry).
ReplyDeleteIf they can capture the footage onto a computer/hard drive, and you can keep the original DV files (making absolutely certain that the files are not converted or compressed in any way), then that's second best. Luckily Vietnam is an NTSC country, so NTSC/PAL is not an issue. But the resulting digital files may be too large to make it practical to copy onto data DVDs: one hour of DV NTSC is about 12.7 GB, while a DVD holds only 4.3 GB. So you’d have a pretty big stack of data DVDs. (Make sure that you do not get video DVDs, which will be highly compressed and of poor quality, and not at all a substitute for your original tapes.) If you can purchase a hard drive, then you could easily carry all the files on that, or if you have a laptop with enough space on its internal hard drive, you could transfer onto that; that would be the most incognito option.
Let me know how things are going!
Ernst
Sorry to hear about this.
ReplyDeleteto be brief you should def. send something with Tom. Being a citizen, looking like you are from there, and being able to speak the lang. might only cause you more problems.
Good luck with this. Fingers are crossed.
j
wow, girl! what a crazy mess! it sounds like ernst and jared got your back, and i haven't got a clue, but know that i'm crossing my fingers for you and hoping all your footage makes it back to the fourth floor of sever!
ReplyDeleteAnother possibility, if you have access to very fast internet, would be to buy a membership to an online backup service and upload all the footage. I don't know what's out there offhand (there's one called Mozy that comes to mind) but I'm sure you can find something with google. Besides that I think the best would be to backup to hard disk. Good luck!
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ReplyDeleteI'm the devious one, so I vote for sending the juicy stuff with Tom, keep a few with you that are docile and they can check those out if need be. (but of course, backing up would be smart too).
ReplyDeleteyikes.
good luck with that!
Let me know when you're back in town, I'd love to catch up!
Thanks everyone for the helpful advice! I will try to make copies but will also try to risk it at the airport instead of going thru the Foreign Affairs Office for paperwork or sending w/ Tom since at least I can fend for myself linguistically w/ airport officials.
ReplyDeleteLooking forward to seeing all of you (and your footage) soon (enough).
will we have to write for the fall, or will you write the conclusion to this short saga? technically inept myself, I am glad others could offer better advice. it was a strange coincidence--the day you wrote, I was caught by the touchy political regime that is the RATP who made my destroy my cassette) (they watched until I pulled out the tape and placed it in "Poubelle" = France's name for trash can)
ReplyDeletevery much hope your tapes all make it home safely!