There are a lot of cool things out there that make us wonder — do they really work? In our I Tried It series, we set out to use them in the real world and have determined that, in fact, they really do.
The Product on Trial
ClearClick Video to Digital Converter 2.0
The Tester
Michael Natale, a neurotic and nostalgic film nerd with too many VHS tapes he's losing to the passage of time
The Brief
Rewind: Preserving Impermanent Images
Of all the books we read in high school, it’s The Great Gatsby that’s stuck with many of us
the most. It’s story of opulence and decadence, unaware it’s on the precipice of collapse, and of characters realizing it’s now too late to reclaim history they let slip away, strikes people of all ages for a reason. But did you know there was a film version of the book, produced not only in the lifetime of its author, F. Scott Fitzgerald, but the very year after the book was published?
But you haven’t seen it. Nor has anyone else in nearly a century. That’s because it’s lost forever, just as nearly 75% of all films from the silent era are estimated to be. And not because any cinematic Caesar set fire to any Library of Alexandria on the Warner Bros. lot. They simply rotted away in vaults, or were tossed in the trash when their run at the local picture house was done, to make way for something new. They’re lost, not from willful erasure, but from neglect.
Even though I consider myself a big believer in film preservation, all this time I was letting hundreds of hours of irreplaceable images waste away, fading and decaying in a place far closer to home than some vault in the Hollywood hills: my parents’ basement.
Playback Error: When Tapes Decay
If you were a child of the 1980s or 1990s, your parents were essentially amateur documentarians, hauling around ridiculously big cameras in an effort to capture every backyard birthday party, every grandparent visit, and scraped knee. The only problem? All of those moments were captured onto VHS tapes, a now-antiquated technology that used tapes with a lifespan of only 10 to 25 years max before serious decay sets in.
Because of this, I began looking for a way to rescue all of the moments of my personal history from the ravages of time (and mold, since moisture can really do a number on these tapes). There are mail-away services that will digitize your old tapes for you, but those can charge by the tape or by the hour, making recovering decades' worth of footage a costly proposition. Not to mention the fear of your original tapes perhaps not surviving the shipping journey.
After researching a number of cumbersome devices that require countless wires, paired with costly software, and all taking up too much space, both on my desk and my hard drive, I came across the ClearClick Video to Digital Converter 2.0.
This portable device promised to record video from virtually any source via the standard RCA cables (those tricolor cables from the pre-HD days), producing instant SD files onto any USB drive or memory card I attached. I'll be honest with you — ClearClick is a small company based in California that I was unfamiliar with, so I was a bit hesitant to spend $150-plus on a device that made promises that seemingly begged the consumer to anticipate letdown. But can you really put a price on getting to once again touch the past? Well, I purchased it, pulled out those boxes filled with a lifetime of tapes, and put the ClearClick Video to Digital Converter 2.0 to use.
Just Push Play: How It Works (and It Really Does Work)
The ClearClick Video to Digital Converter is a relatively small device and is generally the size of a smartphone. Its controls should be relatively easy to understand for anyone familiar with a modern remote control, with four main buttons you'll need to use: Power, Record, Menu, and Mode.
Power and Record speak for themselves, while the Mode button allows you to switch between video capture, image capture, and view a gallery of previously recorded content. The Menu button allows you to customize the recording process through things like timestamps, and activate an auto-stop function, which allows you to set a record time so you can walk away and go about your day. Or, if you’re unsure of the video length, there's also an option for “Lost Signal Detection,” which will automatically stop recording once the signal from the attached device ends. Of course, you can also forgo both those functions if you intend to stand by the device as it records, watching the video play out on the device's vibrant 3.5-inch preview screen.
Along its top are the ports for various cables, including its own power cable, three RCA cable ports, an HDMI out port (solely for playback purposes, as this device cannot record off of HDMI cables), and a USB port. There’s also an S-Video port for those rarer playback devices that require it, and along the side, a slot for SD cards, onto which the resultant video files can alternatively be preserved.
Of course, the most obvious downside for most consumers is that, yes, the ClearClick does require a playback device to record off of. Which means if you only have VHS tapes without a functioning VCR, you’re essentially SOL (if you’ll forgive the third abbreviation). That said, a quick trip to your local thrift shop or browse on eBay should provide an inexpensive solution. Once you're all set, simply put the tape in the VCR, be sure to rewind so you don’t miss a moment, then hit “play” on your player and “record” on your ClearClick. After that, simply watch the past play out on the small screen as both video and sound are captured onto the USB/SD card.
Thus far, the ClearClick has captured over 50 hours of family footage for me, from trips to Disney World in the 1990s all the way back to silent 8mm scenes of my grandmother when she was younger than I am now. I’ve been able to watch the town I grew up in go from roughly rural to suburban sprawl, seen first-hand footage of the 1964 World’s Fair, Frank Buck’s Zoo, and faces that look so familiar, imbued with a youth I never knew them to have.
Best of all, every single file in my recordings has been copied over without a single issue. I had read user reviews that suggested that the “Lost Signal Detection” function actually caused corruption on the file, but no matter how many times I utilized that functionality, the files always came out perfect on my end. Perhaps that’s because the product underwent improvements since those reviews, perhaps its user error on the part of that reviewer, or it's simply a matter of “your mileage may vary.” But for me, it’s worked every time.
In truth, the drawbacks of this device are few and far between. Aside from requiring a VCR or other external playback device, the only qualm I could raise is that the “Lost Signal Detection” functionality only determines when the VCR stops delivering a signal, meaning that if the tape you’re capturing has long stretches of gray screen (where the tape is still playing but there are no recorded images to show), then the file too will capture that gray screen, making what could be 15 minutes of family footage into a 40-minute file. However, putting these MP4 files into any rudimentary video editing software to trim the edges is easy enough.
The Closing Argument
Plenty of us have treasured boxes of home videotapes buried somewhere — pivotal moments of family history intermingled with unexpected surprises (like how thick my mother's Queens accent really was before I was born) are being ravaged by the passage of time.
But even setting aside the urgency to “capture these tapes while you still can,” the ClearClick also provides an opportunity to take images that were once locked away on a single tape in a single place, and suddenly disseminate them to loved ones all across the world. To forgo the World’s Best Mom mug for a year, and instead give the gift of reclaimed images, moments she once felt were crucial to capture, that she hasn’t seen in decades.
And while most of us so often wish we could go back into the past, to no avail, we can at the very least not let those crucial images of our younger days sink amidst the waves of time and decay. The ClearClick Video to Digital Converter 2.0 isn’t just a novelty device that boasts more than it can handle — it truly is a life-preserver we can toss to our recorded personal history, pulling our past selves from a rickety video format wasting away into the present day, to flood our TikTok and Twitter feeds with #TBT fodder for years to come.
SHOP CLEARCLICK VIDEO TO DIGITAL CONVERTER 2.0
