Mini-DV Archives

From now on, there is a new video from my Mini-DV archive every single day – on Instagram, YouTube and TikTok. Short time capsules from 2000 to 2008, shot on my Canon XL1S.

43 hours nobody has ever seen

For eight years this camera was almost always with me. Clubs in Frankfurt, concerts of friends, the Games Convention in Leipzig, the Musikmesse, ski trips to Livigno – and then Shanghai, Beijing, Ningbo, Xi'an. Weddings, parties, streets, people, nights.

I filmed all of it. Watched it afterwards – nobody. The tapes sat untouched for almost twenty years.

This October I finally digitized them. Not all of them – client jobs and the really private stuff I left out on purpose. What remained: around 43 hours of footage I can show. And that is more than enough.

An AI as my editor

43 hours of raw tape. Editing that alone would have taken me years – realistically, it would never have happened. So I did something I would have called science fiction back when I shot this: I let an AI cut it.

Together with Claude I built a small pipeline on my MacBook. First, the AI looked at everything – three stills per minute of footage – and wrote down what it sees: the place, the mood, the people, every readable sign. An Xbox Live logo in a trade fair hall. A Chinese street sign near the Bund in Shanghai. Then Whisper listened to every minute of sound, locally on my Mac, so the cuts would never land in the middle of a sentence.

After that, the AI did the actual editing. For every tape, every event, it built short cuts – three to five shots, never longer than sixty seconds. Around 930 of them.

My job: I gave every shooting day its context – where it was, what it was, who was there. And I decide what goes online. The AI is the editor. The director is still me.

One thing is important to me: the footage is real. Every single frame was shot by me, on tape, twenty years ago. The AI did not generate anything – it only chose and cut.

What you see

Every video looks the same – on purpose. The original 4:3 image sits in the middle, untouched, no text on it. Behind it, the same footage again – blown up to full screen, blurred and darkened, so the colors of the scene drift around the frame.

Above the image: MINI-DV ARCHIVES № 0569. Every cut has its number. The numbers are not the posting order – the series is shuffled on purpose. A Games Convention in Leipzig, then a wedding in Xi'an, then a club night in Frankfurt.

Below the image: date and time, exactly as the camera recorded them – and the seconds keep running, like on the display of an old VCR. Under that, what it was and where, whenever I know it. Everything set in VCR OSD Mono, the font of every video recorder menu from back then.

The sound is the original sound. No music on top, no voice-over, no filter. The DV look stays exactly as it is – the noise, the color fringes, the soft PAL resolution. That is not a flaw. That is the aesthetic of the time.

The captions are short notes, like something written on a tape label: one line about the moment, place and date, a few hashtags. Some of them are funny. Some of them are just true.

Where to watch

One new video every day – on all three platforms:

• Instagram: instagram.com/yakobusan/reels
• YouTube Shorts: youtube.com/@JakobMontrasio/shorts
• TikTok: tiktok.com/@jakobmontrasio

Some cuts come from longer recordings – a complete concert, a whole day at a trade fair, an interview. Those will follow as full tapes on YouTube, unedited, in one piece.

Around 930 cuts are ready. At one per day, this will keep going for a while. If you were there – at one of those concerts, in one of those clubs, at one of those weddings – you might see yourself again. Twenty years younger!