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Home movies


A home movie is a short amateur film or video typically made just to preserve a visual record of family activities, a vacation, or a special event, and intended for viewing at home by family and friends. Originally, home movies were made on photographic film in formats that usually limited the movie-maker to about three minutes per roll of costly camera film. The advent of camcorders that could record an hour or two of video on one relatively inexpensive videocassette, followed by digital video cameras that recorded to flash memory, and most recently smartphones with video recording capability, made the creation of home movies easier and much more affordable to the average person.

The technological boundaries between home-movie-making and professional movie-making are becoming increasingly blurred as prosumer equipment often offers features previously only available on professional equipment.

In recent years, clips from home movies have been available to wider audiences through television series such as America's Funniest Home Videos, in Great Britain You've Been Framed! and Internet online video-sharing sites such as YouTube. The popularity of the Internet, and wider availability of high-speed connections has provided new ways of sharing home movies, such as video weblogs (vlogs), and video podcasts.

The development of home movie-making has depended critically on availability of equipment and media formats (, video tape, etc.) at prices affordable to consumers.

Development of film formats suitable for amateur hobbyists began early in the history of cinematography. For example, the 17.5 mm "Birtac" format was patented by Birt Acres in 1898. This format split the standard 35 mm film into two strips half as wide and was able to be loaded into the camera in daylight. Since the frames were also half the height of 35 mm frames, the Birtac format used only 25% of the amount of film stock used by 35 mm. Since the camera doubled as a printer and projector, equipment costs were also reduced.


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