This chapter is concerned with the practical and material dimensions of vids. Central to this are the following assertions: vids originate in personal archives; they describe a history of home video; and they themselves act as an archive in collating, organizing, and memorializing a body of work. My concern is the vid's place within the context of changing home video technology, specifically the creation and maintenance of home video collections that provide vidders with their raw material. The materiality of the vid form exists beyond the transformation that occurs when video clips are re-edited into new works. This chapter explores the traces of that materiality.

Throughout this book, I use home video to encompass television episodes recorded off broadcast television (onto videotape, DVD, or hard drive), films obtained in the same manner, as well as film and television sold in pre-recorded formats, obtained directly or duplicated from existing recordings. This duplication may be through tape-to-tape dubbing, format-shifting, or downloading a copy of a file. Home video collections will often include recordings of both television and film, and there is no useful reason to separate film from television in instances when their distribution and storage is so similar. Vids are made from both film and television sources—often separately, but vids will mix media—and therefore vids embody this technical parity. What matters is the availability (and quality) of clips necessary to make vids. As will be shown in this chapter's Star Trek examples, to make vids of a franchise with narrative continuity across television and film will require the use of both kinds of source material.