We can transfer your 8mm or 16mm Home Movies to DVD for 10 cents a linear foot (Plus $9.95 for the DVD).
One 3 inch Regular or Super 8mm movie reel (see picture above) is 50 feet of film ($5.00 to capture it).
Notice!!! We are now able to capture both sound or silent Super 8mm film.
Film with sound is 35 cents / foot.
Yes, we still capture SILENT regular film and 16mm film with or without sound.
Each 3 inch Super 8mm reel plays about 3 minutes. Regular 8mm reels play about 3 3/4 minutes. 35 -39 or so of these
3 inch 8mm movie reels (@ 1800-1900 feet) will fill up a 2 hour DVD.
We splice your film if it is broken and temporarily add leader if needed so the whole reel gets captured.
We project the film (while keeping lint off the lens) onto a very flat and white surface while
capturing it through a firewire connected digital camcorder into a computer.
No, we do NOT use one of those worthless film transfer boxes that make the picture grainy and washed out
with a strobe light effect. We do NOT use a telecine projector but the film IS projected at a frame rate that
matches the NTSC (American) TV refresh rate so there is no strobe effect. New LCD screens have no refresh
rate. Your old home movies will still have the look of film. There is NO "SETUP FEE" because we are always
"SET UP" for film and we work on film every day.
We capture film in a digital format at 30 frames per second (60 fields) in a full 720 X 480 pixels at over 500 lines of
resolution. As we project the film we continually adjust the lighting. Dark areas get lightened up and light areas get toned
down so whatever is on the film may be potentially viewed better. Rewinding and re-projecting is often necessary to
insure the lighting, focus and framing is correct. We actually watch every inch of your film as it is captured.
After the film is captured into our computer we then edit out the leader and most of the completely dark or white
parts. We record the high resolution edited footage to either MiniDV videotape or DVD or both. A master on MiniDV
preserves the movies in the best resolution possible (except for .avi files on a hard drive) even though DVD is a much
more common playback medium. MiniDV video tape is a magnetically recorded medium and is subject to loss over
time (20 - 30 years). Also, one common camcorder mishap in your MiniDV Camera can result in a MiniDV video tape
being eaten and destroyed. We record to DVD in high quality MPEG 2 format. We strongly suggest making backup
copies of your DVDs to archive in safe storage.
Some people in the Film Transfer Industry say DVDs don't last after 2 - 5 years but we preserved our own family's movie
reels onto DVD back in December of 2000 and they all still look, play and sound GREAT! These DVDs are easily viewed
with any good quality home entertainment type DVD player and all computer DVD players/recorders. A few cheap DVD
player models won't play laser burned DVD-R. See a very old list of compatable DVD players at: http://americal.com/cgi-bin/smart_cart2.cgi?page=dvdr-play-compatibility.html&cart_id=UNK.NON.8503435_18163.
If your film was shot out of focus (often while zooming in while shooting Super 8mm movies) there is nothing that
we can do to fix that. We can edit out (for $1 each) any and all totally out of focus shots upon request. We continually check
the focus of our equipment to insure it is at its best for every reel. Some reels play with the picture upside down. Unless
it was shot that way on purpose we can use our computer to turn them right side up for $5 per 3 inch reel. Some film was
shot sideways. We can fix that on our computer but you would end up with a tiny picture with big, black bands on each
side. The cost for this service is outrageous.
If you're not sure exactly what order to have your film reels play back in we can build you a "First Draft". The way
this works is you first mark your reels with numbers in no particular order. After we capture them into our computer we
will place the reel number (viewable on TV) before each reel for 5 seconds. We leave a 5 second gap of black between
each numbered reel also. As you watch your "First Draft" as many times as needed you can then take notes and
decide which reel ought to be first, second, third, etc. We do NOT charge to put the numbers/gaps in nor to take the
numbers/gaps out afterwards. We do NOT charge to move the reels into the correct order because it is as easy as
moving cards around on a table top (on the computer). The only extra charge would be the new correct, "Master DVD"
at $9.95 (plus shipping & handling if applicable).
We keep your movie files on one of our hard drives for up to 2 MONTHS to give you plenty of time to watch your
"First Draft(s)" and decide which order to have us put them in. After the 2 MONTH free file storage period has
expired, a "back-up" DVD is then made to archive your movies. Your movies can still be re-arranged in order but
they would first have to be re-captured from the archive to a hard drive for $25 per hour of movie footage.
We can add music (yes, we return it) at $3.50 per song (songs lasting 10 minutes or less). We can divide your DVD into
different chapters with titled "Menu Buttons" for only $5 each. Each chapter title can be up to 23 character/spaces.
We build Pinnacle .avi data files from the original high resolution digitally captured footage every time we work on the
movie footage. For those who want to edit their own movies, we can transfer all these .avi files to DATA DVDs for
$9.95 each or, better yet, to your own Portable Hard Drive for 50 cents per gigabyte.
The .avi files we're talking about are Pinnacle .avi files from the good old days, from the turn of this century, when Pinnacle
capture cards, systems & bundled software worked superbly. These Pinnacle .avi files are usable in most computers
because the correct codec(s) (compression-decompression) are usually already installed. If, for some reason they
are not working, the free downloaded version of Quicktime, once installed, most always provides all the codec(s) needed.
There are 4 (four) "TEST" .avi files on this website found here for anyone that wants to download them to check if
these Pinnacle .avi files will work on their editing system.
It takes @ 4 times as much room on a DATA DVD to store .avi data files because they are not compressed but are
larger than the MPEG 2 files on a regular watchable VIDEO DVD. Uncompressed, full resolution (720X480) .avi video
files run about 1 gigabyte per 5 minutes of playback time or 13 gigabytes per hour of playback time.
We can also copy your Pinnacle .avi files to a portable hard drive, for 50 cents per gigabyte, if you provide the hard drive.
We also can build Pinnacle .mp2 (MPEG2) files from the default original Pinnacle .avi files for $5 per 3 inch reel. As
mentioned above, these files are compressed to about a quarter the file size as .avi files, so, MP2 files don't use up as
much room on a DATA DVD.
A word to the wise, always keep hard drives very cool when running for an extended, dependable hard drive life.
A hard drive that gets hot to the touch is soon to die so only use your portable drives when needed.
All this takes about 3 - 4 weeks time depending on the amount of film you send. A very few people just send one reel
to see if we do a good job. After they see just how nicely their movies play on DVD, they ALL send the whole
box to have them transferred!
Click Here to go to the Movie Film Order Form.
Questions? Call (801) 226-2986 or E-mail us
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