(877) 547-9534Film Transfer to DVD
Of all the services that we provide, I think that the 8mm and 16mm film transfer service is my favorite. I received an email message this morning that typifies the response to seeing the results of our film transfer service:
I think that these 8mm film transfers are successful for several reasons:
- Easy Accessibility: In many cases, the people for whom we do these transfers haven’t seen the movies in ages – or in the case of younger relatives, perhaps ever! Hence any way to view them is fantastic. The DVDs are easy to view by almost everybody. They can be pulled out and viewed on a whim without a lot of effort. This definitely wasn’t true for the 8mm films!
- Easy Sharing: The ease of use of these DVDs make them great for showing at family gatherings (as Cecelia indicates above). This is a great way to get the younger parts of the family interested in the lives of their parents and grandparents. These DVDs are easy to duplicate for the rest of the family. This is particularly important since many of these films are being inherited by one of the children or grandchildren; sharing with the whole family is easy and inexpensive (which it definitely was not with the 8mm film).
- High quality video: I am continually surprised by the quality of the video we get out of these tiny films. I often tell people that the film will look better than it has in years (maybe ever) but that we can’t duplicate the sound of the projector and the heat of the fan! The quality is often better than video from VHS and Hi8 video tapes that are decades newer. That is not to say that I am disappointed with the quality of our VHS/etc. transfers – rather, the quality of the video is often poor on these analog video tapes compared to the images on 8mm films.
- Better Source Material: Having grown up with easy to shoot and inexpensive video tapes, we have grown accustomed to home movies that are long and, let’s face it, extremely boring. Who really wants to sit through an hour of watching the family open Christmas presents? 8mm film, on the other hand, was (relatively) expensive. Hence people shooting these movies were very conservative regarding when (and for how long) they squeezed the button to shoot. As a result, the films are short and sweet with very little “waste”. This is refreshing. It also means that transferring these films is very cost effective — every foot of film is the good stuff, so you don’t feel like you are paying for long shots of dad’s feet.
December 30th, 2009 in
film transfer
Steve Bennett
