Film to DVD

8mm home movies were taken in the days before proper auto exposure and auto focus. They were taken on a reversal film that needed a very precise exposure. This means that often large sections of home movie films are too light or too dark or are incorrectly focussed. Standard 8mm film was passed through the camera twice and this sometimes caused sections with orange flashes on the left of the projected image. This combined with colour fading and projection damage generally means that capture results though much better than when the film was originally seen will not be quite up to the standards that can be achieved with a modern DV camcorder.

We will use or best efforts to repair damaged sprockets and to remove damaged areas from the digitised film. Some films may be damaged to the extent that we cannot digitise them. We will tell you about this and no charge will be applied. Many films will have been spliced using cement splicing techniques. We will repair faulty splices using cement or tape splices as required.

Your film will be cleaned and checked prior to digitising using a system called 'telecine'.This uses a modified high quality 8mm / Super 8 projector and a machine vision camera. A picture is taken of each individual frame in the film by the machine vision camera. This recording is done using an enlarged projector gate. The projector gate in 8mm projectors cropped the image before projection and the enlarged gate technique allows us to digitise areas of the film that have never been viewed before.

The captured film will be enhanced to remove jitter and flicker from the picture. It will be degrained and the majority of the dirt spots on the film erased. It will then be autoexposed to enhance film that was under or overexposed when it was taken. The film is then converted from its original 16/18 frames per second to 25 frames per second. This means that motion in the film will tend to be smoother that in the original film.