Digitize Your Home Movies
HOME MOVIES
Do you remember watching home movies on a big white sheet across the room? We can help you relive that experience!
Our team expert team can preserve any home video stored on 8mm or Super 8mm film. We inspect each reel of your film for damage. We check all the sprockets and splices and complete any needed repairs or re-splicing. If we find any damage we cannot repair, we will notify you at once. We are generally able to extract and digitize all or most home movie data.
Next, we rewind your film by hand. Then we apply a lubricating film cleaner. This helps to preserve and protect your film from becoming dry and brittle over time.
We bypass the process of running home movies through a projector. Instead, we scan your reels onto our hard drive in high-resolution. (exception: we project and record 16mm film to digitize it). We then apply noise reduction and speed alteration. This gives your film a more natural playback experience.
When your digitized film is ready, you can take it home on a flash drive.
Film Digitizing Process
Marrying analog technology with digital technology has it’s advantages. Setting up old home movies for family movie night was a big production!
I remember as a child my dad would drag out the old Kodak film projector. He would set it up on a rickety wooden TV tray table and plug it into the wall. In our family, we hung a big white bedspread from a large double door in the living room, wrinkles and all! Then my dad would stick a paper bag full of little film reels next to it on the living room floor. To feel the full theatrical effect, we would turn off all the lights in the room. The old 8mm films were silent, so all you heard was the loud whir of the reels on the projector.
Analog film had it’s drawbacks. Like many of our customers, very few of our family films had labels marking what was on them. What, when, and who we would see on each reel of film was always a guessing game.
Not to mention the blinding light and immense heat from the bulb on the projector. Or times when the film broke during a movie and we’d have to stop to splice it before we could finish watching. There had to be a better way!
Today, we can scan the film and watch it on any device. Although,
it’s not quite the same family experience!
Editing your Home Movie Film
Editing home movie film, unlike digital, involves splicing together physical pieces of film.
With digital footage, we can marry two scenes together with the click of a mouse. Digital editing tools even let us add effects, such as dissolving one image into another.
With analog film, we had to take individual pieces of celluloid for each scene change. We would clip a frame on either end and splice the two pieces together with film tape. This was necessary to create seamless scene-to-scene transitions or even a simple frame-to-frame splice. With the analog process, you lose a frame on either side of the splice and you can’t add effects.
Yet, this is the way it had to be done!