What About Cleaning Films?

May 14th, 2011

Before beginning a conversion and transfer process of home movie film to DVD we consider cleaning our client’s 8mm movie films using a process developed especially for movie film. We only do so when it looks like the movie films would benefit from it and we are certain and confirm that the given movie film will not react adversely to the process.

The need to clean the movie film is not particularly common. If the movie films have been stored as open reels they may have collected dust and lint that a cleaning would help with. If stored in a film reel can or Kodak box then it is unlikely that any cleaning would be beneficial. There have been times, however, when after capturing a given reel of movie film we were able to see that the reel would benefit from cleaning.

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Judging the Condition of Your Films

May 11th, 2011

Often times our clients tells that their films have been sitting in a closet somewhere for decades without having been touched. The home movie films, 8mm or 16mm, may have been from a family collection put together by a now long since deceased mom or pops. It is only natural to wonder about the condition of your 8mm home movie films and if they are convertible to the digital domain. More than likely they are.

You can do a quick evaluation of your home movie films yourself. Open a reel and pull out enough leader to expose the film. Then pull off some more to let maybe a foot or so of film hang freely from the reel. Look for bowing or twisting. If the film hangs freely then guess what. Your film has passed the first important test.

Can you detect the smell of vinegar. If so then your movie films have begun a non-reversible chemical decomposition. They may still be projectable but if so, not for long.

When you bend the movie film does it easily crease or break? This is not good. Good film should only accept a crease if you try to fold it like paper and apply pressure to the crease. Even with that it should not break,

Inspect for sprocket damage or tears in the movie film. When you lightly pass your fingers over the film you should feel no ridges. In the opening footage of the movie reel it is more likely that you will see this but it doesn’t mean that the rest of the movie reel is that way. About the only way the consumer can go beyond this without some movie film editing equipment is to just hold up the reel to the light and look through it. If there is no light passing through whatsoever you have passed another important test. If you see some light passing through it may still be okay. Just look for irregularities. Irregularities might be good splices so don’t get too worried. Localized problematic irregularities include torn film at the periphery, sprocket damage, pockets of lint. Irregularities that are somewhat uniform through the reel might be from warped film caused by the emulsion having shrunk. The film base generally does not shrink so when the emulsion shrinks it causes the movie film to bow and warp. These anomalies will cause a constantly changing focus as the film is projected. It’s not a lot but just enough to notice.

When we check your movie films in for conversion and transfer to DVD we will do these same simple tests. If we believe a given reel is questionable we will manually run through the entire reel using editing equipment to find and repair individual film irregularities that would hinder good projection such as a weak splice or torn film.

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Movie Film Reel Capacities

May 8th, 2011

If you have legacy 8mm or 16mm home movie film handed down to you from perhaps mom & pops, more than likely you will draw a blank when asked how many feet of film is on a given reel. You can determine the maximum capacity of a movie film reel by measuring its diameter. The common three inch reel holds fifty feet, for example.

Please view the animation to get a better idea of how this works.

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Splicing Small Movie Film Reels to Make One Big Reel

May 4th, 2011

There are some 8mm home movie conversion and transfer service providers who will splice their clients’ 3″ diameter reels (each holding 50 feet) onto the much larger 7″ reels (each holding 400 feet) saying it is a free service they provide. The advantage to the client is mainly that instead of a shoebox full of fifty-eight 3″ diameter reels the shoebox will only have to hold seven 7″ reels.

We do not splice customer home movie films onto larger reels.  It gains no efficiency. By the time a person can load eight 50′ reels in reverse order onto a new 7″ four hundred foot home movie reel, he could have had those same customer’s movie films at least halfway or more completed to video by then.  Every time we touch the customer’s home movie reels more than once, our profit margin is decreased.

The advantage to some home movie transfer service providers in combining smaller reels onto a single larger reel is that it makes it possible to leave the projector run unattended.  The operator is then free to do other things such as rewind film, prepare paperwork, etc. For transfer processes where a simple camera is pointed at a projection image there is also the ever present risk that something will be knocked out of alignment when the film is changed. Larger reels minimize reel changes for such a home movie film transfer service provider. Our process, however, requires literal baby sitting of film as it is being transferred. Leaving the transfer process unattended would make it impossible to effect real time changes in the settings to accommodate ever changing movie film conditions.

Combining home movie film reels has the natural result that a large documentation element is lost. Many camera men & women (Dads & Moms, Grandmas & Grandpas) hand wrote notes on the film leaders, the sides of reels, and the original boxes (which sometimes have post marks on them to help us in dating the home movies. This is valuable family historical information that we would be needlessly discarding.

Our customer’s enjoy the fact that these separated movie film reels are duplicated individually, each with a 4 second reel marker number page to announce it before each film starts, and each DVD has a “movie reel chapter menu button,” in addition to the “Play All” button, with thumbnail scenes of the first frame of each reel, numbered, for their interactive selection convenience.

Back in the 1930s to 1970s when the photo developing places were offering this service as a customer convenience for their home projections it made sense then but not now.  We are only going to project these home movie films for what we believe will be the last time, and the customer will most likely never project these films again. Most don’t have projectors anyway. Splicing for convenience or seemingly simplified film storage just doesn’t make sense today, financial or other wise. We have to sit down and baby-sit every inch of film during the transfer process anyway, due to all the manual video camera functions that need to be made to keep up with, and match, the ever changing white balance and exposure levels of each 50 foot reel of film. Those transfer businesses that just set up a video camera on full auto, load a 400′ reel, and walk away from it for 28 minutes are not doing professional work and it shows in the delivered product.

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What’s All This “Sprocketless Projector” Stuff, Anyhow?

April 30th, 2011

There are 8mm home movie film conversion and transfer service providers that use sprocketless movie projectors and claim superior performance. Reports we have seen are that they are inconsistant and problematic.  They can sometimes cause the movie film to “vibrate” or “jitter” or “blur.” While the concept of this modified projector is great, the actual performance can vary widely due to the huge range of age, condition and types of film used.  Oldest 8mm silent black & white film (1936+) being the most difficult to project due to “shrinkage” and stiffness of the very dry and brittle film.

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What’s All This HD Film Transfer Stuff, Anyhow?

April 27th, 2011

Surfing the internet, the home movie film transfer consumer will find many service providers of home movie film transfer to HD media. We at W. Cardone Productions made a decision in 2006 not to offer HD home movie film transfer until market conditions change. When market conditions do change we will adopt a process using HD that maximizes its benefits. Please read the discussion below to understand the reasons for our decision.

As an early adopter of HD and HDV video, we at W. Cardone Productions have learned much in the years since 2006 when we acquired our first high definition video camera. There are many nuances of high definition video that affect the overall quality of the final product. It is only natural for the consumer to think that HD is merely a higher form of DVD video. While properly produced HD video presents many striking improvements to picture quality relative to standard definition, if we ignore its nuances we do so at our own peril. Capturing close-ups of facial features is one example. Please see our blog post on this subject.

Before beginning this discussion we would like to thank Tom Koziol of Thomas Video Studio in Eau Claire, Wisconsin who has done much pioneering work in this area and provided much of the information presented herein.

Old 8mm home movie film images are mostly grainy old photographic frames, usually underexposed and have scratches from many previous plays on old projectors over the years. Our findings have been that high definition didn’t yield improved picture quality when trying to copy old film, but did enhance the scratches, camera recorded lint and mold spores somewhat.  Higher resolution capturing for old film can go too far and actually make the film look a little worse. A certain amount of reduced resolution is better for smoothing over some of the issues with film resolution. Because digital photos have a capability of 4000 x 4000 pixels, doesn’t necessarily mean that we are going to use file sizes that large all the time. Resolution is image dependent. Extremely low resolution 8mm movie film picture frames will not be improved by reshooting them with a high definition camera.  The forgiveness of standard resolution of yesterday’s standard definition digital cameras is generally more than adequate and is as high in resolution as the old films will yield to anyway on a practical basis.

We find that HD is not necessary for conversion and transferring home movie film, with the exception that a Blu-ray disc will not have the digital blockiness picture noise that a regular DVD disc has when playing an SD DVD on a high definition TV.  That’s the only problem with playing any and all regular DVDs on a High Definition TV screen, 20th century standard definition DVD players connected to a 21st century high resolution TV look terrible.  Low def just doesn’t look good on a high definition screen.  Up-converting can even make SD DVD picture noise look worse.

The reader is asked to keep in mind that Kodak invented 8mm home movie film almost as a joke.  Their goal was to get a camera small enough for women (a huge part of their buying demographic) to fit into their purses. 8mm home movie film was never designed for photographic quality imaging.  Any movie film photographer requiring the best in motion picture imaging, would have chosen 16mm German made cameras and equipment of the time.

A single frame of 8mm movie film’s surface area is roughly the size of a #2 pencil eraser.  With an image that tiny, magnifying and jacking up it’s resolution digitally will only reveal the limits of it’s composition (pixels or photographic dot matrix make-up).  A piece of 120 grit sandpaper looks like a brown sheet of paper, possibly with some texture visible, when shot at it’s full size.  Now, either scan that sheet at overkill resolution or screw a close-up diopter onto a camera to magnify only an 8mm square’s worth of area, and you will see every grain of sand and possibly the adhesive holding each grain onto the paper’s surface.  There really does need to be some “resolution forgiveness” in order for this old 20th century photographic motion picture film to look reasonable.  Unless someone goes through the non cost-effective time consuming process of photo-shopping every frame of film, one frame at a time…. you simply can’t make a fabulous 35mm picture out of an 8mm consumer movie film.  It is what it is, and despite all these professional opinions out there making extraordinary claims about their brand of 8mm home movie film picture quality on DVD…. you just can’t polish a turd.  Consumer movie film formats had their well deserved deaths for good reason.

We in the home movie conversion and transfer business promise to preserve and enhance the client’s consumer home movie films to the best of our knowledge and experience with the tools that we have carefully chosen. That’s as far as we can go. We are not “film restorationists” or “film lab technicians.” We are digital media specialists who offer the retail consumer market the very best professional digital duplication of their photos, slides and home movie picture films at a price they are willing to pay.

Free Trial Invitation:

Why not just take the easy road: Let’s just dump all the hype of all the various service providers including ourselves. Let us convert and transfer to modern digital media DVD one 50 foot reel of 8mm home movie film without charge. Send the same reel of movie film to a service provider offering HD transfer to Blu-ray media who will also provide a similar free trial service. Blank Blu-ray disks are still expensive at the time of this writing (several dollars) so offer to give him a few bucks to cover the cost of the disk. Compare the results for yourself. This offer is given for 2011 but may be available later as well. Please call for availability. Free pickup and delivery of your complimentary order may be available as well. Please call for availability and scheduling. We would not make a special effort to promote this free offer if we were not 100% convinced that our service is among the best in 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm home movie conversion and transfer within the Greater Detroit and Lansing, and southeastern Michigan regions.

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What’s All This Frame-by-Frame Stuff, Anyhow?

April 24th, 2011

Years ago a knowledgeable associate of ours (Thomas Video Studioin Eau Claire, Wisconsin) carefully inspected the projectors offered by an impressive company in Texas. They completely rebuilt projectors, widening or removing the framer windows, reinventing the transmission to allow for the “snap shot speed” of frame-by-frame capturing, tied the projector in (electronically) to a PC via computer cable and hardware card, and developed their own proprietary software to go with it. He told us that the CCD camera was supplied and mounted onto the front of the projector in place of the projector’s lens, the halogen light decreased and properly defused for magnified essentially building a video microscope that would shoot each frame of film up close.

The frame-by-frame home movie film conversion and transfer process for 8mm home movie film ( not available for 16mm movie films to our knowledge) is a rudimentary version of the Flying Spot Rank Film Transfer Process, a state of the art process that Hollywood uses to duplicate 35mm major motion pictures to digital video & DVD for world wide distribution. The difference between the frame-by-frame and the Flying Spot Rank process is that the Flying Spot process does an actual scan of the home movie film frame whereas the frame-by-frame process merely takes a video still picture of the frame.

The frame-by-frame film transfer process requires specialized software written for a small market of film transfer service providers. This means that operators will face never ending battles involving conflict of drivers, computer operating systems, and such. Because the software has a small user base, updates to correct for conflicts will by definition be rare. Consider also that the transfer process is slow necessitating an unattended mode of operation. As the movie film conditions change within a given reel there is no ability to adapt the transfer process in real time. The end result is that the movie film transfer process becomes time consuming necessitating a high cost but with only minimal benefits plus the increased risk that something might go wrong and be unnoticed. If the home movie transfer service provider does not charge enough his profit margin erodes making it impossible to satisfy a viable business model. The frame-by-frame movie transfer service provider charging too little, in an effort to compete, will be forced to look for other corners to cut with the ultimate conclusion what we believe is that overall quality will suffer. Please understand, though, that this is merely our opinion. Ultimately we recommend that you sample a service provider’s work before committing your entire home movie collection to that provider. Many home movie transfer operations are beginning to do one 50 foot reel for free when you ask. Please see our offer at the bottom of this blog post.

For Super 8mm sound film transfers to digital media the frame-by-frame method presents additional overhead. Because the images are not captured in real time the sound track must be captured in a separate step. Once the frame-by-frame image capture is complete the film is rewound and then run through a Super 8mm sound projector in real time to capture the audio track to digital media. There now exist two separate media–the digital video of the film and the digital audio from the film. The two must be matched for reasonable lip sync which is not a straight-forward task. Super 8mm film speeds were only roughly achieved at 18 frames per second. Because the 8mm film market was very consumer driven the manufacturers looked for corners to cut allowing lower dollar entry points facilitating increased sales. A number of variables consequently affected the actual film speed. The only way that we know the speed it should be played at is by how natural sounding the voices in the audio sound which itself has considerable variation. The end result is that it is a time consuming process to marry the digitized movie film to its digitized audio track and still have reasonable lip sync. The frame-by-frame film transfer service provider must therefore charge a fee to reflect this additional film transfer overhead. The good news, though, is that Super 8mm sound home movie film usually only needs a quick audio sync. Usually only a gross miss-match would be noticed. More often than not they can probably do a reasonable sound sync in a minimum of time considering the loose requirements.

There is a special case for 16mm silent home movie film (not applicable to 16mm optical sound film or any 8mm films) where a frame-by-frame process would present an advantage. In another post scheduled to release soon we describe a special nuance of 16mm silent home movie film transfer. If special provisions are not made a slight choppiness or strobing can be detected in the digital transfer upon close inspection. Usually this is only detectable for slow but evenly moving objects such as a tourist boat floating down a river and then only with close inspection. Please read that blog post when it comes out for details on this nuance but for now we will say that a frame-by-frame process in theory eliminates this problem. It should be carefully noted that most people will not notice this nuance of 16mm silent film transfer and that there are other methods we implement to correct it.

The Flying Spot Rank Process is the only way to go for brand new 35mm commercial film stock, projected for the first & only time, in brand new condition. In our opinion the tiny 8mm consumer home movie films with much wear and tear and damage/age issues are not ideal on this system. These issues are magnified and made even more annoying on the TV monitor. Oh yes, there is a software “scratch & imperfection” solution for those issues but with prohibitive cost increases to the consumer.

Flying Spot Rank Frame scanning services usually retail between $0.50 to $1.00 per foot (at the time of this writing in 2011) if it is an experienced, reputable industrial company. At W. Cardone Productionswe offer the Flying Spot Rank Film Transfer Process to our more discriminating customers if they ask. However, when they are given a choice between $10.00 per 50 feet of film or $50.00 per 50 feet of film, and they have 58 reels stuffed in their shoeboxes……they just won’t pay $40.00 more per reel, nor probably notice or care enough about how the movie images look between our superlative quality aerial and Flying Spot Rank Frame Capture imaging. While we truly appreciate excellence in ultimate imaging quality, a video business owner and service provider can go too far into the overkill area, without a realistic working speed, turn around time and profit margin on equipment and service that consumers will not pay for.

Free Trial Invitation: Why not just take the easy road: Let’s just dump all the hype and look for free before you leap. Let us convert and transfer to modern digital media one 50 foot reel of your 8mm or 16mm home movie film (silent or sound) without charge. Send the same reel of movie film to a frame-by-frame service provider who will provide a similar free trial service. Compare the results for yourself. This offer is given for 2011 but may be available later as well. Please call for availability. Free pickup and delivery of your complimentary order may be available as well. Please call for availability and scheduling. We would not make a special effort to promote this free offer if we were not 100% convinced that our conversion service is among the best in 8mm, Super 8mm, and 16mm home movie conversion and transfer within the Greater Detroit, Jackson, Lansing, Ann Arbor, and southeastern Michigan regions.

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Did I Get All of My Frame?

April 21st, 2011

We are presenting a continuing series to explain what effects, phenomenon, and peculiarities one should look for in evaluating the quality of a home movie film conversion and transfer to DVD. These considerations are applicable to regular 8mm, Super 8mm, as well as 16mm home movie film conversion and transfers. The consumer does not have to be an expert but merely needs to know some key elements to be aware of. There are many service providers in the Greater Detroit area that will perform these services with varying degrees of excellent quality. Truly, many are excellent. However, it only makes sense to do some homework first so that you can avoid others which might give you disappointing results.

In this fifth installment we will examine the consideration of getting your whole frame.

Home movie film transfers look so much more crisp and nice if they have a nicely defined edge at the periphery. While 16mm film is much better at having such a nicely defined edge, the sad truth is that 8mm film usually does not. Consider first that just getting into home movies was a budget buster for most families. Consequently, home movie film camera manufacturers looked for ways to lower the cost and thereby compete more effectively in the home movie film market. By lowering the quality in areas that consumers were either not aware of or could easily tolerate the manufacturer could hit a home run. A prime candidate for getting hit was the film gate of the home movie motion picture camera. There are a variety of limitations resulting from this but one of the big ones is a fuzzily defined periphery and especially so on the entry level 8mm home movie cameras. There were also other factors affecting even the high-end equipment such as dust and dirt that collected in the film gate of the camera and became a permanent part of the picture being exposed onto the film itself.

When some service providers transfer your 8mm home movies to digital media they will sacrifice some of the imagery in the periphery in order to get a sharply defined edge. This is not necessarily a bad practice but one of preference. If done with precision it may even be a favorable preference. At W. Cardone Productions our preference is to let you actually see the periphery of your 8mm home movies and then carefully control the image capture such that the film’s periphery is at the outermost edge of the video frame. When you see a rough edge on the periphery you know that you were given the entire frame of your 8mm home movie. The severity of the rough edge, though, depends on the original film exposure.

Now, let us describe the problem that can arise from trying to hide the original periphery and thereby have a nicely defined edge on the frame. The problem arises when the person doing the home movie transfer gets sloppy and does not carefully center and maximize the view capture. This is very easy to do and especially so when cranking through an arm load of home movie film transfers.

Please examine below still frames given to us by a client who took some time to compare home movie transfer services. In the illustration you will see the competitor’s frame on the left and ours on the right but with the competitor’s frame overlaid on ours. With this overlay you can see the portion of the original frame that the competitor missed. Examine the periphery of the still frame on the right and you will see a rough edge. Because the rough edge is at the outermost edge of the video frame you know that your capture was carefully aligned and centered.

To be fair, though, this particular competitor charges significantly less than we do. It would therefore be fair to say that their home movie transfer service is a worthy consideration if shopping for a price point.

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Home Movie Transfer DVD Packaging

April 18th, 2011

At W. Cardone Productions the home movie transfers that we do are packaged using professional graphics coordinated between the DVD case dust cover, DVD disk label, and the DVD interactive menuing system. Similar packaging is done for audio transfers to CD such as 78rpm and LP records, cassette tapes, and reel-to-reel tapes. Please view the animation below to see an example of what a typical package is like.

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How Viewable are Dark Areas?

April 16th, 2011

We are presenting a continuing series to explain what effects, phenomenon, and peculiarities one should look for in evaluating the quality of a home movie film conversion and transfer to DVD. These considerations are applicable to regular 8mm, Super 8mm, as well as 16mm film conversion and transfers. The consumer does not have to be an expert but merely needs to know some key elements to be aware of. There are many service providers in the Greater Detroit area that will perform these services with varying degrees of excellent quality. However, it only makes sense to do some homework first so that you can avoid others which might give you disappointing results.

In this fourth installment we will examine viewability of dark areas.

One of the more common things we see in home movie film transfers by various service providers in the Greater Detroit area is shadowy areas that show little detail. Please view the two still frames below provided to us by one of our clients that gave sample film to us and another film transfer company for comparison purposes. The frames on the left are from a competitor’s 8mm home movie transfer and on the right are matching frames from W. Cardone Productions.

Please look for additional posts in the future where we will discuss still other considerations relating to regular 8mm, super 8mm, and 16mm home movie film conversion and transfer to DVD. And also please remember that at W. Cardone Productions we are among the top service providers treating your family treasures with the respect they deserve.

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