Film to Video Transfer
Also
known as intermediary reshooting, GCM offers Super-8 and regular 8mm transfers
to video. This service was started
originally for the fictional movies which owyheesound shot on film. The idea was to shoot on film for its higher
quality and then transfer it to video to create Edit Decision Lists (EDLs) for
professional negative cutters to assemble the raw footage. It also served as a method for allowing
owyheesound to show its films on the internet without a lot of unnecessary added
costs. While this has been the primary
reason for developing our techniques, it has gone far beyond that out of
requests from various other independent film companies in the area as well as
from the average Joe’s wanting to preserve their home movies.
OK, there’s a million sites that offer 8mm and Super-8
film transfers to video. While many of
these companies are valid and do a great job, most of them are absolutely
horrid. Even many professional
commercial establishments are sub-par on this subject. These places often use a simple projector
pointed at a screen or even a simple piece of paper to produce the image. This is often picked up by a consumer grade
camcorder which then feeds a VHS deck for the recording portion. Even such places that offer DVD often record
to VHS first and then merely copy to DVD.
These places are rampant on the internet and often leave their customers
wondering why their once brillient looking home movies now look like….well….faded,
worn, out of focus home movies.
While the movies themselves have often degraded
significantly, the film still looks far better in projection than it does after
transfer to a home video format. Even
more reputable transfer houses use only a slightly more advanced approach. These houses use a “telecine projector”
which is a projector that contains a cheap plastic screen on which the movie is
projected through a mirror and lens assembly.
While theoretically these systems are a far cry better than the
“camera-pointed-at-projector-screen” houses, there’s often much to be
desired. Of course, the higher quality
houses utilizing full on telecines with built-in image multiplexors where the
film image is projected directly into a CCD are almost impossible to find
anymore. Then there’s the “work printer”
method where the image off a modified projector is focused directly into a
camera. This yeild very good results
but is also very rare. Then finally,
the cost-prohibative Rank-Cintel process which, though retains the most
quality, is the most expensive and rare.
Most of these “transfer mills” are negligent in their
approach to reshooting film on a video format.
As stated earlier, GCM and owyheesound developed our own methods of
transferring film. This came about
after much searching for cost effective quality solutions with no avail. Most transfer houses used machines of very
poor quality due to lack of maintainance.
Most of these places never cleaned their machines (and none of them
cleaned the film before the process).
Many of them used the “shoot off a screen” method and provided
absolutely horrid results. Even the
screens were often of substandard quality and dirty on top of that. Another huge shortcommings is that most of
these houses offered either VHS only or they recorded to VHS first then dubbed
the tapes to the medium of choice. Make
no mistake, many houses never tell their customers this. One must ask if the image can be captured
directly to disk, DV or whatever else may be needed. It was because of these fact that we developed our own methods of
converting our valuable film stock to video.
GCM bridges the price/quality gap ever so slightly not so
much with technological advances but through care. This is the only affordable place where each film is hand cleaned
before the transfer process begins.
Each film after cleaning, is then run through a modified Bell &
Howell 466A (which is least likely to damage film) through a modified telecine
convertor into a 3CCD digital camera where the image is directly sent to a
computer hard drive without intermediaries.
The big difference is in the care of each project. Instead of being restricted to what the
telecine determins is the normal viewing area of a film, the gate of the Bell
& Howell has been physically enlarged to expose the entire film plane
including the perforations. This is
manually focused through the telecine convertor to the camera which will be
manually adjusted to capture as much of the image as possible.
This
may not seem like much but remember, in most transfer houses, the gate of the
projector cuts off 10% of the image on each side, then the telecine screen cuts
off another 10% while the camera is zoomed in to prevent getting the edges of
the screen, thus cutting off another 10%.
Finally, the viewer’s TV screen has an overscan region that cuts off an
additional 10%. This equates to a lot
of loss in the end result, about 34% of the image is never seen again by the
viewer. With GCM’s process, the
telecine chain is set up so that even part of the perforations of the original film are captured in the
camera. The presence of these
perforations are cut off by the overscan region of the viewer’s television only
being revealed if viewed on a non-overscan system such as a computer. This means the entire usable image is seen
by the viewer.
Because of the care and ingenuity used at GCM, all customers thus far are repeat customers, giving comments that indicate better quality than houses that transfer film to video as a main source of income. There are two options available, auto-exposure transfer which is still supervised under strict guidelines and “scene-by-scene” where the exposure of each scene is manually adjusted for best results. The auto transfer yeilds very good results for the price but the receiving camera takes a short period of time to adjust to major changes in film exposure. Scene-by-scen is even better but more time consuming as the film transfer must constantly be stopped, adjusted and replayed to get optimal seamless results and is thus more costly.
Transfer of super-8 or 8mm film to DVD, MiniDV or VHS
is $6 per film minute plus media costs in “auto” mode. Scene-by-scene transfers are $12 per film
minute.
If interested, please contact the owner of GCM
Recording Studio in Boise, Idaho at