All cinefilm that I digitize will be comprehensively cleaned before I transfer it. Over a film’s lifetime of being played and stored it will build up quite a residue. Everything from dust, hairs, oil, grease, fingerprints and various specks. All of these will potentially end up on screen if the film is not thoroughly cleaned first. Firstly, I use the Industry standard ECCO cinefilm cleaner and I now have 3 of them operational for varying film formats.

I import the American industry standard “Filmguard” fluid which will clean and lubricate your film without reacting with it so there is no harm to your film whatsoever all allied to a pair of PTR rollers and a built-in wetgate system. Air cleaning is just not sufficient as it will only deal with very loose material leaving everything else behind. So, it really is belt and braces to get the cleanest possible version of your film archived.

A typical 8mm frame is just 4.5mm across, so a 1mm speck will cover over 20% of the width of the image. Blow that up onto a nice modern 55 inch screen and suddenly it is an 10inch blob on your screen, which cannot be a good thing.

Your films will be returned to you in a far better condition than they have been for many years, cleaned, lubricated and ready for many more years of archive storage

I have found over the last few years that the more time I spend on your archive BEFORE it gets to the new “Scanbox 4K” the better the final outcome. So during the cleaning process I take the films off your reels and put them on professional 1,200ft reels. I make sure all of the leaders are in good condition and the splices are good enough to ensure a smooth transition through my machinery. Within reason I will happily repair two splices per 100ft. Over that I will reserve the right to charge a nominal amount per splice. I have to do this as sometimes I get a 200ft reel with 40 broken splices or just “bits of film”.

During this process I also keep a close eye on the sprockets to make sure these are in good condition. The “Scanbox 4K” is capstan driven with laser registration so doesn’t need sprockets to drive the film. However, I will repair any severe damage.

After the archive has been digitized your films will be returned to their original reels and returned to you, usually in far better condition than they arrived here.

The majority of the work I perform on your archive will be done before I capture so much as a single frame. The Scanbox 4K knows exactly what frame is in front of the camera at any given point in time. So, I can tell the Scanbox 4K how that frame should look.

Work carried out before capture is as follows…..

• Set film format – N8, S8, 9.5mm or 16mm (check sound heads if sound film)
• Initial laser corrected focus – to make sure the film is in best possible focus at all times.
• Warp and shrink settings to the 0.05mm – to correct for any shrinkage over the years of storage.
• Stabilisation of film depending on Y axis sprocket stability N8, S8 and 16mm.
• Stabilisation of film depending on XY axis sprocket stability 9.5mm film.
• Getting best possible capture screen position depending on messy / dirty edges of film.
• Setting capture size 2K+ or 4K+ and correct codec to be used.
• Work carried out before capture for each scene
• Set White balance.
• Set Temperature at exposure.
• Set analogue gain.
• Set gain for Red, Red/Green, Green/Blue and Blue.
• Set Gamma (shadows and highlights).
• Set Brightness (different to exposure), Contrast, White gain, Black Gain, White clip and Black clip.
• Check waveform for Green light, Red light and Blue light and correct as necessary.
• Check RGB processing for Red, Green, Blue and Master.
• Check HSL processing for Blacks, Gammas, Whites and Master. (Hue, Saturation and Luminescence).

All of these settings for every single scene mean I will get the film to look as good as it possibly can. I cannot, no-one can, turn a sow’s ear into a silk purse but your film will look its absolute best.

After all of the above programming is done, I then capture your film making sure the position of the fast-moving film is optimal at all times. If there is a bad splice that shifts the film up or down, I stop the capture and reset to the new position, rewind and start from the point the position of the film shifted up or down. All of the above applied diligently to every scene means your film will look as good as it can from start to finish.

One of the reasons I have stayed with Debrie Technologyas a company and upgraded to the Scanbox 4K telecine capture machine is the ability their machinery has to pre-program in all of the edit points. This means that if there are any un-exposed and blank pieces within your film they will be edited out during this process. You will not have to sit through so much as even 1 second of “blank” waiting for your films to restart.

On your instruction I can also pare down overlong scenes. So, if you know you have long scenes of flower beds or forests, I will cut these down. For example, you might have many 60 second shots of various harbours that you want reduced to 15 seconds or so. It will make the film flow and you will still know that you were there but it can make a film more watchable, Because I keep the digital films in an editable version for a long period of time, I can edit specific pieces of film out at a later date if you want. You might want specific scenes or people cut out. All you have to do is give me a disc / film number, chapter number, in and out points and a brief description of the scene and your unwanted scene will be gone.

To be able to give you access to duplicate discs or files up to two years later I have invested in reliable long-term storage. I now have a total 248TB of back-up space using a brand new Enterprise Class Broadberry Cyberstore Raid structures. To back up even older files I am using 60TB of G-Tech ESpro Raid storage. So, between my new and older systems I will have your material backed up for many years.

This means that if your Great Aunt or Nephew visits at Christmas and they decide they would like a copy of the family archive on disc you can just get in touch with me and I can organize duplicates for you.

Likewise, if you lose your original files, I can provide all of the originals back to you up to at least a year later. The biggest loss one of my customers suffered was £770 due to reformatting his MAC computer and wiping his own Cinefilm files. He went to a Hard Drive Retrieval company and was told it would be over £1,000 to get the files back forensically with no guarantee of file integrity, he rang me to see if I could help, not realizing I still had the original digital versions. I was able to recreate his entire archive for £60, saving him a whopping £940+ in total. He was thus able to get all of his digital masters back 15 months after the original work was completed.

The sensible thing to do is back your own files up, but for whatever reason, if things go wrong, I will still have them.