Movie Film to Digital Video Conversion:
The quality level you need depends on your pocketbook and priorities!
By Jason Schneider
The last time I personally had a movie shot on film converted to video was 37 years ago when I sent the 45 minutes of Eastman 7292 16mm film of my daughter’s caesarian birth I shot with my Arriflex to NFL labs (of football fame, now defunct). They did a splendid job of converting my 16mm magnum opus and sent back my original film footage plus a VHS cassette that made it much easier to show my friends and relatives the blessed event in excruciating detail. Nowadays, there are myriad services that will convert practically any analog images, including prints, negs, slides, and movies in Regular 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm, and even 35mm to digital form and send them back to you as a DVD, Blu-Ray Disc, USB thumb drive, Accessory Hard Drive, and/or post them on the Cloud with a code so you can grab them at your leisure.
Rank-Cintel high-end movie film scanner in use. Scanners like this are very expensive and used only by the top pro film scanning services.
3 Leading Broad-spectrum Movie Conversion Services
Several of the leading “preserve your memories” sites, such as Legacybox of Cahattanooga, TN now advertise aggressively on TV, pitching their services as means of safeguarding your precious family images from fading, decaying, or being lost in natural disasters. As one ad states, “Digitizing your old media stops the fading and preserves your recordings so they’re safe forever. Receive all your original media back, along with perfectly preserved copies on the Cloud, thumb drive, or labeled DVDs, and take a trip down memory lane.” Legacybox Digitizing Kits are available in labeled specially designed packing boxes of various sizes ranging from a 2-item starter kit at just under $33 to a10-item Family Kit at $159.99, to a 40-Item Trunk at $629.99. The company also offers bulk photo scanning at $19.99 for 200 3x5 or 4x6 photos, $79.99 for 1,000 photos, and $339.99 for 5,000 photos, proclaiming “our photos will be scanned at higher quality than the originals and you’ll receive secure access to your digitized photos via a secure link.”
When we spoke to Madai Alzayero at Legacybox she confirmed that the company was set up to scan 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm movies in color or black and white, and that the scans were “done to 40p standard definition” but couldn’t tell us which scanner or scanning system they used, stating that was “proprietary information.” The turnaround time is 10-12 weeks, and all original material is returned to the customer. Based on word of mouth and posted reviews, Legacybox does a good job in meeting the needs its broad-spectrum customer base, but the company is not really set up to meet the more stringent demands of professional and serious enthusiast cinematographers who require video transfers of the highest quality and are prepared to pay the price.
iMemories is another widely advertised digital transfer service aimed at a broad spectrum of consumers that can transfer 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm movies into “high-quality digital files” and do the same for videotapes in the VHS, Betamax, VHS-C, Hi8, Digital 8, MiniDV, and MicroMini formats. To quote from the company’s website, “After our digital restoration specialists have finished there are 4 ways to share your digitized memories: use our app to stream and share with iMemories Cloud for $7.99 per month or $49.99 per year; download and save all your digital masters for free; get all you digital masters in a USB thumb drive starting at $39.99 per 8GB USB ; and get all your digitized memories on a DVD or Blu-Ray disc at $19.99 per disc.” An initial 50% discount offering lists the following prices: videotapes at $14.99 per tape; movie films at $14.99 per 50 feet; and photos at $0.49 per photo. Digital conversion add-on pricing lists the following additional options: $59.95 for a 16GB Flash Drive, $79.95 for a 32GB USB Flash Drive, and $99.99 for a 1TB USB portable hard drive. Like Legacybox, iMemories is set up to cater to a mass market audience rather than professional or serious enthusiast cinematographers, and judging by the reviews and comments posted online it does a very good job of serving its customer base.
ScanMyPhotos, established in 1990, offers a complete array of digitized scanning services including photo, slide, and negative scanning, movie and VHS scanning and photo restoration. The company also offers Xpress ScanFast same day scanning for memorial services or last-minute gifts, will scan photos “for as low as 9 cents per image,” and claims that its 8mm/16mm film and VHS digital transfers are “digitized frame by frame” and made using “the best scanning equipment” but don’t specify either the scanners or provide quantified performance criteria. You may be able to infer the overall quality level of the work from the specs they provide for digitizing still images—prints are scanned at “JPEG file resolutions up to 600 dpi,” and 35mm slides and negatives are scanned at “resolutions up to 4,000 dpi.”
Prices for movie film, VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8 transfers are as follows: Individual Professional 8mm Reel Digitization starts at 19 cents per foot (minimum deposit $20) and an “8mm reels-to-DVD box” is $599.95 per box (or 17 cents per foot) with free shipping and delivery. Individual Professional 16mm Reel Digitization Service starts at 25 cents per foot (minimum deposit $20). Individual VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8 digitization is priced at $29.95 per tape or $27 per tape ($375.00 total) for a box of up to 14 tapes with free shipping and delivery. Whether these movie conversions are done at a truly “professional” level as claimed depends on your criteria, but ScanMyPhotos has had favorable press coverage over the years and almost all posted customer reviews are positive.
2 Specialized Services Offering Pro Caliber Movie Transfers—At a Price!
Video Conversion Experts (videoconversionexperts.com), founded in 1980 in Chandler, AZ is a company specializing in high-end professional video conversion and restoration of motion picture films in 8mm, Super 8, 16mm and 35mm formats. According to co-founder and CEO Brad Hinkle, VCE uses Rank Cintel scanners, other state-of-the-art Laser Graphic , Spirit ,and Arri scanners for full 4K scanning, and are “the leading film-conversion service used by professional cinematographers, archivists. etc.” VCE offers 4 quality levels of scanning—SD, HD, 2K and 4K—and that normally includes optimal restoration with color and exposure correction, grain removal, scratch and surface damage removal, and stabilization. The price of converting a 50-foot roll in 4K (3112 x 4096) is $153 including shipping, or about 3x the cost of “generic” conversions, but if it’s an important and irreplaceable movie that was originally shot to a high-quality standard, it’s well worth it. Video Conversion Experts also specializes in converting outdated film formats to modern digital formats and the preservation of old movies shot on film. Storage methods include DVD (not recommended and becoming obsolete), Blu-Ray disks (less risky and with more current playback options) Flash Drives (greater capacity and reliable if used for storage, but subject to deterioration if constantly used), SD cards (more reliable than flash drives and available innhigher capacities) and SSD Drives (highest capacity, but less reliable than SD card or Flash Drives—no mention of solid state flash drives which are more expensive but should be more reliable than electro-mechanical Flash Drives.
The VCE website includes a huge, detailed, and very informative section on How to Transfer 8mm Film to DVD Yourself, that even has a section on Scanning Each Frame Individually, noting that “it’s not as onerous as it sounds and is a lot cheaper than paying for a professional service like ours.” However, VCE offers movie conversion scanning at a higher level than even a well-equipped, tech savvy home scanner can hope to achieve and the site offers a helpful guide to the 3 most common levels of movie and photo scanning operations currently available:
Real Time: The lowest level, these are high volume retail resellers like Walmart, Costco, and Walgreens that generally farm out their work to third party companies specializing in scanning that use inexpensive equipment and the least expensive workforce to turn out commercially acceptable work in high volume on machines that cost about $3,000.
Frame by Frame: The next class of scanning services are small independent companies like camera and video game stores that will transfer your film to DVD using real-time or frame by frame machines that are basically a modified projector and camcorder setup. Their staffs are generally better trained, and they may be able to offer more personalized services. There are about 500 operations of this type in the USA at present, and in general the quality of their transfers is good.
Professional Film Scanners: These are the companies that professionals use to have their movies shot on film scanned at the highest possible level. Some do a mixture of Hollywood and professional work; others will also cater to serious cinema creators and enthusiasts. Because these companies do a fair amount of professional film scanning, they will have the most expensive and highest quality machines to scan your 8mm, Super 8, 16mm and 35mm film, and the machines they scan on generally run in the $100k to $500k range. If you’re looking for the very best quality these are the companies that you want scanning your film. And these companies also usually do some amount of restoration, color correction, grain reduction etc.
Video Conversion Experts (VCE) price list showing costs per foot of movie film scans at 4 quality levels.
Pro8mm (Pro8mm.com) is a family business founded in 1971 that specializes in a wide variety of high-end analog-to-digital conversion services including movie film in several formats. It was founded by Harvard Professor Bob Doyle who did pioneering work in developing Sync Sound for Super 8. The following overview was provided by Rhonda Vigeant co-owner and Vice President of Marketing at Pro8mm in Burbank, California,
Pro8mm is now able to scan in resolutions from 6.5K down to 720p, and we’ve been continually enhancing and upgrading our capabilities for more than four decades. The company built its own film chain in 1985, using modified projectors with multiplexers they also sold to other labs, added a Sony BM2100 scanner in 1988, and a Rank Cintel in 1993. The latter was integrated with a DaVinci color corrector allowing full color correction scene by scene, allowing the company to correct “our own Super 8 color negative stock which we invented in 1992, by cutting down 20 Kodak and Fuji 35mm film sticks to Super 8.” A Rank Cintel Y Front added in 1998 enabled scratch reduction on archival film, and a Millennium 2 with customMax8/Super 8 gate became the heart if an entire million- dollar-plus transfer suite, enabling over-scans and custom encoding fir turning out NTSC, PAL, or HD video at different framing rates. We purchased a second Scan Station with HDR in 2018 which allows us to run constant quality control checks by comparing their output. Both our senior operators, Phil Vigeant and Kevin Miller, have been scanning film, including movie film, for over 35 years.
Pro8mm currently scans motion picture film at the following 4 levels:
Basic=720p HD, mp4 output
Production=1080p HD or 2K, ProRes or mp4 output
Advanced=4K ProRes, DPX or mp4 output
Ultimate=6.5K ProRes or DPX
Pro8mm price list showing cost per foot scanning movie film at 4 quality levels.
One final thought from Rhonda Vigeant: “I always tell people before they decide how they want their film scanned to base their decision on what they’re going to do with it. If the material is going to be released theatrically, they might need a 4K scan. If they’re streaming it over the internet, 1080p might be fine. If they just want to watch it on their home computer 2K mp4 might be all they need. But if they require a good archival preservation copy 6.5K should be considered. It’s not uncommon for our clients to do multi-format masters, so they will have the material to use in various ways to fit various applications.” To give you the best possible overview if the services and prices offered by Pro8mm here is their complete current price list. Note: while Pro8mm does offer basic color correction, scratch minimizing, etc. the company is not set up to provide extensive custom restoration services. If that’s what you need, check with Video Conversion Experts (videoconversionexperts.com) site covered above.
The quality level you need depends on your pocketbook and priorities!
By Jason Schneider
The last time I personally had a movie shot on film converted to video was 37 years ago when I sent the 45 minutes of Eastman 7292 16mm film of my daughter’s caesarian birth I shot with my Arriflex to NFL labs (of football fame, now defunct). They did a splendid job of converting my 16mm magnum opus and sent back my original film footage plus a VHS cassette that made it much easier to show my friends and relatives the blessed event in excruciating detail. Nowadays, there are myriad services that will convert practically any analog images, including prints, negs, slides, and movies in Regular 8mm, Super 8mm, 16mm, and even 35mm to digital form and send them back to you as a DVD, Blu-Ray Disc, USB thumb drive, Accessory Hard Drive, and/or post them on the Cloud with a code so you can grab them at your leisure.
Rank-Cintel high-end movie film scanner in use. Scanners like this are very expensive and used only by the top pro film scanning services.
3 Leading Broad-spectrum Movie Conversion Services
Several of the leading “preserve your memories” sites, such as Legacybox of Cahattanooga, TN now advertise aggressively on TV, pitching their services as means of safeguarding your precious family images from fading, decaying, or being lost in natural disasters. As one ad states, “Digitizing your old media stops the fading and preserves your recordings so they’re safe forever. Receive all your original media back, along with perfectly preserved copies on the Cloud, thumb drive, or labeled DVDs, and take a trip down memory lane.” Legacybox Digitizing Kits are available in labeled specially designed packing boxes of various sizes ranging from a 2-item starter kit at just under $33 to a10-item Family Kit at $159.99, to a 40-Item Trunk at $629.99. The company also offers bulk photo scanning at $19.99 for 200 3x5 or 4x6 photos, $79.99 for 1,000 photos, and $339.99 for 5,000 photos, proclaiming “our photos will be scanned at higher quality than the originals and you’ll receive secure access to your digitized photos via a secure link.”
When we spoke to Madai Alzayero at Legacybox she confirmed that the company was set up to scan 8mm, Super 8 and 16mm movies in color or black and white, and that the scans were “done to 40p standard definition” but couldn’t tell us which scanner or scanning system they used, stating that was “proprietary information.” The turnaround time is 10-12 weeks, and all original material is returned to the customer. Based on word of mouth and posted reviews, Legacybox does a good job in meeting the needs its broad-spectrum customer base, but the company is not really set up to meet the more stringent demands of professional and serious enthusiast cinematographers who require video transfers of the highest quality and are prepared to pay the price.
iMemories is another widely advertised digital transfer service aimed at a broad spectrum of consumers that can transfer 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm movies into “high-quality digital files” and do the same for videotapes in the VHS, Betamax, VHS-C, Hi8, Digital 8, MiniDV, and MicroMini formats. To quote from the company’s website, “After our digital restoration specialists have finished there are 4 ways to share your digitized memories: use our app to stream and share with iMemories Cloud for $7.99 per month or $49.99 per year; download and save all your digital masters for free; get all you digital masters in a USB thumb drive starting at $39.99 per 8GB USB ; and get all your digitized memories on a DVD or Blu-Ray disc at $19.99 per disc.” An initial 50% discount offering lists the following prices: videotapes at $14.99 per tape; movie films at $14.99 per 50 feet; and photos at $0.49 per photo. Digital conversion add-on pricing lists the following additional options: $59.95 for a 16GB Flash Drive, $79.95 for a 32GB USB Flash Drive, and $99.99 for a 1TB USB portable hard drive. Like Legacybox, iMemories is set up to cater to a mass market audience rather than professional or serious enthusiast cinematographers, and judging by the reviews and comments posted online it does a very good job of serving its customer base.
ScanMyPhotos, established in 1990, offers a complete array of digitized scanning services including photo, slide, and negative scanning, movie and VHS scanning and photo restoration. The company also offers Xpress ScanFast same day scanning for memorial services or last-minute gifts, will scan photos “for as low as 9 cents per image,” and claims that its 8mm/16mm film and VHS digital transfers are “digitized frame by frame” and made using “the best scanning equipment” but don’t specify either the scanners or provide quantified performance criteria. You may be able to infer the overall quality level of the work from the specs they provide for digitizing still images—prints are scanned at “JPEG file resolutions up to 600 dpi,” and 35mm slides and negatives are scanned at “resolutions up to 4,000 dpi.”
Prices for movie film, VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8 transfers are as follows: Individual Professional 8mm Reel Digitization starts at 19 cents per foot (minimum deposit $20) and an “8mm reels-to-DVD box” is $599.95 per box (or 17 cents per foot) with free shipping and delivery. Individual Professional 16mm Reel Digitization Service starts at 25 cents per foot (minimum deposit $20). Individual VHS, VHS-C, and Hi8 digitization is priced at $29.95 per tape or $27 per tape ($375.00 total) for a box of up to 14 tapes with free shipping and delivery. Whether these movie conversions are done at a truly “professional” level as claimed depends on your criteria, but ScanMyPhotos has had favorable press coverage over the years and almost all posted customer reviews are positive.
2 Specialized Services Offering Pro Caliber Movie Transfers—At a Price!
Video Conversion Experts (videoconversionexperts.com), founded in 1980 in Chandler, AZ is a company specializing in high-end professional video conversion and restoration of motion picture films in 8mm, Super 8, 16mm and 35mm formats. According to co-founder and CEO Brad Hinkle, VCE uses Rank Cintel scanners, other state-of-the-art Laser Graphic , Spirit ,and Arri scanners for full 4K scanning, and are “the leading film-conversion service used by professional cinematographers, archivists. etc.” VCE offers 4 quality levels of scanning—SD, HD, 2K and 4K—and that normally includes optimal restoration with color and exposure correction, grain removal, scratch and surface damage removal, and stabilization. The price of converting a 50-foot roll in 4K (3112 x 4096) is $153 including shipping, or about 3x the cost of “generic” conversions, but if it’s an important and irreplaceable movie that was originally shot to a high-quality standard, it’s well worth it. Video Conversion Experts also specializes in converting outdated film formats to modern digital formats and the preservation of old movies shot on film. Storage methods include DVD (not recommended and becoming obsolete), Blu-Ray disks (less risky and with more current playback options) Flash Drives (greater capacity and reliable if used for storage, but subject to deterioration if constantly used), SD cards (more reliable than flash drives and available innhigher capacities) and SSD Drives (highest capacity, but less reliable than SD card or Flash Drives—no mention of solid state flash drives which are more expensive but should be more reliable than electro-mechanical Flash Drives.
The VCE website includes a huge, detailed, and very informative section on How to Transfer 8mm Film to DVD Yourself, that even has a section on Scanning Each Frame Individually, noting that “it’s not as onerous as it sounds and is a lot cheaper than paying for a professional service like ours.” However, VCE offers movie conversion scanning at a higher level than even a well-equipped, tech savvy home scanner can hope to achieve and the site offers a helpful guide to the 3 most common levels of movie and photo scanning operations currently available:
Real Time: The lowest level, these are high volume retail resellers like Walmart, Costco, and Walgreens that generally farm out their work to third party companies specializing in scanning that use inexpensive equipment and the least expensive workforce to turn out commercially acceptable work in high volume on machines that cost about $3,000.
Frame by Frame: The next class of scanning services are small independent companies like camera and video game stores that will transfer your film to DVD using real-time or frame by frame machines that are basically a modified projector and camcorder setup. Their staffs are generally better trained, and they may be able to offer more personalized services. There are about 500 operations of this type in the USA at present, and in general the quality of their transfers is good.
Professional Film Scanners: These are the companies that professionals use to have their movies shot on film scanned at the highest possible level. Some do a mixture of Hollywood and professional work; others will also cater to serious cinema creators and enthusiasts. Because these companies do a fair amount of professional film scanning, they will have the most expensive and highest quality machines to scan your 8mm, Super 8, 16mm and 35mm film, and the machines they scan on generally run in the $100k to $500k range. If you’re looking for the very best quality these are the companies that you want scanning your film. And these companies also usually do some amount of restoration, color correction, grain reduction etc.
Video Conversion Experts (VCE) price list showing costs per foot of movie film scans at 4 quality levels.
Pro8mm (Pro8mm.com) is a family business founded in 1971 that specializes in a wide variety of high-end analog-to-digital conversion services including movie film in several formats. It was founded by Harvard Professor Bob Doyle who did pioneering work in developing Sync Sound for Super 8. The following overview was provided by Rhonda Vigeant co-owner and Vice President of Marketing at Pro8mm in Burbank, California,
Pro8mm is now able to scan in resolutions from 6.5K down to 720p, and we’ve been continually enhancing and upgrading our capabilities for more than four decades. The company built its own film chain in 1985, using modified projectors with multiplexers they also sold to other labs, added a Sony BM2100 scanner in 1988, and a Rank Cintel in 1993. The latter was integrated with a DaVinci color corrector allowing full color correction scene by scene, allowing the company to correct “our own Super 8 color negative stock which we invented in 1992, by cutting down 20 Kodak and Fuji 35mm film sticks to Super 8.” A Rank Cintel Y Front added in 1998 enabled scratch reduction on archival film, and a Millennium 2 with customMax8/Super 8 gate became the heart if an entire million- dollar-plus transfer suite, enabling over-scans and custom encoding fir turning out NTSC, PAL, or HD video at different framing rates. We purchased a second Scan Station with HDR in 2018 which allows us to run constant quality control checks by comparing their output. Both our senior operators, Phil Vigeant and Kevin Miller, have been scanning film, including movie film, for over 35 years.
Pro8mm currently scans motion picture film at the following 4 levels:
Basic=720p HD, mp4 output
Production=1080p HD or 2K, ProRes or mp4 output
Advanced=4K ProRes, DPX or mp4 output
Ultimate=6.5K ProRes or DPX
Pro8mm price list showing cost per foot scanning movie film at 4 quality levels.
One final thought from Rhonda Vigeant: “I always tell people before they decide how they want their film scanned to base their decision on what they’re going to do with it. If the material is going to be released theatrically, they might need a 4K scan. If they’re streaming it over the internet, 1080p might be fine. If they just want to watch it on their home computer 2K mp4 might be all they need. But if they require a good archival preservation copy 6.5K should be considered. It’s not uncommon for our clients to do multi-format masters, so they will have the material to use in various ways to fit various applications.” To give you the best possible overview if the services and prices offered by Pro8mm here is their complete current price list. Note: while Pro8mm does offer basic color correction, scratch minimizing, etc. the company is not set up to provide extensive custom restoration services. If that’s what you need, check with Video Conversion Experts (videoconversionexperts.com) site covered above.
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