What about us : Film Transfer is the result of a scientist coming across a piece of film, a microscope and the emergence of Linux operating system.
By realising how much information there is on a Super 8 mm frame, the idea was launched and the passion has not decreased.
How about Taking your History into the 21st Century?
Combining Past with Present and take it to the Future while providing professional film scanning to families. We are relying on open source software and in house research and development to use the latest IT technology and keeping cost affordable.
Since the beginning we have been using Linux based platforms for their reliability, safety and running cost. Open source systems has enable us to communicate directly with software developers to tailor dedicated solutions to film digitization.
We use a “frame-by-frame” system. This is a high quality transfer process designed for editing and colour correction. This system captures a high resolution digital image of each frame of your film, producing a much sharper movie with a fuller range of colours compared to continuous-film scanners.
Our systems are based on intermittent pull-down film scanners that scan each frame individually, locked down in a pin-registered film gate, sampling roughly 7 to 12 frames per seconds. With Filmtransfer’s “Frame by Frame” scanning you can avoid the flickering, smearing, fallout and vignetting that occurs with continuous-film telecine systems or cheap DIY home made transfers.
Unlike many systems used to digitize films, our scanners do not rely on projection or mirrors, nor does it use a consumer camcorder to capture the images. Instead, machine-vision cameras are used to capture each frame directly from the film as it passes in front of a diffused light. Thanks to this choice, the achieved quality is close to the one used by professionals processing film archives for movie studios, television production companies, or other demanding clients
Films are manually cleaned and checked for loose splicing or a loose magnetic strip (if there is a soundtrack) before scanning. A film can be declared ‘unfit’ if decay is too pronounced. We store the film frames into a sequence of individual pictures, using high-end data storage devices.
Frames are sampled in RGB 24 or 48 bits format and high resolution up to 2300 pixels. Allowing much deeper colors and better control over the movie frames to make your film look better than ever. We are able to modify image colour, brightness, sharpness and contrast during acquisition and post processing using open source software. Each scene, as a context, is controlled one by one, brightness, saturation are quantified by the videoscope and can be corrected interactively.
Our Philosophy
Light and Optics. When microscopy and films meet together.
The main idea behind our services is to bridge the technology of microscopy to films. Making a copy of a film takes more than a cheap optical device and a video camera. Without in depth knowledge of light physics, there is very little chance to get a proper duplicate of a film frame.
The power of Linux. Render farm and open source.
What is a render farm ? It’s a way of joining several computers together through a network to achieve the huge amounts of calculation needed to restore colours and improve sharpness of your films. Is it needed ? yes. Most films will evolve through time, the faded colours will be re saturated, the focus can be improved etc. By sharing the tasks over several computers we can produce results very quickly and keep costs low by using open source software
Our equipment
We are taking pride of the fact that we built everything from start
Like everything a lot of engineering homework comes handy when time is up for assembly and first trials. Selecting electronics, lighting system, optics, sensors, software and computers is the key to our success in offering quality. Among the hardware selected we can name a few among others : Olympus for their optics, Open Suse for the operating system, Allied Vision Tech and Basler for the scanners.
All parts are put together in a tailored system purely dedicated to digitizing your films, nothing else.