Films often host the most valuable content that you have.
They are usually older than your video tapes and you don’t have any more the equipment to show them.
The good news is that films can be preserved as they are for a long time, longer than audio or video tapes. But this is true only if their preservation environment is dry and at low temperature.
The bad news is that films are no more produced by manufacturers. As a consequence, equipment and skills are increasingly rares.
The film industry has moved to electronic cameras and digital storage and films archives need to do the same to preserve content.
At Vectracom, we have all the ressources to digitize all your films, whatever their type is:
- 8mm, 9.5 mm, 16mm or 35mm,
- positive or negative,
- COMOPT, SEPOPT, COMMAG, or SEPMAG
Before digitisation, films must be carefully repaired and cleaned. Also, to facilitate digitisation, several films may need to be linked together to avoid waste of time and money. Finally, an ultrasonic cleaning allows to remove all dust and hair from the films.
The digitisation itself is done on a high quality scanner.
Speed of scanning varies with the resolution that you need. We can manage SD, HD, 2K and 4K with our scanners. AT this point, it’s expected that scans are done without any correction, in order to be able to restore the picture later on as it should be.
After scanning, a light color grading is sometimes welcome. For archives digitization purposes, such color garding is usually preferred. It allows providing colours very similar to initial colours.
No restoration is done if the purpose is only for archiving. But be aware that Vectracom can also propose you to do a complete restoration of your content and to re-master it.
At the end of the processes, several formats are usually created for archiving, editing and browsing purposes.
Obviously, quality control and reports are also provided together for all digitized content.
We can manage any size of archive from small to large volumes with hundreds of thousands of films.
We take care of all aspects of the digitization/scanning projects, from logistics to digitization and quality control.
Our speciality is definitely for small and mid-range volumes in our facilities and large quantities when the job is done at the location of archives.