There are certain folks who like to read the fine print before they make an important decision. This section is for you. It’s not a light read, but will give you a look under the hood at how the film reel transfer process works. Our philosophy has always been simple: only offer a service if we can do it better and/or cheaper than the alternatives. If you can’t look in the mirror and meet that standard with a straight face, then don’t offer it at all.

Quality Factor #1 – Film Preparation

Our film digitizing machines are really good – so good that they can reproduce high definition footage of all of the dust, mold and blemishes that have accumulated on your reels over the last 50 years. For numerous reasons, the preparation of the film is just as important as the equipment chosen. Specifically, EverPresent’s film to digital transfer team does the following:

• The film itself is cleaned by microfiber cloth and/or a special cleaning solution to remove as much dust, scuff and other surface matter as possible.
• The film is inspected for any bends or breakage. Where possible, we repair splices. This is critical, because damaged film can lead to jumpiness in the final digitized version, or even damage, if we don’t address it up front.
• We also inspect the reels themselves. If the reel housing the film is in bad shape, or the footage is wound poorly, it can lead to issues in the capture. We very often will replace the original reel with a new one, or respool the footage to get optimal tension of the film transfer.
• Lastly, we evaluate the reels for other forms of compromise, such as mold or vinegar syndrome. Where we can, we remediate the issue before the conversion process.

Quality Factor #2 – Digitizing Equipment

8mm and 16mm film transfer may yield the biggest difference in result between poor vs. solid equipment of everything we see at EverPresent. Many companies still do versions of projecting film on old devices onto a wall or into a dark box and then re-record the film using handheld cameras. We don’t do this. Our transfer equipment is custom built, offers frame-by-frame scanning of the film, and the optical element can capture up to 2KHD resolution. Every film project at EverPresent experiences the benefit of tens of thousands of dollars worth of technology.

Critically, our equipment performs a sprocketless transfer. This really, really matters. The little sprockets on the outside of film reels are how old projectors and cameras grabbed the film and moved it along. This was perfectly adequate technology for handling brand new film. But over the decades, the sprockets have deteriorated. Most cheaper equipment still relies on the sprockets, and the result is jumpy transfers at best, or damaged film at worst. Our machines use advanced soft tension rollers to move the 8mm and 16mm film along without relying on the sprockets, which yield a safer and superior film transfer.

All that said, the way you maintain equipment is just as important as the quality of the equipment. When you are running old home movies through the machines, there’s wear and tear. That’s why we maintain the equipment diligently. That includes cleaning the rollers so that they don’t dirty your film, cleaning the imaging lenses, and replacing the lighting elements on a frequent basis. If you don’t do this, good equipment becomes bad equipment very quickly.

Lastly, to our knowledge we are the only large consumer film transfer company offering digitizing of film with sound or offering 2KHD conversions. Believe it or not, most other companies simply ignore the sound strips on your film, whether it’s the common magnetic audio on Super8 film or the optical sound found on 16mm films. We find ourselves constantly redoing the work of other companies in this area.

Quality Factor #3 – File Organization

The majority of film reels come to us in cardboard boxes where space was scarce to write a label or in a metal tin where a small piece of tape was used to write a label – again, with scarce space. Further, more than 80% of film reels are the three inch variety, and most people have a lot of them.

Our competitors tend to take the path of least resistance, which is to combine the reels together, skip the written labels, and create one master video file for all of the reels. This is not good! It means the films that may have been in order are certainly out of order, and there’s no way to navigate to footage you want in a DVD menu or USB drive folder structure.

At EverPresent, when we transfer film to DVDs, we transcribe the written labels into the DVD or USB menus. And after the transfer, we clip every unique reel into a unique file. So if you send us 32 reels, you get 32 files on your drive or 32 items in your DVD menu. This seems obvious, but we’re an exception in providing this level of organization.

Quality Factor #4 – Human Beings

A lot of what we’ve written on this page is about the technology and process of transferring film to digital (sometimes spelled film-to-digital), not the people. But people are the most important part of EverPresent’s service. We make an expert consultant available to you at the start of the project so that you can ask all of the questions that need asking before making big decisions. Your technicians are skilled and go through extensive background checks and apprentice training before we let them digitize your cherished memories. Senior technicians quality check every order to ensure the integrity of the footage, and even write you a letter reviewing how the process turned out. For those clients in the Northeast, all transport of your materials to and from our digitizing studio is handled by our full-time in-house drivers so you don’t have to worry about the overwhelmed postal services losing your materials.