Video Transfer Service- Technical Details
Professional film transfer services. Transfer video tapes to DVD or hard drive. VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, Beta, Laserdisc, Video-8, Hi-8, Digital-8, Mini-DV, Betamax, Betacam SP, U-Matic, DVcam, DigiBetacam, DVC-Pro
We use dedicated commercial equipment complete with noise reduction and image stabilizationwhen we transfer home movies to DVD. Our process produces exceptional video quality. Digital Pickle can perform professional video editing and DVD authoring to your requirements. We are able to handle high volume video archiving projects and transfer video tapes to DVDs as well as uncompressed video to external hard drives or mini-DVs in AVI, Quicktime, MPEG4 (H.264), and any required proprietary format for editing and archiving.
Video Tape Formats
New! We convert HD video shot on HD video cameras and recorded on mini-DV tapes to SD video files or DVDs.
Digital Pickle transfers any type of video tapes to DVD and as full quality digital video files onto external hard drives for editing. Please mouse over the different formats in the table below in order to see a visual image of each tape type.
| Digital Pickle transfers almost all types of video tapes to DVD | |
|---|---|
| consumer formats | professional formats |
| VHS | DVcam |
| S-VHS | Betacam SP |
| VHS-C | U-Matic (3/4") |
| Beta (Betamax) | 1" tape |
| Laser Disc | DVC-Pro |
| Video-8 | Digital Betacam |
| Digital-8 | |
| Mini-DV | |
Our Process and Equipment
- Video tape cassettes of all types are transferred on commercial tape decks. We always transfer the content first to a computer at maximum quality where we can edit out blank stretches and clean the signal (if possible) to produce better results.
We do not use machines that transfer your tape directly to a DVD. These systems do not allow for editing of content or for dealing with tape issues.
- From the content on our computers we can create DVDs and full quality digital video files transferred to external hard drive so you can edit the video content later.
- After your videos are digitized we edit out blank spots and perform quality checks to make sure that the video and audio operate in perfect sync and at the correct gain. We then burn to high quality DVD-R discs that are compatible with almost all DVD players.
- Open reel tapes are transferred using services of adjacent commercial video labs call for quote).
- We keep a copy of your compressed content for 3 months as backup. We are unable to keep a copy of your full quality (uncompressed) content due to the high disk space requirement.
Output Formats
- By default we set up your DVD for auto-play. Chapter points at 5-minute intervals may be requested so you can quickly advance or retreat to any point in the movie. Please note the DVDs can hold up to 2 hours of content. Therefore, VHS tapes recorded at slow speeds may require more than one DVD.
- We do not install any copyright protection, so you are free to make copies of your DVD.
- You can edit your video by copying the *.VOB files to your hard drive and renaming them to *.MPG. However, if you plan to do any serious editing it is best to use full quality digital video files ("uncompressed" AVI or QuickTime). We can provide these files on mini-DV, DVD-ROM (20 minutes only), or on an external hard drive. Uncompressed files occupy 12GB per hour of video at the default bit rate of 4Mb/s and resolution of 720x480.
Note: You are welcome to send us your own hard drive. However, if it is formatted as FAT32, we must re-format the drive (AVI & QT files are too large) with resulting loss of previous data. - We can prepare your video clips in the proper format and upload them to the online gallery of your choice. Please provide your user information and note that clips may be up to 10 minutes long and up to 100MB in size.
