Bit by bit by bit

As anyone who's used pro-telecine facilities knows, whilst the transfer kit can be the best in the business and the colourist might really know their art, your imagery really is only as good as the data derived from it. If you've dumped it to tape and then read your tape into your PC or Mac, at each and every stage of the process there's degredation of quality and that's without considering the Pandora's box of tape compression standards, issues which all directly effect how your footage will finally look.

The Holy Grail of telecine has always been an uncompressed transfer straight to disk, thus eliminating the need for fragile tapes, the compression and data security problems they bring. With the rise of Super 8, the massive developments in data technology, and the fact that such kit gets cheaper by the month, such professional, high quality transfers are now a reality for small film users.

The premise is simple - take (or send) your removable hard drive to the telcine house with your raw film footage. It's telecined as normal, but instead of being written to digital (or analogue) tape, the uncompressed data is written directly to your hard drive in a file format compatible with various non-linear editing packages. Take the drive home, plug it into your PC and edit straight away with images of awesome quality at your disposal.

Such transfers are in their infancy (and can be expensive), but the improvement in quality over tape based methods are undeniable and it's an obviously simpler way to work. Listed below are a few companies who now offer this service using their pro-telecine suites (DAV-INC Cineglyph, Rank Cinetel & Thomson Shadow) with 4:2:2 uncompressed output;

• Bonolabs (Arlington, Virginia, USA)
• Debenham Media Group (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA)
• Flying Spot Film Transfer (Seattle, Washington, USA)

This really is the future of Super 8 transfers - offering the opportunity to get the absolute best out of each and every Super 8 frame with a hugely simplified workflow. Bring it on!

technorati tags - super 8 | telecine