The highest quality transfer service.
At DiskBank we always strive to provide the highest quality transfer and the most viewable experience for your home movies, family photo collection, or home audio recordings. Your home movies, be they film, analogue video, or digital video will always be transferred using techniques developed to improve the final product.
DiskBank uses professional-grade equipment to ensure the best possible quality is achieved. Furthermore, we spend time ‘editing’ or cleaning up the footage, images and audio we transfer. This makes us different to many other transfers companies who don’t provide this as a standard part of their service. Many people do not realise digitising old media formats, and if not done correctly, may be dissatisfied with a poor-quality transfer of your family memories.
DiskBank employs sophisticated techniques in all our transfers to make sure we are providing you with the highest quality transfer we can achieve. Additionally, we review and clean up your digitised media as a standard level of service, firstly to ensure we have a good clean capture, and secondly to attempt to remove any problems that may be present in the source material.
Video Transfers
Time Base Correction
Time Base Correctors (TBC) are used as standard for all our analogue to digital video transfers. These sophisticated pieces of specialised video equipment correct errors in an analogue video signal.
Analogue video all relies on extremely precise timing in order to function correctly without errors such as skipped frames, unstable images, flickering, and distortion. This precise timing comes at a price however, and most video equipment that was made for the consumer market does not contain a TBC circuit.
Video Head Clogged
During our editing and cleanup process, if we find a section of footage affected by a dirty video recording head we can often fix it. In this example, the flickering horizontal lines are the result of a recording head in the camera becoming dirty and ‘clogged’, then slowly improving as the tape winds over it and pulls the dirt off. Luckily, due to the nature of analogue video and interlaced video fields, we have a technique whereby we can eliminate the flickering lines from a recording.
This example shows a before and after, along with a side-by-side comparison of our editing technique that achieves a more watchable experience.
HiFi Audio Crackle Fix
Many analogue tape video formats contain two audio channels, a Linear Audio Track, and a HiFi Audio Track. The linear audio was the original technology used when VHS was first developed, but was later replaced by a ‘High Fidelity’ track that was meant to be an improvement. Under perfect circumstances a good HiFi Track has noticeably better audio quality when compared with the Linear Track, however often there were problems achieving a perfect recording with home video cameras, and this can lead to obvious pops and crackles heard during playback. This was not a problem however for the simpler Linear recording method.
At DiskBank, we use transfer equipment that can individually select between each of these tracks in order to provide the best viewing experience and highest quality transfer possible.
Image Transfers
Digital ICE
Digital ICE is one of the methods we use to remove dust and grime from 35mm Slides and Negatives. This is a feature of high end professional scanning equipment, and the process is done within the scanner itself to achieve the best possible scan of an image.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of Kodachrome slides, and the special chemistry used in their formulation, this method cannot be used. However we have developed other techniques to ensure dust and grime are still removed from these high quality slides.
Image Scanning
Dust Removal
All images we scan and digitize have a dust removal process applied to them. First we clean off any loose dust and debris from the physical image to ensure the cleanest scan. Then after the scan is complete we touch up the digital image to make sure we didn’t miss anything.
In the first example you can see this process applied to 35mm colour slides. This process is different to Digital ICE, and can be used on Kodachrome slides too! In the second example you can see this process applied to black and white photographs.
Cropping
All scanned images have their orientation corrected, and are cropped as standard in our cleanup process. The unsightly edge of an old and worn photograph is removed, as is the frame or border of slides and negatives. The result is a clean and crisp edges to all images that are transferred.
Colour Correction
Over time it is common for many different types of physical photographic media to degrade. Often this degradation affects the colours of the image, be it Slides, Negatives, or Photographs. This is the result of the dyes used to produce the colours slowly bleaching out of the image as the years go by. Images can develop a ‘Red Shift’, ‘Blue Shift’, or simply become desaturated over time. Once we have digitized your images, we can adjust and correct the colours back to their original appearance.
Film Transfers
Colour Correction
Due to 8mm and 16mm movie film being composed of the same organic dyes used in photographic film, movie film is subject to the same colour degradation that affects still images.
Colour correction for film that has suffered a colour shift over the years is applied as part of our standard transfer service.
Grain Reduction
High resolution HD and 2K film transfers are able to pick up much more detail that was previously discernable using older transfer techniques or when viewing films on a projector. So much so that the film ‘grain’ is often now visible. These are the individual light sensitive particles that give film its ‘natural’ look, and without going into too much detail function a bit a pixel does in a modern digital camera.
Some people prefer the older ‘grainy’ look of film as it lends an air of nostalgia to the images, whereas others prefer their transfers to be as clean and crisp as possible. DiskBank has available powerful image enhancement software that can reduce or in some cases remove the grainy look from a film transfer all together.
Talk to our staff about this, as this service is available at an additional cost.