Magical Hippo Solutions PUTTING MEMORIES INTO MOTIONSM

Dirty secrets many companies do not tell you about digitizing your media:

Video is compressed in order to fit the restrictions of the media being used. This compression affects the amount of detail or resolution in the image. The amount of compression can be visualized by the amount of water that flows through a hose. A small drip line attached to a sprinkler system would be comparable to the VHS tape forma while a garden hose would be comparable to a High Definition TV and a fire hose would be comparible to the movie film we see in theaters. Manipulation of digital images is all about compression and data rates.

Compression is not a bad thing. It allows an image to be processed by the constraints of the media. Stated another way, it's like putting a mesh screen in front of a window. The finer the mesh, the more information that is obscured. You can still see through the screen but you do not see all of the detail. The shadow details are difficult to see and the brightness from the other side is reduced. The table below shows the resolution and the amount of information that needs to be processed for each frame of video. Television in the US (NTSC standard) is broadcast at 27.97 frames per second. When you multiply the amount of information required for each frame by 30, you get some large numbers for the amount of information that needs to be processed per second.

NOTE: The amount of video information depends upon format and not screen size

However, not all compression is good. Video compression uses lossy compression techniques. This means that if you had film put directly onto VHS video tape, there will be no improvement in resolution or color when the video is digitized. Digitizing directly to DVD is a little better since this media provides more color resolution. The best alternative is to generate a digital master.

A digital master is stored at a sufficiently high resolution (amount of pixel information) to provide usability in future formats. The higher the resolution of the digital master, the more likely the video will meet future requirements. The resolution of an image can be easily reduced. Once the "extra" information is discarded, it will no longer be available for future use. This is why digitizing directly to DVD is not in your best interest. The resolution of a digital master image should be as high as possible. Compression is used to reduce the time it takes to transfer an image as well as the need for storage space. Compression methods fall in two categories:

1. Lossless or Non destructive compression. When the image is later decompressed it will be exactly the same as the original and no information has been lost.
2. Lossy or "Virtually lossless". The least noticeable details in the image are permanently removed in order to achieve a particular resolution or data rate.

The current best digital master format is the miniDV format. This format provides the best possible data rate for the format size, is easy to handle and is easy to store. MiniDV tapes can be used for either NTSC standard format resolution (720_480) or High Definition resolution (up to 1920_1080).

Digitizing movie film (8mm, Super 8 or 16mm)
Home movie film is shot at film speeds between 16fps (frames per second) and 24fps with most films shot at 24 fps. As stated earlier, TV is broadcast at 29.97fps. This mismatch can cause flicker when the film is recorded directly to video tape or DVD. There are two ways to get around this issue. First is to use a Telecine film projector onto a screen. To convert 24 frames per second to fit the NTSC standard a process called 3:2: pulldown is used. Basically this process "stretches" the 24 frames in a second of film into 30 frames. This allows the film footage to be viewed correctly instead of "sped up" but can cause some jitter or flicker in the image. If the film was shot at a slightly different speed, the blank space between the film frames will be visible.

The second method is to use a frame by frame digitizing method directly off of the emulsion surface. The benefit is there is no flicker, the resolution is the best possible and the video speed can be adjusted in the computer to match the actual film speed when the movie was shot. This is the method used by Magical Hippo Solutions.

But I already have a VHS tape of my film. Do I need to digitize the film or video tape?
The image below demonstrates the difference between digitizing the 8mm or super 8 movie film and digitizing the video tape. Each half of the screen is the left half of the same frame. The image on the left is from the VHS video tape. The image on the right is from the movie film using frame by frame digitizing method.

There is a circular shadow at the lower left corner of the video tape image indicating that the set-up was not done correctly when the film was digitized years ago. Also, if you look closely, you can see scan lines in the image. Resolution is also poor. None of these issued can be "edited out" in the video editing software.

The image taken from the movie film is sharp with lots of detail.