Film & Video Export

Choosing your output
We offer several choices for output type of your tape and  film. The default choice is a DVD or CD enabling you to just go home and watch your films or listen to your CD’s, the other choices focus on you being able to edit your tape or films.

Transfer to DVD:
We utilize custom designed systems to transfer your film in order to preserve your 8mm, Super8 or 16mm film on DVD. We digitize and author a DVD-R that is compatible with the majority of DVD players presently on the market. Our MPEG streams for DVD are 6000kbs average, which is higher than normal DVD quality…that’s why we fit up to 1 hour and 30 minutes on a DVD. We now offer full menu systems similar to DVD’s you buy at the store, for no additional charge! These menus include Chapter Marks along with a stunning theme to complete your transfer. Editing from a DVD copy isn’t recommended as the film has been compressed when built for DVD meaning that if you decide to rip your film from the DVD to edit, the quality is already much lower than the transfer we did for you. If you’ve edited your film and decide to output it to DVD again, then it will go through the compressions again lowering the quality even more.

Transfer to AVI
Transferring your film to AVI files is the recommended method if you’d like to edit your films yourself. How this works is we’ll transfer your film, do the standard edits of cutting out blank spots etc, then doing work on color correction and balance. We’ll then export to films uncompressed and burn them onto DVD in the chosen format. AVI files are for Windows based computers. We can burn 18 minutes of uncompressed film per DVD so it’s likely you’ll receive a number of disks that you’ll have to transfer the footage from and put the film back together yourself. If your order totals over 4 hours of footage then you’ll need to supply a hard drive for us to transfer the uncompressed footage to.

Transfer to MiniDV Tape (standard def)
MontrealHomeMovies recommends customers to order an archive copy of their transfers on minidv tape. This highly versatile, high quality, long-lasting format allows you to easily edit your films at a later date, and the nature of the tape is very durable and far harder to damage than a DVD. While many customers order AVI files for editing, you will find a miniDV tape a better permanent storage format. If you want to safely store this important film for generations to come, then this is your best option by far. After capturing the film to our digital source, we can then output the film to a MiniDV tape for easy editing on your own PC or Mac…..or even use the MiniDV as a suitable storage medium. When we transfer to DV each film is separated by Color Bars and tone so that you can easily recognize each individual film. As standard, we transfer up to 60 minutes of footage onto each tape.