There are services out there geared to help the average person save their family memories. Often there are significant low prices for digitizing their old failing media. There are a few things to consider if one truly wishes to gain the best quality from their old at risk media.
Digital Quality: What are you truly getting back in the form of quality after that service has performed your digitization.
As an example: Compare Legacy Box. Your films are digitized to the level of DVD quality with no sound and no color correction as well as no editing out of dead scenes such as lens cap left on or footage of the camera pointing to the ground. Many times from old footage such as film, the exposures can be extreme from washed out almost too white and bright to super dark with hardly any light allowing for one to determine what the scene actually is.
Digital Video comes in many flavors and quality levels. The two most important levels of quality to pay attention to, are Resolution and then CODEC which stands for Compression-De-Compression. Each of these two can have a serious effect on what you get back after paying for the service.
Resolution means how crisp and how large of a screen your digitized media will look good on. The old TV’s of yesteryear with their bulky size and curved heavy glass screens only offered a resolution of 480 lines used to create the picture. If you have ever stood next to one of those old TVs, you could actually count the lines from top to bottom. This is the maximum resolution you receive back from companies like Legacy Box.
Todays TVs are far superior to those old dinosaurs of yesteryear. The cheapest TV today offers 1080 lines compared to that old forgotten standard but using a service like Legacy Box, the only thing you will get back is that old dinosaur resolution which looks horrible on modern day TVs.
The next thing you might want to pay close attention to is the CODEC used to create your digital video from your old media. Again CODEC stands for Compression-De-Compression. Simple old MP4 H264 has so many different settings that one might wish they were a professional with years of experience to make sure their MP4 was created with at least the best possible quality available. All too often it is not. instead it is done at an average quality setting that may look fair but not pristine. We ensure that when you do want an MP4 version of your preserved media that it is the best it can be.
Another problem comes when you might have a desire to collect only the best scenes from your videos to make a best of edited video. Anyone who is well versed in video editing knows that when you use MP4 video as the source to edit your videos down to a better one… GUARANTEED! the resulting edited video will lose quality because this kind of CODEC degrades each time it is copied. Similar to using a copy machine to make document copies. The more times it is copied, the worse it looks. With todays TV standards, to use an old dinosaur 480 MP4 video to make another version is simply insanity if you desire to maintain any quality from the resulting edited copy.
Is there an answer to achieving great preserved digital versions from your old media and avoid quality degradation?
MOST CERTAINLY!
Our digitization process allows you to have High Definition for your films and even 4K resolution which is a total resolution of 4096 X 2160 in quality compared to the forgotten horrible standard of 640 X 480. When it comes to digitizing your old video tapes, you may not ever get a better resolution out of those as that is locked in from that standard unlike film, but they will come back to you without that terrible jagged edge look which comes from that old standard and they called it INTERLACING. Interlacing look terrible on newer TVs so we make sure you get an updated digital version that looks so much better on modern TVs.
As for the CODEC: Not only will you get a super high quality MP4 H264 or even the better 265 quality digital version back but you can also have the MASTER Grade original HQX file which can be edited over and over and over again without losing any quality. This makes creating a Best Of Video from your footage a no brainer in pristine quality results.
We can take your preservation even one step further by color correcting all imagery and enhancing the audio to twice the quality as well as putting a version onto a special High Resolution Archive medium that is rated to last up to 1000 years without any data loss. That is something no flash drive, hard drive, cloud can even come close to promising.
With other services, “What You See Is Not What You Get!” You chance getting back a quality less than what can indeed be achieved. What you hear may not be what is possible either. Our sophisticated AI Enhancing can greatly improve any audio.
Give us a call if you would like to know more about how much better your preservations can be.
