• 3 Tips on How to Film Great Home Movies

    Posted on by C Chow in Video Production | Comments Off on 3 Tips on How to Film Great Home Movies

    Summer is almost over! Footage from families are starting to pile up in everyone’s homes. As technology advances, it’s also easier to film anything at almost any moment. I mean, who wants to not film their children grow & share it? Check out some tips below on how to get the best possible footage from your hand held device, cell phone or DSLR! 1) Slow smooth shots: After transferring home movies for many years, the worst videos are when the camera is zooming in and out, panning and tilting everywhere with no sense of direction. It makes the audience feel very nauseous, and will loose their attention. When filming, keep your camera as steady as you can, if an action is taking place somewhere else off frame, make sure you pan over slowly, and try not to keep panning back and forth! 2) Getting audio: Its hard to grab good …

  • betamax conversion toronto

    How to Identify Your Video Format

    Posted on by C Chow in Recent News, Video Conversion | Comments Off on How to Identify Your Video Format

    There are many types of video formats that has come out in the past 50 years. I will explain the most popular formats during the past 50 years as we get many people bringing in tapes they can’t identify.   The most common one is the VHS tape. It came out around 1980s and is slowly phasing out today. Despite of this, we still see VHS tapes being sold at stores. The magnetic tape is half inch in width. Image from http://en.wikipedia.org   Betamax looks similar to BetaSP, but they are not. Betamax is an older type of tape, it came out during the same period as VHS tapes. There was a format war during this time as people were deciding on which format to choose from. Ultimately, VHS won out despite that Betamax had better picture quality. Image from http://www.atticlightstudios.com/   Hi8, regular 8 & digital 8 all look the same. …

  • SD vs HD

    Why Transferring Home Movies to HD is Not a Good Idea

    Posted on by C Chow in Recent News, Video Conversion | Comments Off on Why Transferring Home Movies to HD is Not a Good Idea

    Transferring from standard definition to high definition is not a good idea because your increasing the size of a video by blowing it up. This method is also known as up converting. A standard VHS, VHS-C, Hi8, Regular 8 video tape has a standard definition (SD) frame size of 720X480. High definition (HD)  frame sizes are typically 1920X1080. There are some other HD sizes as well, for example: 1280X720 or the older format 1440X720 (which is rare now a-days). 1920X1080 can also be written as 1080p and 1280X720 can be written as 720p. These numbers represent how many pixels are placed horizontally and vertically on a screen. As you can see from the numbers mentioned, SD is smaller than HD. So in order to make your footage HD, you have to increase the number of pixels on the SD format which is not available. However, if one were to do …

  • The Best Way to Find Out What to Transfer Your Videos Onto

    Posted on by C Chow in Recent News, Video Conversion | Comments Off on The Best Way to Find Out What to Transfer Your Videos Onto

    Are you confused on what to convert your family videos onto? There are a lot or video formats out there and it can get confusing. However, if you know exactly what you want the final output to be, you can nail it down to one format. Here is a simple breakdown of the most popular formats you can transfer to: 1) DVD Video – This format can be played on a DVD player, PC & MAC. You can extract the information and convert it to a file format for editing in the future as well, however it can be time consuming. A good software to extract this is MPEG Streamclip. 2) AVI – This format works well on a PC & for MAC’s, you’ll need the proper codec to read it. Transferring to this format does take a lot of space. Approximately 13GB for every hour (NTSC-DV). However, you are …