Hello.
My name is Ward Willats and I am a computer programmer, ham-radio operator, electronics hobbyist, and generally geeky guy.
Like many people in their 40s, I inherited a bunch of 8mm film from my folks, and I also had a lot of film I made in Super 8 as a teenager. Also like a lot of people, I wanted to make high-quality transfers of the film, but didn't want to pay an arm and a leg to have someone else do it.
For the last year or so I've been collecting high-end transfer equipment and have recently purchased a device that lets me scan individual frames of film into the computer for a flicker-free and evenly lit transfer. With this equipment, I intend to scan and convert my personal films into digital format. When this is done, I intend to offer this service to others through this web site.
My idea is this: I have no interest in the time consuming and $$$ process of editing other people's film, setting it to music, and burning DVDs, but I think, what I can do, is perform the tricky and obscure work of converting film to full-resolution digital files and making the results available for you to edit, burn onto DVDs, and so forth; hopefully at a cost that is more reasonable than what other charge but with the same or probably better quality.
I am writing this in October of 2005. I hope to begin initial transfers for friends and customers in January 2006. Please watch this site and feel free to e-mail me with any ideas, suggestions, comments or info.
Thanks for visiting,
-- Ward
P.S. When I was a teenager, Door Number Three was the name I gave my "production company" for my amateur epics. So it seemed right to call the new company that.
April 11 2006
I have been meaning to update this site for some time now. It took me longer than I expected to get together all of the equipment I needed to do this -- old splicing blocks, film cleaner, rewinds, software. Finally, in early February I began transfering film for my family, editing the work in Premiere and authoring DVDs with EncoreDVD.
The good news is the quality of the transfers is very high. Premiere is somewhat eccentric, but powerful, and after a month or so learning the keyboard interface, now lets me get my work done quickly. I am still looking for a good DVD authoring program. Encore is too much work to drive for the features it supports and is really too tied into Photoshop for my taste. I am currently starting to master my second big DVD of family movies and am going to try the trial version of some other program, probably "dvdIT."
The other great thing I've discovered is the very nice software out there to process video. Products like SteadyHand and MotionPerfect can do an amazing job of removing shakes and performing time correction. When you combine this with the filters in Premiere, you can also fix exposure, sharpen blurry material and do color correction.
The bad news is that, even not offering editing and DVD mastering as a service, I don't see how to make any money doing this. It takes me an hour to check the splices and clean 400 feet of film (about 30 minutes worth) and another 2 to 2.5 hours to do the transfer and conversion from 18 fps (film) to 30 fps (video). (The frame-accurate transfer equipment runs 1/3 normal speed and lets me scan 6-8 frames a second into the computer. So 30 minutes of film takes 1.5 hours to digitize.)
Anyway, the upshot is that it takes 3-4 hours of work to get a "raw" transfer to work with, and I was hoping to price this really low, like $0.10/foot. But the idea of working for ten bucks an hour on this doesn't seem too exciting. So I need to either figure out a way to go faster, charge more, or come up with a different business model. We'll see.
In the meantime, I will continue to do transfers and learn the craft. I must say my skills have improved tremendously since I began. I've now transferred and edited most of the our 1950s material -- about 28,000 feet -- and am getting better figuring out what and what not to do.
I keep meaning to post some video clips here so you can sample the results I am getting. I will try to put that up shortly. Some of the old Kodachrome is breathtaking. The problem is that transcoding for web delivery is a side-trip that is not part of my day-to-day transfering so I have to sit down and do it "special." That's why I haven't put anything here. But soon.