MontrealHomeMovies

SECAM (Séquentiel couleur avec mémoire, French for “Sequential Color with Memory”), is an analogue color television system first used in France. A team led by Henri de France working at Compagnie Française de Télévision invented SECAM. It is the first European color television standard. Work on SECAM began in 1956and the technology was ready by the end of the fifties, but this was too soon for a wide introduction. Initially, a version of SECAM for the French 819-line television standard was devised and tested, but not introduced. Following a pan-European agreement to introduce color TV only in 625 lines, France had to start the conversion by switching over to a 625-line television standard, which happened at the beginning of the 1960s with the introduction of a second network. SECAM was inaugurated in France on October 1, 1967, on la deuxième chaîne (the second channel), now called France 2. A group of four suited men—a presenter and 3 contributors to the system’s development were shown standing in a studio. Following a count from 10, the originally black and white image switched to color; the presenter then declared “Et voici la couleur!” (and here is color!). The adoption of SECAM in Eastern Europe has been attributed to Cold War political maneuvering: Western TV was popular in the East, authorities were well aware of this and adopted SECAM rather than the PAL encoding used in West Germany. This did not hinder mutual reception in black & white, because the underlying TV standards remained essentially the same in both parts of Germany. However, East Germans responded by buying PAL decoders for their SECAM sets. Yet many TV sets around the world still broadcast with SECAM.

At Montreal Home Movies, we can transfer any video in SECAM to DVD. We have cameras and decks that support all formats, which allows us to transfer the SECAM video to NTSC (the North American Standard) and onto DVD without losing quality. As many immigrants from Eastern Europe, Russia and France came to Canada and the United States, they brought along with them their old SECAM videos. We therefore get many requests for SECAM to DVD transfers. To learn how we ensure the highest quality SECAM to DVD transfers, please see our Remastering section. We guarantee your satisfaction with our product and that is why Montreal Home Movies is your number 1 option for SECAM to DVD transfers.

However, SECAM to DVD transfers is not all we can do with your video. We can also upload it to your hard drive in many formats such as .dv and.avi for those of you who like to do your own editing. We can also do the editing for you and input menus and graphics to your DVD. Please see our export section for all your options.