MontrealHomeMovies

Choosing your output

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

DVD:

Transfer to DVD
DVD’s are the most popular choice of output as this lets you simply go home and watch your films. The disks should play is DVD players and Computers with DVD drives so you shouldn’t struggle to watch your films.

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. Click here to see a video for further advice regarding hard drives.

Transfer to MiniDV Tape (standard def)
MontrealHomeMovies recommend customers to order an archive copy of their transfers on mini dv 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.

As standard, we transfer up to 60 minutes of footage onto each tape.