If not upgraded, computers act sluggish, wardrobes look foolish, and 4 year olds never turn 5. Upgrade your moving memories with today's Groupon: for $40, you get $100 worth of digital film and video transferring at Digital Transfer Systems in Northbrook.
The tech wizards at Digital Transfer Systems extract memories from old media and inject them into digital formats for clients such as the U.S. Army, BP, and Hallmark. For film transfers, laser-shrunken staff members dive into film rolls to delicately clean, scan, and repair super 8 and 16 mm splices ($0.25/ft.) before sprucing up images with brightness adjustment and minor color correction. After reformatting the apprehended images, digital formatters transfer each home movie onto a DVD, which can hold up to 1,200 feet of film. For video transfers, variable bit rate encoding transforms footage from MiniDV ($15), VHS ($20), or Beta ($30) form to DVD or Blu-ray ($80/disc) formats. DVD transfers include a single disc with up to two hours of video and chapters every five minutes.
Pixcel
With the advent of the digital age, calling movies “films” is becoming increasingly inaccurate, and Pixcel is at the forefront of this media shift. The digitization business started as a research project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign focused on bringing old media to the modern world. That was more than a decade and five Fast and the Furious sequels ago. Nowadays, Pixcel has established a name for itself outside the academic sphere, digitizing not only family memorabilia, but massive archives for the Joffrey Ballet, the Arizona Department of Transportation, and the United States Geological Society. They transform analog formats—such as tape, film and photos—into digital HD files, which they can store on everything from DVDs to external hard drives.