There are many ways of transferring film to video. The most popular method is to project the video onto a screen and then shoot the projection with a video camera. This can be on a large screen or a small mirrored transfer unit. This method has two major problems with it. First, the color of the film is diluted but even more importantly, the resulting video will be very "jumpy". This is because there is a difference in film and video speeds. Film is shown at 24 frames per second and video is shown at 30 frames per second.

The better way to do the transfer is with a direct transfer unit, also called an Elmo Transfer Unit. At Dream Street Productions, we only use Elmo Transfer Units which means that the speed difference is smoothly handled by automatic frame replication and the color intensity is maintained by the use of a direct projection of the film image into a minature video camera.

Before you bring your film to our studio, you should first be sure that it is a film format that we support. Below is a graphic that shows the three formats that we transfer to video.