Latin America. eFootage, a distribution company for historical or contemporary tape footage, uses two Cintel scanners, six Teranex 2D processors and DaVinci Resolve Studio as part of its work dynamics of digitizing, archiving and maintaining tapes.
Spanning a period of more than 100 years of film history, eFootage features informational material, especially from 1960 to the present, an extensive and eclectic collection of silent films, both in black and white and in colour, as well as recorded material about lifestyles, travel around the world and 35 mm tapes with a blue background. The images are available for licensing and download on the company's website: www.eFootage.com/.
"Over the years, we have acquired a wide variety of existing film libraries, in addition to having obtained licenses for others. Overall, we like to meet with content owners to discuss how we can help them amortize their material. We also provide search and organization services for recordings, and related ones for specific projects, as well as some production work," explained Paul Lisy.
On the other hand, he added: "We try to offer and deliver films with the highest possible quality, which are usually unique and often rare. Currently, we are in the middle of a multi-year project of digitization and online presentation of our repository, usually in HD and 4K definition. Much of this will be available to the public. Right now, we've been processing about two thousand hours of content, but we still have a lot more."
Before purchasing the Cintel scanner, digitizing most of the eFootage material was not economically viable. "Cintel scanners give us the ability to control the quality of scanning while minimizing expenses and delivery times," said Greg McLemore. "We were looking for other solutions, but they were really expensive, so Cintel was the least expensive and highest quality option."
The company eFootage relies on two Cintel scanners, along with windows for 35 mm and 16 mm tapes and a KeyKode audio and number reader, to digitize its extensive archive. "Before, we had other equipment to process the 16 mm tapes, although we replaced them with Cintel, since this allows us to present the content in formats with higher resolution. Our experience with the first Cintel scanner was superb, so adding another one was evident. In addition, this has helped us streamline the process to deliver our collection to the public faster," said Lisy.
eFootage has an exceptional amount of analog films and videotapes in different formats. In the case of tapes, the company digitizes both 16 mm and 35 mm (positive and negative) with Cintel scanners and transfers the material through the Thunderbolt port to Mac computers, which ingest the content using DaVinci Resolve Studio.
Teranex 2D processors are used as part of the archive in the videotape library. Base time checkers pass recorded footage via the Teranex 2D drive and Thunderbolt port to computer equipment, where files are recorded in high quality using Blackmagic Design's Media Express program. Finally, such files are transferred to large capacity external disks for the purpose of processing them and being able to offer them on the website.
"We keep all the original tapes for storage and also for when customers ask to see them again. In addition, some of our material, which had been scanned a few years ago, can be re-digitized with a higher resolution and with the quality of Cintel.
Currently, we offer services to update content that is not yet on the website in a larger format. This involves reprocessing them with the scanner or converting them from SD to HD using the Teranex 2D processor," McLemore said.
