Fox News Features MemoryWise's Effort to Help Save Flood-Damaged Photos: September was a tumultuous time in the city of Boulder. Floods devastated areas of Colorado, destroying structures, damaging or destroying many priceless and irreplaceable...
SD can never reproduce the full image detail on a film frame because SD video has a fixed pixel pattern with a density of 720x480 pixels, and the pixels that make up the image are always in the same place from one video frame to the next. But film has a random grain pattern, and the image created by the grains of crystals is in a totally different place from one film frame to the next. These random grains each carry a bit of the detail that make up the complete picture and, at running speed, the random grains overlap each other on the retina of your eye to significantly increase the amount of apparent detail. This is called “accumulative resolution”. If you transfer your 8mm home movies to SD video, even with the very best SD camera, your detail will be limited by the coarse, fixed pixel pattern inherent in SD video. Of course, HD and 2K have a fixed pixel pattern, too, but the number of pixels are so great and the pattern is so insignificant, that HD and 2K are like a fine silk stocking compared to the burlap weave of SD.
Our high definition (HD) film capture offers resolution gains of 667% over a standard definition (SD) capture (more than 6 times better). Our HD capture is not a mere up-conversion from an SD source. Our HD film capture equipment uses a high definition image sensor to take in 5 times the square pixels per frame of film that our SD machine is not capable of picking up. For 8mm films the HD image sensor generates greater than 4000 pixels per inch. Thus, the accumulative resolution effect found in film can be more readily seen in an HD transfer than in an SD transfer.
