The rapid advance of new digital audio and video recording formats in recent years has revolutionized our industry, leaving many production environments and clients with a wealth of historical sound and vision recordings, for which they no longer have the technology to view and deploy. Channel 6 Television offers a range of digital conversion and archival services to solve this problem.

Continued access to video and audio material recorded using legacy technologies is more than a question of having access to legacy video or analogue playback equipment. Such equipment must be maintained in working condition - often long after the manufacturer has ceased to stock spare parts. With today's limited service workshops where technicians who are trained to maintain older analogue and digital technologies, our company has continued to handle the in-house service and maintenance of a wide range of older equipment, covering almost all recording formats used in Denmark in the past 30 years. 

Our services range from the quick and simple conversion of a single audio or video recording to a digital format, to the handling of larger archival conversion tasks which may also require colour grading and digital restoration as well as aspect-ratio conversion or the removal of analogue blanking so that the end result fills the digital frame. Format conversion from certain NTSC formats is also possible.

For the professional archival client we can also offer a range of documentation services including the preparation of archival metadata to ensure that future users of the material will be able to identify each recording and have access to relevant information about the content and origin of the material. 
Transcription, translation and sub-titling of spoken-word recordings is also possible. 

This is a very specialized range of services, the solutions for which are developed in close cooperation with each client, following, where relevant, international archival methods and standards.

Regardless of the digital target format, it is our experience that the best digital conversions are achieved when working from the original recording (rather than an intermediate dub or digital conversion that was made from the original). For further information on this subject please see our Analogue facilities page.

Video conversion

Our standard approach for Standard Definition video material is to digitize using a very low compression ratio - typically in an Avid MXF container-format using a 25 or 50 Mbit video codec. Where required, aspect ratio conversion and de-blanking is accomplished during the digitization process. Playback from a VTR is accomplished using a high-quality digital time base corrector or digital frame store. When any further processing such as colour grading or audio sweetening has been completed, the material is usually encoded to suitable digital archival formats such as Uncompressed Quicktime (.mov), with an accompanying compressed proxy file (typically H264/MPEG4) for easy on-line viewing.

We offer conversion for the following PAL video formats -

• 3/4" U-Matic (low band)

• 3/4" U-matic (high-band)

• 3/4" U-Matic (high-band SP)

• VHS

• S-VHS

• Betamax

• Hi-8

• Video-8

• Betacam (also NTSC)

• Betacam SP (also NTSC)

• MII

• 1" C-format (up to 3 hour reels with 3 track audio if required)  (also NTSC)

• Digital Betacam

• D2 (Composite digital)

• D3 (Composite digital)

• Digital-S 4:2:2

• CVR (Component video disk)

• DVD (MPEG-2 VOB)

• DV

• DVCAM

• DVC Pro

• HDCAM (not SR)

Audio conversion

For audio conversion projects we must first identify the specific recording format, with a choice of mono full track, or half- or quarter-track mono or stereo playback equipment for reel-to-reel formats. A short playback test is undertaken to ascertain whether the magnetic tape medium is damaged. 

Many reel-to-reel magnetic tapes have suffered from years of containment under varying temperature and humidity conditions, which results in the magnetic medium "peeling-off" the plastic tape base during playback - smothering the playback heads with magnetic residue and degrading the playback quality. In extreme cases we may recommend "baking" the original tapes in a special oven to reconsolidate the bond between the magnetic coating and the plastic substrate, but this is a specialized service which must be handled out of house by laboratories who specialize in such work. A vulnerable audio recording may often be retrieved by digitization of shorter sequences, with periodic cleaning of the playback heads to ensure playback quality.

Audio digitization is accomplished typically at 48 KHz 16-bit stereo using Adobe Audition, with 48KHz, 44.1KHz (CD) and MP3 as release formats. Unless required by the customer, we do not employ any equalization, signal processing or compression. Some equalization may be necessary when restoring material from magnetic tape which has suffered storage damage.

We offer conversion from the following audio formats -

• 1/4" reel-to-reel Mono full track

• 1/4" reel-to-reel Stereo/2T half track

• 1/4" reel-to-reel Stereo/2T quarter track

• 1/2" reel-to-reel 8 track

• 2" reel-to-reel 24 track

• Compact cassette

• Mini disc

• DAT

• Digital file formats - wave or MP3

• Gramophone records (33/45/78 rpm) (with RIAA correction)

The cost of digital conversion will depend on the quantity of material; the specific media involved; the amount of processing and other services required and the delivery format. 

Please contact us for a specific quotation for your digital conversion assignment.