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FAQ Pick 'em Up Productions? That's a funny name, how'd you come up with it? Our first project involved digitizing the Penn State Blue Band's film archives. A sign used to hang over their practice field reminding members to "pick 'em up" as they high stepped down the field. Our founders are Blue Band alums and the company name pays homage to an organization that not only kept us "in line" through college but also helped us get our start! Plus, we're suckers for alliteration. Why bother transfering my media to digital formats like DVD or CD? We all have cherished memories that will last us a lifetime. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for video footage, photographs, and audio recordings. Digital media is not susceptible to the quality loss and fragility of paper photographs and tape based media. Transferring your old media to digital formats will ensure your memories last for generations to come. I've seen products at my favorite big box retailer that let me capture my own home videos. Why not just do it myself? Video work is a highly technical and time consuming endevor. Most consumer grade capture devices compress your video to MPEG/2 as it is being captured to your computer. Each time video is compressed, quality is lost. This is done so that the captured video can be manipulated and stored on the average home PC. Working with uncompressed footage usually requires a high end computer. Editing your captured footage in MPEG/2 often results in loss of audio sync and imprecise editing. Most consumer editing software will happily recompress the already degraded video as you burn to DVD. The resulting DVD is often of poorer quality than the original footage!We employ broadcast quality hardware and software that captures and edits uncompressed footage. When we do compress, we use industry standard codecs that are individually tuned for each project to minimize quality loss. Let us apply our know-how to your mountain of tapes! How much video can you fit on one DVD? Generally speaking, we can fit 2 hours of video tape footage and 1 hour of reel footage on a single DVD. We use high quality capture and encoding settings to get the best possible transfer and minimize quality loss. Further compressing the footage to fit more on a single DVD would result in a much lower quality transfer. Dual layer DVDs may be available for an extra charge. Contact us for details. What payment methods do you accept? We prefer checks made out to Pick 'em Up Productions. We also accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover, and of course, cash. What shipping methods do you use? We ship all orders via USPS media mail. Media mail is by far the least expensive way to ship video and photographic material. However, shipping times can be slow and there is no tracking number. If you need faster delivery or a tracking number, we recommend UPS or FedEx. Keep in mind, you are responsible for all shipping charges regardless of the shipping method. |
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pick 'em up productions 2020