Alive Studios convert Dragon Crusaders

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The video team at Alive Studios have jut carried out a conversion from the French language master video tape of this fantasy feature film, to a HD stream file provided on a hard-drive, ready for an international cable TV network to broadcast from.

Tech specs for us nerds…
Camera: Canon EOS 5D Mark II, Zeiss Compact Prime Lenses
Process: Digital Intermediate (2K) (master format) / ProRes 422 (source format)

Karishma 4 now available

As a customer, you will benefit from the incredible Karishma Account – free to everyone.

This revolutionary account is one of the main reasons people opt to have their movies transfered with Alive Studios. It’s the world’s only software build exclusively to manage, view and share your personal movies online.

Other film to DVD companies use generic upload sites like You Tube or Google Drive.
To protect our clients and give them to best user experience possible, we have put 6 years of development time, and hundreds of thousands of pounds into developing Karishma – so don’t settle for an unsecure, generic upload of your precious memories – insist on the best by using your Karishma account – exclusively available from Alive Studios. We’re pleased to say that we’ve just finished upgrading every single customer to the brand new Karishma – version 4.

Some of the new features you can enjoy from today… 

  • FREE online preview – watch all your films online so you can tell us the running order.
  • No longer a limit on how much cine film is uploaded to your cloud account. Whether you send 15mins or 15 hours of film, EVEYTHING is uploaded to your cloud account – completely FREE!
  • Improved SHARE functions for sending email invitations to friends & family
  • Contribute a film to the Movie Vault to extend your online hosting for FREE

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17 Carnations

Alive Studios spent some time recently working with Andrew Morton on the images to be used in his latest book – 17 Carnations – a compelling account of the wartime world of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, which neither the government nor the royals of the day wanted you to read. Morton sourced private film archives from all over the world, and sought the help of Alive Studios to scan and restore the tiny film cells to produce some incredible photographs to be published throughout the pages of the book.

Check out a few of the pictures on this page – these were taken by using the ‘JPEG Image Sequence’ option when ordering 8mm cine film in HD to Blu-ray & DVD

The resulting JPEGS were then cleaned up by hand to produce some great freeze-frame from the never-before-seen films.

– Thank you to Andrew Morton for his mention of our studios in the acknowledgments page of the book.

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Karishma 4 Preview

Exciting times ahead for Alive Studios customers – Karishma 4 is getting near to completion!
The latest update to the Alive Studios online experience is absolutely huge. Click the screenshots to your right to checkout some of what you can expect…

New design
Gorgeous new graphics; we’ve had some of the top designers in the country working on Karishma to make the visual experience even more delicious than before.

Android devices now supported
As Mac developers, everything we make is compatible with Macs, iPads, iPhones etc. But this year we’ve re-designed to ensure 100% support of Android phones and tablets too.

FREE Upgrades for all Cine Film Orders
Instead of just 1 hour of movies uploaded for free, you now get your entire cine film order uploaded to your private gallery – completely free!
Not only do you get it ALL, but is now in 1080p instead of the normal 720.

FREE Upgrade to Online Preview 
We have always charged an additional £25/hr to see a preview of your order before we complete, giving you opportunity to re-arrange the order, give titles for each reel etc.
The response to this part of our service has been overwhelming, and many say its essential to get your films in chronological order. To make sure everyone has access to this feature of our company, we are now offering it completely FREE!

Improved Movie-Sharing Tools
Karishma 4 has improved share functionality, allowing you to access your online gallery and share any of your movies with family & friends all around the world in the click of a button. As well as share-on-Facebook and Twitter, we’ve improved the share-on-email tool so it’s now even easier to use. And of course, this incredible sharing tool is free to all Alive Studios customers.

The Vault
Something the staff here are really excited about is the upcoming launch of ‘The Vault’.
We see so many incredible movies, shot by normal people, of incredible places and events, which record the history of man throughout the last 100 years. It’s often sad to think these films never go beyond the customer’s living rooms… but now, thanks to The Vault, you will be able to share these brilliant movies with the entire world! Just select a clip from your Karishma gallery that you think is awesome, hit the ‘Share’ button and let the rest of the world share in this great snapshot of history. Add titles, descriptions dates and keywords, and add to categories like ‘Fashion’, ‘Cars’, Trains’ ‘Travel’ and many more…

Exciting times ahead… make sure you’re with Alive Studios to get all these great benefits!

Available to all Alive Studios customers May 2015

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1920s film for the BBC

Alive Studios have been chosen again this month to work with the BBC in scanning and restoring some incredible 16mm film shot in and around Scotland during the 1920s.
A collection of film reels were cleaned, scanned and restored by Alive’s archive team, and supplied as true HD ProRes 422 files on a hard-drive, ready for the BBC documentary team to edit into their upcoming project.

Alive Studios are responsible for the film archives of many TV and film makers, so if you’ve got important archives to transfer, give us a call…

1959 Cho Oyu expedition Historical 16mm film

Alive studios were chosen this month, to re-scan an historically important 16mm film for an upcoming BBC program.
Alive Studios customer, Tim Healey has been in possession of two reels of 16mm film since his late wife, Eileen, shot them in the late summer of 1959, whilst climbing in the Himalayas. The films captured the first all-female expedition to the summit of Cho Oyu, the world’s sixth-highest peak.

The incredible footage of dazzling snows and deep blue skies, long forgotten in Healey’s attic, was brought to Alive Studios, back in 2007. The film was cleaned and transferred to DVD. Shortly afterwards, the film was screened at the Kendal mountain festival in Cumbria, where it was hugely popular.

With the recent interest from the BBC about the famous Cho Oyu expedition, and their desire to interview Mr Healey, he asked Alive studios to scan the 16mm films once again, but this time utilizing the latest High Definition equipment.

The results have been astounding, and clearly show how much technology has come on in the last few years. A wealth more detail can now be seen, and the colours are more vibrant and rich.
When asked what they thought of the new scan carried out by Alive Studios, Siobhan Kilroy, specialist & general factual researcher for the BBC, said;

“The edit has gone very well thanks. We are most pleased with the high quality from your cine transfer; it is excellent and looks wonderful in our film.”

Anyone considering a re-transfer of cine film they’ve previously had done in SD should contact Alive Studios, as it’s crucial to get the most out of your films before they degrade.
The Cho Oyu program will air on BBC One later this year – we will keep you posted when we know the exact date and time.

Karishma 4: This is the reason we made this software.

When we created the first version of Karishma, we had a grand master plan of what we wanted to offer the world…

Like all great things, it takes time. And here we are 4 years later working on version 4, and we’ve finally got to where we initially envisaged we would be.

The next stage of Karishma will blow your mind. We are on this project night and day and we’re just so excited by what we are creating – but we can’t release details just yet! We want to keep this one close to or chests to keep the copy-cats at bay for a little longer. Let’s face it, the ‘competition’ are still trying to make their own version of Karishma 1 so we’re not too worried! but we don’t need to spoon feed them our ideas…

We will announce more details as we get nearer to completion.

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