Turnaround times vary depending upon the size and complexity of your project, however the average turnaround time is typically seven to ten business days upon receipt of your movies. Heavy workflow or holidays may lengthen our turnaround time.

Absolutely! All original materials are returned to you after your order has been processed.

All services are completed right here in our Plymouth, Massachusetts studio and never leave the premises. Unlike our local competitors that transport your irreplaceable home movies to another location. Some even outsource their work overseas, increasing the risk of your movies getting lost or damaged.

Absolutely not. Some of our local competitors hide the fact that they charge an additional service fee for the "safe handling and storage of your order." These are completely bogus charges and should be included with your service. However if they factored this additional fee into their displayed prices then they would no longer be viewed as competitively priced. At Icehouse Pictures we believe in fair, honest pricing with no surprises. Additionally we include premium services like color correction at no additional charge.

For our local customers we can provide you with a dual 8 projector or VHS Player so you can view all your footage before committing to having them converted. For more information please visit our equipment rentals page.

Unfortunately we don't offer any discounts for large orders since the majority of orders we receive are typically large home movie collections. Therefore it would be impractical to offer a discount to all our customers.

Unfortunately we do not provide any custom editing for our film or video conversions. We can however provide a digital movie file which can easily be edited using your own editing software. There are many free movie editors for novices that are available for Linux, Mac and Windows and are very simple to use.

Technically speaking you can with some help from third party software conversion tools. However, video on DVD is compressed specifically for viewing and not for editing. Editing footage compressed onto a DVD results in a lower quality final product. Therefore it is best to use full quality uncompressed digital video files when editing. For customers who plan to edit their own videos we suggest having the raw video files transferred to either a USB flash drive or as a digital download. The uncompressed files can then be edited using your own video editing software.

The two formats we accept are silent 8mm and super 8 film, both formats measure 8mm wide. The sprocket holes in Regular 8mm film are larger and almost square, whereas the holes in super 8 are elongated. Film with a gold or copper colored magnetic strip on the underside of the film is sound film. Only 6% of all 8mm film is sound. The frame-by-frame film scanning process we use will not transfer any sound. To help you determine what type of film you have please take a look at our film format diagram below:

Measure the diameter (the total width) from edge to edge of the 8mm reel. The film gauge diagram will provide you with an approximate idea as to how much film you have on each reel.

3″ reel (50 feet) 4 minutes
4″ reel (100 feet) 8 minutes
5″ reel (200 feet) 16 minutes
6″ reel (300 feet) 24 minutes
7″ reel (400 feet) 30 minutes

A DVD can hold up to two hours of footage. Two hours is approximately 1,600 feet of film.