Since opening its doors two years ago, Soho Digital Film has been making innovations in the area of high resolution film scanning, recording and video to film conversion for the motion picture industry. Although it is a small shop operating out of the downtown Toronto basement of sister company Soho Post & Graphics, it is attracting international business.

Earlier in the year the shop handled a job improving the picture quality on a theatrical commercial out of Kuwait for TGIFridays restaurant which ran in the Middle East before the premiere of Titanic. Since then, the shop has been doing high resolution transfers for clients from as far away as Prague and Venezuela.

According to Russ Robertson vp of sales and marketing, e-mails are flowing in from Nepal, Singapore and Australia with questions about shooting on the new experimental (and not yet available) 24- frames-per-second, progressive scan, high-definition video cameras and finishing on film.

‘Features such as Hoop Dreams and When We Were Kings were transferred from video to film,’ says Robertson, but not by Soho. ‘The trend and the precedent has been set, and from what we understand, it is going to continue to grow. Film is great but for independent filmmakers, shooting on video cuts down on the cost.’

For vp and director of operations Brian Hunt the important thing at the moment are the new standards, something he stresses they must be ready for.

‘We got a job in from an experimental camera in the US and our system just said forget it,’ he says. ‘I have got to figure out why because it’s a new camera system that could become very predominant out in the field and it’s being rejected on any video to film program so I’m rewriting it to make it work.’

The shop houses the Oxberry 6400-20 EFX Scanner for film to digital scanning and the Solitaire Cine III Film recorder with an FLX head for digital to film.

The video to film program being used is the V2F+ designed by Hunt along with programmer Greg Blair. Although it has been used in different states for over a year Soho Digital Film will be formally launching it early in the new year.

Aside from transferring theatrical spots, not originally intended for the big screen, from video to film the shop has been working on theatrical trailers for Alliance Atlantis hockey series Power Play and one for the Toronto International Film Festival.