TKone Shows 'It's Experience That Counts'

A specialist film and archive restoration company has recently relocated to an ideal building in the heart of London's Covent Garden.
TKone Ltd's new headquarters houses comprehensive Telecine transfer facilities from 35mm, 16mm and 8mm film to all major video formats. New encoding and editing stations provide high quality edit-ready files and web-friendly browse files, for instant desktop viewing by clients.
David Yeo of TKone explained: "The Film2Files service is proving popular with clients based outside London, who need to quickly verify that the archive images are present & correct."
The new premises boast an industrial size loading bay with off street parking, allowing safe and secure movement of client's precious film cargo.
The new home of TKone got off to a successful start with the transfer and restoration of the landmark television series, The World at War. This iconic 26 part series was originally produced by Thames television for transmission in 1974. It has now been re-mastered by TKone to full HD, for a high profile Blu-Ray DVD release and is HD compliant for future HD transmissions.
TKone's Managing Director Alf Penn, who once worked at Thames TV as an archive film researcher commented: "This meant I had real working knowledge of the quality and condition of the original film materials. We have shown the client that their vault of back catalogue titles is a major asset."
A growing part of the TKone business is encoding for established archives. TKone has recently completed a mass digitisation project for Cambridge University. Their acclaimed Korean archive collection is now available for on-demand desktop viewing allowing academics and students to browse by film and subject title.
"Other collections are showing real interest in this as a specific service", said Alf Penn, "This enables long held special interest archives to be far more accessible and increases opportunities to monetise potentially valuable assets."
This initiative now opens up opportunities working directly with overseas archives, allowing high-end restoration in London but with timely verification and sign off in the country of origin.
The other area showing strong potential is the stabilisation of legacy video formats. TKone now has a dedicated legacy transfer bay with fully maintained machines. "Clients are realistic that their analogue tape archives also need attention, the importance is that our restoration staff can tackle deteriorating tape libraries as well as film material", confirmed Yeo.
The area of High Resolution Film Scanning is also under serious investigation by TKone, Yeo added: "We are collaborating and evaluating the generation of archive scanners and are working very closely with key manufacturer's, bench testing development machines and putting this emerging technology through its paces."
Alf Penn & David Yeo can be contacted on: Tel: +44 (0) 207 240 7040.
(BMcN/GK)