Public Domain Catalog

Lost and Rare

Video Companies -- Rare Masters for New Releases!

All titles in the Public Domain Catalog are available from Festival Films in the inexpensive DVD-R format.

However, Festival Films also sells higher quality formats like DVCam, BetaSP, BetaDigi and hard drive to video companies who author DVDs for commercial release. You need the highest quality image with the least compression to maximize the quality of your DVD releases. We have sold such masters to PC Treasures, Genius Entertainment, Mill Creek Entertainment and Alpha Video, among others, as well as overseas and to movie/TV productions. We use professional video labs for this service, ones who sometimes work from 1" video masters transferred from film many years ago. These labs have their own libraries with a number of rare titles that have never been issued on DVD.

Three Steps North Poster

We constantly seek rare films ourselves that are not widely available and transfer from 16mm film format to video master. An example from June, 2010, is the 1952 Lloyd Bridges film Three Steps North that will be released by Alpha Video in the fall.

Please call or write me at FesFilms@aol.com for a price quote on higher format masters for DVD authoring. Public domain means no royalties and no cost beyond the initial purchase. You may then broadcast the film, sell it on DVD, put it on the internet for downloading or simply watch and enjoy it like millions of fans out there.

All users of public domain films should become familiar with the concept by perusing this Copyright Discussion. Briefly, films fall into the public domain if they are released without any © notice in the credits, if they are never registered with the Library of Congress, or if they were not renewed after 28 years as required for films and TV shows made before 1964. Oh, yes, any film from any country that was made BEFORE 1923 is in the public domain. There are other nuances so do study up!

Ron Hall
President, Festival Films
Phone or Fax: 952-470-2172
Email: fesfilms@aol.com