Your memories, made shareable.

Digitizing your videotapes lets you save your precious history in a digital format that does not degrade over time and can be copied as many times as you want without diminishing quality. Your VCR and camcorder tapes get turned into digital files and placed on a USB drive that you can plug into a computer, video game console, or smart TV.

Drop me an email, arrange to drop off your tapes in London, Ontario, and I’ll turn them into beautiful digital video you’ll be excited to share. Prices are just below the video.

Basic price as of June 21, 2022: 

  • $50 per tape includes up to two hours per tape. Additional capture hours are $20 each

  • $30 per disc transferred — DVD, Mini-DVD, DVD-R, Camera DVD etc.

Includes: 

  • Lossless capture:

    • Capture is through the best VCR that will play the material

    • Signal goes through an external Time Base Corrector, which can make some previously unviewable tapes stable enough for preservation

    • The signal is captured to a file format that keeps all the data, which lets us apply filtering before final compression at delivery time

  • Trimming and deinterlacing to web-ready MP4 (h.264 with AAC audio)

  • Delivery by USB Stick. Or, if you prefer, Internet download. DVD-R is also available, or provide your own portable drive

Extras:

  • The signal coming straight out of the VCR looks exactly as you remembered, but most tapes can look better than the original with some filtering. Restoration treatment can be added for $20 per hour:

    • $20 per program hour for restoration

      • Includes, as appropriate:

      • Noise removal: Reduces speckles, snow, banding, some color distortion

      • Sharpening: Reveal a level of detail you’ve never seen in your original videos

      • Video levels: Correct video levels for a clearer, brighter picture. Remember how every copy of a tape would turn out darker than the generation before? I fix that.

      • Cropping: Removes a few pixels from the picture edges that you would not have seen on an old-fashioned TV. They usually contain noise, which can be distracting and reduces compression efficiency

  • If you have more than ten tapes to transfer, let’s talk about a volume discount

What to do next:

Yes, we also digitize: Cassette tapes, 1/4” reel-to-reel, and most international VHS formats, and disc formats such as CD, DVD and camera-sized recordable DVDs.