VHS Tapes, Digitized in Colwood
The black cassette that sat in the cabinet under the television. Birthdays, weddings, the school concert, the summer at the lake. I play them on decks I keep maintained for the job and turn them into files your family can actually watch, and your tapes never leave my Colwood workshop to do it.
The machines are the deadline
The last new VCR was built in 2016. Tape outlives the players, and every year there are fewer working decks to read it on.
Damp is hard on tape
A cassette stored in an Island garage or basement can grow mould along the tape pack, and a single play in an unclean machine spreads it.
One copy, no negative
A home recording was never duplicated. Unlike a photograph there is no negative behind it, so the cassette in your hand is the whole of it.
Nobody Has Made a VCR Since 2016
Funai built the world's last new VCR in July 2016. Everything still playing VHS today is a machine that was made decades ago, and the good ones are getting harder to find and harder to keep running every year. That is the real deadline on a VHS collection, and it has nothing to do with the tape.
I keep several decks running for exactly this reason. A tape that a cheap machine chews or refuses to track will often play cleanly on a deck that has been looked after, and the difference shows up in the picture straight away.
VHS is one part of what I do with videotape. If your box has other formats mixed in, the videotape page covers the lot.
What I Look At Before I Play Anything
Standard VHS
The tape most people have. A cassette recorded at standard speed holds about two hours, but the same shell recorded at the slowest speed can hold six, and the picture pays for it. I check the speed on every tape rather than assuming, because a six-hour tape run at the wrong setting comes out unwatchable.
Store recordings and home recordings
If a tape is a shop-bought film, another copy exists and digitizing it rarely earns its cost. The ones that matter are the home recordings, the ones with handwriting on the label or no label at all. If you are not sure which is which, bring the box and I will sort it with you before you pay for anything.
Tapes that have been in storage
Vancouver Island damp is hard on tape. A cassette out of a garage, a shed, or a basement can carry mould on the edge of the pack, and playing that in a machine spreads it and grinds it into the heads. Tapes that need it go through a cleaning pass first. That protects the tape as much as the deck, and it often recovers footage that would otherwise be a mess of dropouts.
How It Works
Drop-Off in Colwood
Use my online form to book a private drop-off time. This ensures I can review your items with you personally when you arrive.
Approve Estimate
Once I have your project, I don't just process it. I inspect the condition of every tape and page. If I find something that needs special attention, I’ll call you.
Enjoy and Share
You'll get a private link to everything, and a USB drive to keep if you want one. You can finally watch your memories on your phone, tablet, or TV.
How a VHS Transfer Actually Works Here
A tape gets inspected before it goes anywhere near a deck. I am looking for mould, for a slack or crooked tape pack, for a cracked shell, and for the sticky feel that says the binder is breaking down. Anything that needs cleaning gets cleaned first.
Playback runs through a time-base corrector. A VHS signal wobbles, and capture hardware fed a wobbling signal produces a file that tears and shifts. The corrector steadies it before it is ever digitized, which is the single biggest difference between a careful transfer and a cheap one.
What comes back to you is a file that plays on a phone, a computer, or a television, and your original cassettes, which I return exactly as they arrived.
Questions People Ask
How long does a VHS tape take to digitize?
The transfer itself runs in real time, so a two-hour tape takes two hours of machine time. What decides your turnaround is how many tapes are in the batch and what else is on the bench, not the tape itself. I will give you an honest date when I look at the collection, and I will tell you if something is going to run long.
My tape squeals or the picture jumps. Is it finished?
Usually not. A squeal is friction, and it often means the tape needs cleaning and conditioning rather than that the recording is gone. A jumping picture is frequently a tracking problem that a better deck simply does not have. Please do not keep playing it to find out, because that is the one thing that can turn a recoverable tape into a lost one. Bring it in and let me look first.
Can you digitize a shop-bought film on VHS?
I can, but I will usually tell you not to bother. A commercial release exists in thousands of copies and is almost always available somewhere else for less than the transfer costs. The tapes worth doing are the ones nobody else has, which is the home recordings.
What do I get back at the end?
Digital files, and every one of your original tapes. The files play on a phone, a computer, or a television with no special software. If you would rather have them on a stick or a drive I keep those on the shelf, and you can also just bring your own.
What Clients Say
“We treated those old VHS tapes like gold and Dave's family treated them the same way. Twenty years later, watching our kids' first steps again brought tears to everyone's eyes – even the teenagers put down their phones.”
“I'm too old to trust the mail with my most precious memories. Finding Dave locally was a blessing. Those home movies look better now than they did coming out of our old camcorder.”
One price a tape, whatever is on it.
Any videotape is $39 each, and $33.50 each once you reach 10. One price, whatever the format, up to two and a half hours a tape. Bring the collection to my Colwood workshop and I will look through it with you and give you a written figure before I start. Looking is always free.
Bring the box. I will tell you what is on it.
You do not need to know what is on the tapes, or how many there are, or what format they are. Book a drop-off in Colwood and we will go through them together.