Frequently Asked Questions

We work primarily on home videos recorded on VHS tapes. We will not work on pornography, copyrighted material, or anything illegal.  Don't be stupid.

Most projects take 1 to 2 weeks, but that can vary depending on:

• How many items are in your project
• How many other projects we have in the queue at that time

We communicate with you every step of the way so you have a realistic timeline, and you are able to view your videos as they're completed so you don't have to wait till the end to see how things are turning out.

We’re cheaper! There are many fine services that offer all sorts of creative pricing schemes, but when you boil it down to cost per tape you find that most cost much more than us. Our mission is to be a focused, simple and affordable alternative to these other companies so you can preserve and share your videos without breaking the bank.

A standard VHS tape only has 240 lines of horizontal resolution.  Additionally, tapes degrade over time.  So the quality of the output depends heavily on the condition of your tapes.

That said, we use state-of-the-art hardware and software to digitally convert your video.  Our process produces files at 720 x 480 resolution and we take great care to extract the best quality possible from the source material.

Your files are made available to you in the "My Projects" section of this website.  We keep them there for 1 year after project completion.  In that time, you need to download the files to your computer.

We strongly encourage you to make sure you use a back-up service to protect and preserve your files.  Digitizing your videos protects them from tape degredation.  Now you need to protect them from potential hard drive loss.

While there is variation, a typical hour of footage results in about a 1 GB file. So a project with 10 tapes with an average of 2 hours of footage per tape would require about 20 gigabytes of storage.

Absolutely. You are welcome to provide a drive/card if you have one, or we can purchase one and add it to your invoice at cost. We recommend waiting until the conversion process is complete to determine what size drive you would need.

You should NOT share your username and password with anyone. Instead, you have the ability to invite other people to have shared access to your project.  They'll receive an invitation with instructions for creating their own free account through which they can view and download the videos in your project.

This is not a media streaming website and is not designed to support multiple concurrent users streaming video content. The purpose of this site is for you to download your videos then do what you want with them from there (i.e. upload them to YouTube, Facebook, etc.)

While sure, we’d be happy to charge you an hourly fee for video editing, frankly there are plenty of free and easy ways of doing that on your own computer. Windows and Mac operating systems frequently come with video editors built in, and there are free versions available of some high-quality editors (looking at you, DaVinci Resolve).

Onsite backup is a bad idea for three reasons:

1. It doesn't protect you against a site-level event (e.g. fire).
2. You have to manage it yourself (schedule backups, monitor available storage space, etc.)
3. You need to provide your own equipment: backup PC, NAS, hard drives, etc.

You can do it cheeper and better by using a professional cloud-based backup service.  Install it on your computer, point it at the data you want backed up, and let it do its thing.  You don't have to lift a finger, and when your hard drive fails, you're safe.

I've used Carbonite, CrashPlan, iDrive and now Backblaze.  While they're all viable services, personally I've had the best experience with Backblaze.  Shameless referral: if you want to try it out, this link will give you and I a free month: https://secure.backblaze.com/r/04mo59