The Clock is Ticking: Why You Should Convert Your VHS Tapes to Digital Now We all have them—the dusty shoebox in the top of the wardrobe or the plastic tub in the garage filled with VHS tapes. They contain the only footage of your wedding, your child’s first steps, or the last time you heard […]

If you’ve found a box of old tapes, you might notice that some look a little “off.” They’re smaller than a standard VHS, but they aren’t small enough to be a camcorder tape. In most cases, you’ve found a Betamax—the original rival to the VHS. While they look similar to the untrained eye, these two […]

The Original Pioneer Long before the VHS became a household name, there was Betamax. Released by Sony in 1975, Betamax was the world’s first truly successful home video recording system. For the first time in history, families didn’t have to plan their lives around a TV schedule—they could “Time Shift” and record their favorite shows […]

This rewrite focuses on the transition from analog to digital. Since MiniDV is already a digital format, the value you provide isn’t just “digitizing” it, but “extracting” the data perfectly without loss, and ensuring the mechanical tapes are handled by professional hardware before they fail. The Digital Dawn: A History of MiniDV Small Tape, Big […]

The Millennium Hybrid In 1999, as the world braced for the digital millennium, Sony released the final and most sophisticated evolution of the 8mm family: Digital8. While other digital formats like MiniDV required entirely new, smaller tapes, Digital8 was a genius engineering feat. It allowed users to record a high-quality digital signal onto the exact […]

Smaller, Longer, Better In the mid-1980s, the home video world was dominated by the bulky VHS tape. But in 1985, Sony changed the game by launching the Video8 format. Unlike the massive shoulder-mounted cameras of the early 80s, the 8mm format allowed for the “Handycam”—a device that could fit in the palm of your hand. […]

Making the VHS “Compact” By the early 1980s, the VHS had won the format war, but it had one major problem: the cameras were massive. To record a family BBQ, you practically needed a tripod and a shoulder brace. In 1982, JVC solved this by launching the VHS-C (VHS-Compact). It used the exact same magnetic […]

The VHS tape was a revolutionary invention that changed the way people watched movies and TV shows. It was the dominant home video format during the 1980s and early 1990s, before being replaced by DVDs and later streaming services. But how did the VHS tape come to be, and what impact did it have on […]

High-Definition 8mm Archival Scanning We don’t believe in “standard” transfers. To get the best out of your 8mm and Super 8 film, we’ve custom-engineered our workflow to prioritize raw detail and color accuracy. 1. The Modified Hardware Edge We use a Kodak Reelz frame-by-frame scanner that has been internally modified with a Custom BIOS. 2. […]

YMy Tape is Broken: Can You Fix It? It’s a heart-sinking moment: you finally decide to watch an old family video, but the VCR makes a horrible grinding noise, and when you pull the tape out, it’s snapped, tangled, or crinkled. The short answer is: Yes, we can almost always fix it. At Digital Media […]