How a tape moves through the bench

Six steps, usually eight to twelve working days. Nothing here is automated, which is why we cannot take on a hundred tapes at once.

1. Intake

Every item is labelled, photographed and logged with whatever you remember about it. Sticky shells, snapped leader and mould get flagged now, not halfway through.

2. Conditioning

Tapes that squeal or shed get dry-cleaned on a spare transport. Genuinely sticky binder goes into a low-humidity cabinet for two days. We do not bake domestic VHS; it is almost never the real problem.

3. Playback

We pick the deck that tracks the tape best, not the newest one. Four transports stay in rotation: a Panasonic NV-HS1000, an AG-7350, a Sony EVO-9650 for Hi8, and a DSR-11 for DV.

4. Capture

Composite and Y/C go through a For.A time-base corrector into a 10-bit card. DV is copied over FireWire without re-encoding. One pass per tape, watched in real time, so dropouts land in the log with a timecode.

5. Verification

The master is written as FFV1 in Matroska, framemd5 is generated, and the file is read back and compared before the tape leaves the bench.

6. Collection

You take away your disk, your originals and a printed log. Our copy of the files is deleted within fourteen days, and the intake photographs go with it.

What we will refuse

Commercial pre-recorded cassettes with intact copy protection, anything under active legal dispute, and tapes whose owner cannot be established. We would rather lose the job.

Turnaround and the honest version

A single two-hour VHS is quick. Forty tapes from a family archive is a month, and about one in fifteen will have a section nothing can recover. We tell you which section before invoicing, not after.