Tape or DVD transfer

Having taken the trouble to document valuable life moments with video camcorders, most are likely to have transferred their material to digital form as USB drives or DVD discs. If this is not your case, performing tape transfer is strongly encouraged before the video quality is diminished and the tape reel can still be spooled without snapping - if you still have any tapes, they are already on borrowed time. Occasionally though, unlabelled or otherwise non-descript tapes may be discovered that you are curious to view but the associated camcorder has long been consigned to the bin so you have no way of seeing what is on those tapes. Send them to us and we will advise as to the volume of material on each tape or if blank. Of course you will not be charged transfer fees if it is actually empty.

Transporting tapes

Although we prefer to receive tapes personally from local customers whenever possible (to ensure a chain of custody) a reliable courier collection can otherwise be arranged as we do for customers located further afield. Once received, items will be securely stored on-site and will never leave our side. An ex-TDK engineer is dedicated to the conversion task using appropriate, well-maintained equipment for the best results. Be assured that processed copies of your video are never preserved or used for marketing purposes. Unless you instruct otherwise, we will keep a copy of your material for a period of seven days after which it will be permanently deleted. Some other companies offering AI video enhancement services often use generic production software tools that send your video to online data brokers, often unwittingly. Tapes2HD only use open-source AI tools to ensure oversight on this matter and to preserve your copyright over your own material.

How long does it all take?

As a basic guideline, one hour of tape footage takes one hour to transfer to a digital format (MPEG-4) as it plays through from start to finish at a regular Play speed. It then takes a further fifteen minutes for each hour of footage to execute image cleaning, upscaling and AI-renovation before final rendering to USB or uploading to the Cloud (if that is your preference). Having multiple systems allows us to expedite jobs somewhat faster. If there are short non-contiguous clips of short video distributed over a number of tapes, then your job will naturally take longer. Specially-designed gift presentations usually take a week to prepare but this time will run in parallel with the tape/disc transfer. You'll be advised if there are any unforseen changes to the agreed timescale.

DVDs are already digitally-encoded and can usually complete on the same day.