VHS

Let's face it - if you were around in the 80s, 90s and even the 2000s you probably had a VHS player.

VHS was the winner of the great "Betamax/VHS" war and people with too much time on their hands are still arguing over which was best and why the other format was rubbish. Honestly - it's been decades - I think we can move on now! 

Actually, apart from some early professional and very heavy camcorders, this wasn't a popular format for home movies. At least, most people didn't record their home movies straight onto a full-size VHS cassette: they usually copied their footage from their camcorder (of whatever format) onto a VHS tape because it made it far easier to watch it on the TV. 

So, unless you had one of those early full VHS camcorders, your wedding was filmed with one, or you were on Anglia News (or similar), any footage on full sized VHS is probably a second-generation copy. If you can find the original tapes that’s always preferable as you will end up with better quality footage…but if not, that’s absolutely fine. I'll do my best; just be prepared for less than ideal recordings, especially if the tape was set to LP mode (long play).  

Important note:

Even if the tape is labelled with "Home Movies" etc, it's extremely common for these tapes to have been used to record from the TV, either before or after home movies have been copied to them. Unless you let me know otherwise, I'll therefore assume any TV programmes/films that follow your home footage aren't required. It makes the conversion process much quicker if I spot it at the time, and means you don't get digital files that contain footage you'll never watch and are far larger than necessary.

With unlabelled VHS tapes I'll check the first 10-15 minutes, then if it's blank or just contains TV programmes, I'll assume it has nothing else of value on it. However, if you clearly state that somewhere on a tape there's some specific footage (you were on the news; mum was in a film etc)  I'll capture everything just in case. This will be chargeable even if it turns out that actually there was nothing useful on there, as it's incredibly time consuming capturing long tapes just to "see if X is on there". 

Tape length in the UK can be anywhere from 30 minutes (E30) to over four hours (E240) - longer if you dropped the quality a bit and turned on LP mode. If you decide to give me a box full of 8 hour tapes I will silently weep - but I'll bite the bullet and convert them for the same price as any other tape. I reserve the right to privately judge you though! 😉