As anyone who has used videotape in any format can tell you...
Video recorders eat tapes!
Even brand new tapes occasionally get chewed up or snapped entirely and unfortunately machines have no respect over how vital/irreplaceable your footage is.
Most tapes that people have are anything but new, and the older the cassette, generally the more fragile the tape itself and the more brittle the plastic of the casing. So even if you have looked after your tapes exceptionally well, and your player is in top condition, every time you play a tape there's a chance it could get damaged. It's actually not that common, and if you never play the tapes they are no use to anyone anyway, but the reality is that it does happen.
Converting your tapes to digital files means that you don't have to worry about that any more. I only have to get them to play once, then you can watch them as many times as you like, forever.
If you have tapes that are already damaged, I'll do my best to capture whatever I can from them; they can usually be respliced to rescue the vast majority of the footage. So far I've only had one tape that was completely unrepairable.
Mould
Depending on what type of tape(s) you have and how they were stored, there's a chance of mould developing. This normally shows up as a white powdery substance on the tape (see the picture below) and can cause everything from the odd dropout, to the tape being completely unplayable. It's more of a problem on Video8 tapes due to the tape formulation and how thin the tape is, but any tape can suffer from it.
If your tape has obvious signs of mould, there are specialist services out there than might be able to remove it or at least reduce the effects of it; I'll happily go through your options before I start. Otherwise I will do my level best to recover as much of your footage as possible, but if your tape has mould, there's an extermely high chance that you'll lose a substantial amount of footage. Sorry - that's the unfortunate reality of the situation. Instead of just snapping the tape which is fairly easy to resplice, mould tends to stick the tape together at one side and results in the tape shredding along its length - like when you don't catch the end of sellotape correctly - and any section of tape shredded like this is completely irrecoverable.
