We transfer home cine film and video tape to files you can actually open. Two of us, one room in Hope Mill, since 2017. Everything is done here — nothing gets posted to a lab elsewhere and nothing goes abroad.
Most of what comes through the door is a shoebox found while clearing a house. Sometimes the person who shot it is still around to watch it. That's the good week.
Open
Tue–Fri 10–5
Sat 10–2
Turnaround
2–3 weeks film
1 week tape
Where
Hope Mill, Pollard Street, M4
Phone
| Format | Notes |
|---|---|
| Standard 8, Super 8, 16mm | Silent and magnetic sound. Frame-by-frame scan, not a screen re-film |
| VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS | Including tapes recorded in long play |
| Video8, Hi8, Digital8 | The format that fails most often. Bring them sooner rather than later |
| MiniDV | Transferred over FireWire, so the file is the original data |
| 35mm slides and negatives | Batches of 50 and up |
| Betamax, U-matic | Yes, and more often than you'd think |
Standard 8, stored in a loft, warped at the edges but the emulsion was sound. The bride's granddaughter brought them in. Two of the reels turned out to be somebody else's holiday entirely, which happens more than people expect.
A batch of 16mm with the sharp smell that means the base is decomposing. We transferred six of eight. The other two had shrunk past what the gate will take. There's no trick that fixes this, and the only real answer is transferring film before it gets there.
Fourth Hi8 batch this month with dropouts through the middle. The tapes are now thirty-odd years old and the binder is failing. If you have Hi8 in a drawer, that's the format to deal with first.
More in the workshop notes.