Video tape transfer to DVD, by hand

We can digitize and transfer VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, Hi8, Digital 8, and Mini-DV formats.

Even more than photos, video tape was never meant to last. A video transfer from ScanCafe puts your VHS and other video tapes onto a professional, studio-quality standard-definition DVD:

• Manual editing and color correction
• Like-new picture quality
• A custom, Hollywood-like DVD experience
• Safe, guaranteed handling.
• Archival-quality DVD included
• Great value: $14.99 per tape (to 2 hrs), with DVD

Our quality

Let's start by showing two stills from the exact same 20-year old VHS-C tape, one digitized by ScanCafe, and one by one of the most successful competitors in the industry. Can you see the differences?

In these comparison stills, note the bottom-left tracking error, greenish color, and poor detail in the Competitor version--all corrected by ScanCafe. Video: W Lagrone, 1991

Our handcrafted approach

At ScanCafe, we don't do your video transfer by simply inserting your video tape into a machine and coming back when it's finished! Instead, every video tape at ScanCafe is viewed and edited by a dedicated technician, who gives your memories the attention they deserve.

In short, for our standard level of service, a technician will spend approximately up to 2 hours per video tape addressing all of the issues below, and then some. Just as with our industry leading photo-scanning service, this handcrafted attention to your memories is the only way to ensure quality. For each video tape we perform:

• Manual scene selection.
  Other services create scenes at every X minutes, or every time the camera stops. We think a trained human does a better job.
   
• Color-correction by scene.
  Other services, if they offer any color correction at all, might correct the entire video tape based on the first few minutes of the tape. But our experience is that color correction needs vary from scene to scene.
   
• Masking of unneeded tracking information.
  While invisible when viewed on TV, unneeded tracking information in the picture appears on your computer as a distracting, flickering band. We mask it so that it's invisible on both TV and computer.
   
• Trimming of empty areas of video tape.
   
• Image stabilization.
  Some video tape sources, notoriously camcorders, produce footage that flickers annoyingly. We fix that by improving the tracking signal.
   
• Custom DVD title generation.
  Titles--that is, how you navigate the contents of the DVD--are not an afterthought best left up to a computer. We allow you to name each video tape, and we create a beautiful DVD whose titles will remind you more than a little of the last Hollywood movie you bought. We want watching your video memories to be a popcorn-and-soda experience for the whole family.

How it works

Why standard definition?

Most video tapes, particularly VHS, have inherent picture quality that was considered adequate at the time of their introduction but have long since been surpassed in picture quality, in the era of HDTV. Even Super VHS, Hi 8, Digital 8, and mini-DV, which are substantially more detailed than VHS, are still formats that are best viewed on analog television equipment. So when we say that we can produce a DVD of your footage with like-new picture quality, we mean that it can be as good as that original source allows.

We use standard definition DVDs fundamentally because they are universally playable, and their resolution is well suited to that of the sources we are transferring. Not coincidentally, it also allows us to keep the costs of the service low, and we can put up to 2 hours of video tape content onto a DVD. This does mean, however, that if you view your video tape footage on a large, HD television or computer monitor, it will not seem nearly as sharp as when viewed on a regular analog television, particularly so for VHS.