What Actually Happens When You Bring Us a Box of Old Tapes?
You found the box.
Maybe it was in the back of a closet. Maybe it came out of your parents’ house. Maybe you’ve been moving it from house to house for the last 20 years because you know there’s something important on those tapes… you just have absolutely no idea what.
VHS. VHS-C. Hi8. Video8. MiniDV. A tape with no label. Another one labeled “Christmas 1994?” in handwriting nobody recognizes.
That’s pretty normal around here.
At Accord Film & Video, boxes like these come through our doors all the time. One of the nice things about being a local transfer facility is that your tapes don’t have to disappear into a shipping box headed who-knows-where. They come directly into our Miami office, and the transfer work is handled right here.
We’ve only been doing this for 35 years, after all.
Yes, We Still Have the Machines
One of the biggest challenges with older video isn't necessarily the tape itself. It's finding the right equipment to play it.
Over the years, there were A LOT of video formats—and they weren't all created equal.
That's why our transfer room looks a little bit like a time machine.
We maintain an extensive collection of professional and consumer video equipment that allows us to work with everything from the tapes most families recognize to broadcast formats most people have never heard of.
That includes formats such as VHS, VHS-C, Video8, Hi8, Digital8, MiniDV, Betamax, Betacam SP, DigiBeta, HDCAM, DVCPro, U-matic ¾-inch and more.
Some of these machines haven't been manufactured in decades. Keeping them running is part of the job.
Your Tape Doesn't Just Get Thrown Into a VCR
Before a tape is transferred, we're paying attention to its physical condition.
Older tapes can have problems. They may have been sitting in a hot South Florida garage, stored in a closet for 30 years, played hundreds of times, or simply aged.
And sometimes they arrive after someone else has already tried—and failed—to play them.
When a tape has a problem, we don't automatically give up on it. We have experience troubleshooting and repairing difficult tapes, and in some cases we're able to work with material that couldn't be transferred elsewhere.
We can't promise that every damaged tape can be saved. But we're certainly willing to take a look.
While Your Old Family Videos Play, We're Keeping an Eye on the Process
This is the part people don't usually see. Your tapes are transferred in real time. If there's two hours of footage on a tape, it takes two hours for that footage to play through and be digitized.
Throughout the process, we're monitoring the transfer and the equipment to make sure everything is running properly. We're not judging the home movies—we're making sure they're making it safely from the tape to the digital file.
So while an old birthday party, Christmas morning, wedding, family vacation, or questionable 1980s hairstyle might be making an appearance on one of our monitors, we're keeping an eye on what matters: the transfer itself.
And after 35 years of doing this, we've seen a lot of family vacations.
We also don't assume what's on a tape based on the label. A tape marked “Birthday” might have 20 minutes of a birthday followed by two hours of footage nobody remembered was there.
Sometimes those forgotten parts end up being the best part.
What Do You Get Back?
EVERYTHING. Your original tapes included.
Once your tapes have been digitized, you'll receive your new digital files along with all of your original tapes. Nothing gets thrown away or disposed of unless you make that decision.
For storing your digital files, we strongly recommend using a USB drive or external hard drive as your first copy. From there, don't stop at just one copy.
Old tapes taught us a pretty good lesson: you don't want your family memories living in only one place.
Keep your USB or hard drive somewhere safe—a desk drawer, home safe, safety deposit box, or another secure location. Then make additional copies on your computers and consider uploading another copy to the cloud.
That way, if a computer crashes, a hard drive stops working, or somebody accidentally deletes a folder, you aren't scrambling and hoping that was the only copy.
Our rule of thumb: if the footage really matters to you, keep it in more than one place.
One important thing to know: once your completed project has been delivered to you, we keep a copy of your transferred footage on our system for two weeks. After that period, the files are removed from our storage unless you choose to have us continue storing them for a monthly fee.
That two-week window gives you time to review your files and make your own backups. If you'd prefer the added peace of mind of having another copy stored with us, just ask about our monthly storage option.
Even with additional storage through us, we still recommend keeping your own copies in multiple places. No hard drive, computer, USB, or cloud service should be the only place something important lives.
And don't forget about the originals. We recommend reviewing your newly digitized footage before deciding what to do with the physical tapes. After that, whether you keep them safely stored or decide you're finally ready to clear out that box in the closet is completely up to you.
The tapes are yours. The digital files are yours. We just help get them into a format you can actually use again.
The Box in the Closet Isn't Getting Any Younger
We say that with love.
Videotape wasn't designed to last forever, and neither were the machines that play it. If you've been meaning to go through those old family tapes, you don't necessarily need to know what format they are before bringing them in.
Bring us the mystery tapes.
We'll figure out what they are.
And if you have something particularly strange, there's a pretty good chance we have a machine for that too.
Have tapes you would like to preserve? Visit Accord Film & Video at 2140 South Dixie Highway #301, Miami, FL 33133, call (305) 856-1245, or text (833) 832-6146.
