What We Fix
Expert Videotape Repair and Remediation
We understand that your footage is priceless. Our team works with heavily damaged media daily, and will use our decades of experience to safely recover your family’s irreplaceable memories.
Standard Mechanical Repairs - $39
If the cassette shell is broken or the tape ribbon is damaged, we provide precision mechanical repairs.
Complete Mechanical Rebuilds: for cassettes that were dropped, crushed, or in pieces, we perform a full teardown, replace missing springs/gears, and transplant reels into donor shells when needed.
Jammed Mechanisms: if a cassette won’t play or ejects immediately, we diagnose and repair the internal clutches and friction points to restore smooth playback.
Precision Splicing (snapped tape): when the ribbon snaps or detaches, we re-anchor or perform an archival-grade splice to join the tape cleanly.
Tangled or "Chewed" Tape: we carefully extract the magnetic ribbon, remove only the ruined sections, and splice the healthy tape back together. Usually only a few seconds are lost; the rest can be salvaged.
Remediation Repairs - $85 per tape
(10% discount for 5–9 tapes, 20% discount for 10+ tapes) Environmental damage requires specialized, controlled decontamination to prevent further harm and protect the tape’s fragile data layer.
Mold & Mildew Decontamination: safely neutralizing active white mold and mildew spores while preserving the footage.
Flood & Water Damage: specialized cleaning for tapes exposed to water and contaminants.
Fire & Heat Damage: remediation for smoke, ash, or heat-warped tapes.
Humidity Exposure: delicate recovery for tape that sticks to itself and breaks on the reels.
Sticky Shed Syndrome (lubrication deterioration): recovery for tapes that squeal and bind as the lubrication breaks down.
Foreign Substance Exposure: cleaning mud, dirt, food, and other contaminants from the tape and cassette.
Surface Fouling (sound plays, but there’s no picture): if your equipment’s heads are clean but no image appears, the tape surface may be fouled. We use a slow, gentle restoration to clean the surface layer.
Magnetic Media Limitations
We can recover many damaged tapes, but some issues are permanently encoded in the magnetic recording. Under our No Fix, No Fee guarantee, we will not charge if we encounter these unrecoverable problems:
Tapes that have been recorded over or erased: we cannot recover footage that has been magnetically overwritten.
Continuous tracking lines or vertical scrolling: continuous tracking lines or vertical scrolling: persistent lines/static usually indicate VCR tracking issues or original recording problems, we cannot offer an improvement in the quality of footage with original-recording problems.
Massive physical destruction: if the ribbon is stretched, crunched, or wrinkled throughout the recording, trimming would remove all footage and recovery is not possible.
Digitization interference in miniDV footage: digitization interference on miniDV: heavy pixelation or audio dropouts are usually caused by dirty heads during recording; unfortunately the digital data is permanently corrupted and cannot be repaired.