Digitising Video Tapes is More Than Just Creating a File
We never cut corners
Instead, we offer a truly bespoke, boutique service, designed to treat your memories with the care they deserve
Old VHS tapes and camcorder recordings often hold some of the most important moments in a family's history, birthdays, holidays, weddings and everyday moments that can never be repeated. As former broadcast professionals, we use workflows used in professional TV production and media archiving to help you protect and restore these memories.
At Cherish Me, we offer three service levels to suit different needs and budgets. Whether you simply want your tapes safely preserved or fully restored and brought back to life, we have an option for you.
Every tier starts with the same professional foundation, captured via high-quality playback equipment, proper signal stabilisation, and careful handling. What changes is the level of restoration work applied afterwards.
Our Three Service Levels
Basic — £20 per tape (up to 2 hours)
A professional digitising service that genuinely competes with, and beats most services at this price point.
Unlike some budget services that capture directly to a compressed MP4, we always work from a lossless archival capture first. Your high bitrate MP4 viewing copy is then created from that master, meaning even our Basic service starts from a better foundation than most.
What you get:
A clean high bitrate MP4 viewing copy with light deinterlacing and noise reduction, optimised for TVs, laptops and phones
Constant frame rate output, avoiding the variable frame rate issues common with cheap capture devices
A lossless archival master (AVI or ProRes) is created as part of every Basic job and is available to you at no extra charge - just let us know if you'd like it supplied as part of the package and choose your delivery method. This future-proofs the content, should you wish to restore it at a later date.
A great option for a box of mixed tapes where you want everything safely digitised without breaking the budget.
For tapes that really matter, consider our Enhanced or Premium Restoration service.
Enhanced Restoration— £60 per tape (up to 2 hours)
For tapes that you want to look genuinely better than the original VHS playback.
This service uses QTGMC, the gold standard deinterlacing method trusted by broadcast and film restoration professionals worldwide, alongside upscaling and restoration with Topaz AI. The result is smoother motion, sharper detail, and offers a viewing copy that holds up beautifully on today's large screens.
What you get:
QTGMC professional deinterlacing for smooth, broadcast-quality motion
Topaz AI upscaling to Full HD
Optional additional stabilisation for steadier playback on shaky footage
Clean high bit rate MP4 viewing copy plus lossless archival master
Ideal for wedding tapes, milestone recordings, or anything you want to enjoy watching again
Premium Restoration — £85 per tape (up to 2 hours)
The full broadcast treatment, for tapes that deserve the very best.
On top of everything in Enhanced, our Premium service adds careful per-scene colour correction and professional audio restoration. Rather than applying a single blanket correction to the whole tape, we work through the footage section by section, helping to balance the colour, contrast and brightness to get the best possible result from your original recording. Audio is treated separately, reducing unwanted noise like wind, hot mic, or hiss, while bringing voices to a comfortable, clear level.
What you get:
Everything in Enhanced
Per-scene colour correction - not a one-size-fits-all filter
Professional audio restoration - hiss reduction, hum removal, speech level balancing, wind noise reduction
Presentation finishing, including scene and audio smoothing, and fade to black transitions
The closest thing to a professional broadcast restoration at an accessible price
This is the service we recommend for wedding tapes, recordings of loved ones, or anything with real sentimental value where quality genuinely matters.
Not Sure Which to Choose?
The good news is that you don't have to decide everything up front.
Many clients choose to digitise their entire collection using our Basic service, then select a handful of particularly important tapes for restoration. Others prefer to restore every tape, especially when dealing with smaller collections or treasured family footage.
Some clients even start with a single tape, so they can see the results for themselves before committing to a larger project.
Every collection is different, and we're always happy to offer honest advice based on the condition of your tapes, your budget, and what you're hoping to achieve.
Get in touch and we'll help you find the approach that's right for you.
Why Capture Quality Matters
Many transfer services convert tapes directly to compressed MP4 files for convenience.
MP4 is an excellent viewing format, but when compression happens at the point of capture, it reduces the amount of information preserved from the original tape, and that detail can never be recovered.
At Cherish Me, we take a different approach. The quality of a tape transfer is determined long before the file is created.
High-quality playback decks, proper signal stabilisation, and careful capture all help preserve more of the original video signal before any restoration takes place. Cheap capture devices and fast automated transfers can introduce softer images, motion artefacts, and colour smearing. These effects are not always obvious on small screens, but they limit what can be done with the footage later, and they mean you're not getting a true archive of what was on the tape.
A useful way to think about it: when phone videos or photographs are uploaded to social media, compressed and used with filters or adjustments, they can look fine at first, but when you try to enlarge or restore them later, much of the detail is already gone. The same principle applies to VHS capture. Getting it right at the source really matters.
That’s why every Cherish Me transfer, including our Basic service, starts with a proper archival capture before any viewing copies are created.
The Equipment We Use
At Cherish Me, we invest in high-end equipment at every stage of the process.
Digitising old VHS requires a careful balance of legacy hardware and modern technology. We use only the highest specification players, primarily JVC and Panasonic S-VHS decks with Time Base Correction (TBC) to stabilise the signal before capture.
Footage is then captured through professional Magewell hardware, always to an archival master format. At this stage, nothing is compressed or altered, ensuring a faithful digital archive. Many services compress the master at the point of capture - we do not.
Restoration is handled separately and with care. Unlike services that apply deinterlacing during capture, we process it afterwards, and we use QTGMC for enhanced or premium restoration, an industry-recognised method trusted by broadcast and film restoration professionals worldwide. It’s slower, but it produces smoother motion and a clean 50fps output suitable for modern displays and restoration.
Where chosen, upscaling, stabilisation, colour correction, and audio restoration are all applied as separate, carefully managed steps - never as automated one-click processes.
What We Don't Do
We don't capture directly to compressed MP4 files, which can permanently reduce the detail preserved from the original tape
We don't use low-cost consumer capture devices that prioritise speed over quality, producing soft images, reduced detail, or variable frame rate files
We don't apply automated one-size-fits-all corrections that ignore the individual character of each tape
We don't supply cheap, unbranded USB sticks that risk losing your files
We don't rush. Every tape is handled carefully, with a full quality check process
Please note: video tapes must be digitised in real time. A two-hour tape takes two hours to transfer before any quality checks or restoration work begins.
Delivery Options
Download - secure digital download included at no extra cost. A reasonably modern internet connection is required for larger files.
USB - we prefer to supply reliable, genuine quality USB drives. We avoid cheap, unbranded drives. If a USB fails, your files could be lost.
Hard drive - larger orders or lossless archival masters can be delivered on a hard drive or SSD. You can supply your own, or we can supply one (cost depends on storage size). Please note that supplied drives may need to be reformatted to exFAT.
DVD - available for customers who prefer a physical disc for standard definition playback. Please note that DVDs are limited by the format itself (SD), but all DVDs are created from our archival master or restored masters, rather than a compressed source, and if they are created via our restoration services, they will look great.
Local collection and delivery - if you're in the Surrey Hills area, or within a reasonable distance (Kent, Surrey, South London), we can often arrange collection and delivery in person. We're a boutique service and we enjoy meeting our customers when we can.
Keeping Your Original VHS Tapes
We're aware of much of the advice and marketing that encourages people to digitise their tapes as quickly as possible. While magnetic media does age, and we do recommend digitising important recordings before problems develop, we also strongly recommend keeping your original tapes.
Many VHS tapes remain perfectly playable decades after they were recorded, particularly when stored in reasonable conditions. We occasionally receive tapes with signs of wear, damage or deterioration, but the vast majority of the media is still recoverable and capable of producing excellent results.
We're firmly wearing our old broadcasting hats with this advice, but in the world of television, we never willingly discard original masters. Your tapes remain the source masters of your recordings, while digitisation provides a new, secure copy for everyday viewing, sharing, and safekeeping.
By keeping both the original tapes and the new digital files, you'll have the best possible protection against loss, accidental damage, and future media deterioration.
We'll be happy to return all original media with your order, unless you ask us not to.
How We Compare
Most high-volume transfer services, including some well-known high street brands:
Capture directly to small compressed MP4 files at the point of digitising, permanently reducing the detail preserved from the original tape
Use consumer capture devices, sometimes labelled as bespoke or professional, with built-in real-time compression, producing softer images, reduced detail, and often variable frame rate files
Deliver on unbranded USB drives that may not be reliable for long-term storage
Describe "colour correction" and "restoration" when in practice this often means a single automated adjustment applied to the whole tape in seconds, not careful, scene-by-scene work
A word on what restoration actually involves
Many transfer services offer AI enhancement, often for just a few pounds extra. For some customers, that may be all that's needed.
Our restoration services go much further.
A two-hour tape takes the same two hours to digitise before any restoration work can begin. The tape must be played in real time and carefully captured. There is no shortcut to that process.
That's why some high-volume digitising services aim to complete everything within that real-time window, applying automated enhancements to compressed files. The result may look sharper or cleaner, but it is not the same as a professional restoration workflow built around an archival-quality master.
Our team brings decades of experience in broadcast quality control, production and post-production, working across organisations including Virgin Media, Sony and UKTV. We apply those same standards to every restoration project.
Professional deinterlacing, colour correction, audio enhancement and AI-assisted restoration can take many additional hours after capture has finished. We use industry-leading tools, including Topaz Video AI and Adobe Audition, alongside professional broadcast workflows to recover as much detail, stability and clarity as possible from ageing recordings.
Genuine restoration is not a one-click process. Colour cast often changes throughout a tape, while audio quality can vary significantly from scene to scene. Achieving the best possible result requires careful review and adjustment throughout the recording.
When comparing services, it's worth asking a simple question:
Is my footage being automatically enhanced, or is it being individually restored?
At Cherish Me, every tape benefits from an archival-quality capture workflow. Our Enhanced and Premium services build on that foundation with professional restoration techniques designed to preserve and improve your memories for years to come.