Clearly Better VHS was the first mass produced recording medium for watching and recording films either from television or from your camcorder. Never a high resolution product it was nevertheless accessible and cheap. However there are a few problems that this cheapness produced. First, many tapes were recorded over many times before the final recording of your home movies. Each time a tape was used it degraded slightly. Secondly, over time, the magnetic particles on the tape realign to the Earth’s magnetic field, your memories are literally being wiped before your eyes. Worse still, if you left your tapes near the television then the magnetic fields emitted from the older CRT TVs (the ones with the big backs) would wipe your tapes even faster. Many tapes were cheap inferior versions sold en masse, these recordings suffer even more than most. How can we improve these recordings? Well the first thing to remember is that sometimes nothing can be done to restore your films to their former glory, however if there is a picture and sound present it is possible to improve the quality to some extent. We do this by digital remastering of the image, to increase colour saturation which has quite often washed out over the years, to remove video noise and improve exposure. At the very least we can capture the film converting it to digital format and thereby preserving what is left for posterity. We use top end VHS tape recorders with at least 4 video heads and two audio heads for maximum pickup of the audio-video signal. This is transferred through our TBC analogue to digital converters to further improve the image. Once in the computer we are free to remaster the footage to bring back the colours and contrast as much as possible. We won’t promise the Earth but we do promise to do our best with your memories.

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