How to Restore Old Video Tapes..
How to restore old video tapes – mme- It’s Grandad’s birthday next week and you are stumped as to what to get him… Suddenly a thought comes to mind; Why not give him and your family the gift of fond memories? Along with the legendary family barbeque, you prepare to show a compilation of the family’s most treasured videos but the question on your mind is how to repair video tapes or how to restore old video tapes.
One video, in particular, is in your mind, it’s an old VHS tape that’s been sitting in the loft for decades. It’s perfect – The grandchildren sat around Grandad’s big grand piano listening to him play. What a happy memory.
You dig up the film to check everything’s in good working order… DISASTER! The tape is ruined, the audio is scratchy, the video is all over the place and static plagues the video.
What Does the Science Say?
Research suggests magnetic tapes (like the treasured VHS tape) will go through a 10 to 20 percent loss of signal and natural decay over the years, even if they have been stored in a good situation. Over a couple of decades, your precious film could be destroyed by natural magnetic decay and be lost forever which leads to the question how to restore old video tapes and is there a video restoration service near me?.
Video Restoration for Old Tapes – What Can you Do with Old Videos?
Every day your tapes are slipping closer and closer to their resting date. This is why you should act now to apply some much needed video restoration for old tapes in order to save and preserve the memories before it’s too late. We’d love to give you some tips on how to look after your tapes, but the issue is that it’s inevitable and will happen no matter the circumstances. Past technologies won’t hold up as well as the modern alternatives.
To ensure that this doesn’t happen we recommend that you bring your old VHS tapes to Supaphoto’s video restoration service to have them digitised and make them last forever in a digital form. While your grandad certainly hasn’t forgotten his family piano concerts, it would be a tragedy to lose that video – the same goes for any other precious films too.
The Problem with Video Tapes
Videotape was never really manufactured with any sort of longevity in mind.
The rapid decay of videotape was first noted in the early 1970s and hasn’t gotten dramatically better really since.
This problem essentially lies in videotape’s composition. Generally, video tape is made up of three layers: the back coat, the base and the binder – magnetic layer. The back coating, since the late 1960s has been composed of a quite thin carbon layer that is conductive so as to deter static electricity from building up. This is also helpful to a certain degree as it helps prevent dust and dirt accumulation on the video tape. Video restoration for old tapes is mainly driven by by the need for video tape preservation, though, lies in its’ top – usually referred to as the binder layer. In addition to simply being very physically frail, the binder layer’s chemical makeup was simply never designed for longevity. That’s why it’s important to understand how to store video tapes.
If this has already happened to your tapes then we offer a restoration service in order to attempt to save the tapes. So if you asking yourself if video tapes can be restored? – the answer is yes but best call us in the first instance so that we can assess the condition to begin with it may just need a physical type of repair which will still need some know-how but won’t be as onerous.
