Partly open

Legacy preservation

Your family's tapes, films and photographs — and the digital copies you already have.

Analog tape digitized in archival quality today — VHS, Hi8, MiniDV, Betamax, U-matic and more. Photographs scanned and retouched, and footage you already have enhanced and upscaled. 8mm film opens once the capture hardware is finished.

Tape and film do not fail gracefully. Colour shifts, binder degrades, and the machines that can still read the format get rarer every year. Photographs go the same way more quietly — fading, staining and creasing in the box they were stored in.

Most of this is open now. Analog tape — VHS, Hi8, Digital8, MiniDV, Betamax, U-matic — is digitized today. So is photo scanning and retouching, and the enhancement and 4K upscaling of footage you already have, whoever transferred it.

8mm film is the exception. Super 8 and Regular 8 wait on capture hardware that is still being finished, and we would rather say so than take your only copy of something and learn on it. Tell us what you have and we will come to you first when it opens.

What that means in practice

Analog tape digitized in archival quality — open now
Existing transfers upscaled to 4K, denoised and stabilised
Photographs scanned, repaired and restored
Super 8 and Regular 8mm — once the capture hardware is finished
Your originals, and an untouched master, always come back to you
Per-tape, per-reel and per-image quoting, no subscription

Get a quote

Tape, photos and enhancement are open now; 8mm film is not. Tell us what you have either way and we'll quote what we can do today.

Get a quote

Or call

St. Louis — 314.463.0505 Los Angeles — 323.908.1628 Victoria, BC — 250.483.3411

See it on real work

Drag to compare

8mm home movie, upscaled to 4K

Ten seconds of a family 8mm reel. Both sides are the same ten seconds at the same size, encoded with identical settings — the only difference is what went in.

Transfer Upscaled to 4K

Watch her sleeve, her fingers and the skate laces. This is a heavy diffusion pass — the flowers on her pyjamas are reconstructed from a blur that only hinted at them, and the film grain is resolved away rather than kept. It shows the ceiling; how far to take it on your own footage is your call, and the untouched transfer ships either way. This is the enhancement service — 8mm transfer itself is not open yet.

One photograph, start to finish

A 4×6 family snapshot from the 1950s — scanned, cleaned, sharpened, and given back the headroom the original crop never had.

A 1950s family photograph restored by VideoRx: a woman on a porch step with two young girls. — The scan was cropped tight to the top of her hair. The dark band is canvas that did not exist — the headroom on the right is generated, not recovered. That is the kind of thing we tell you we did.

The scan was cropped tight to the top of her hair. The dark band is canvas that did not exist — the headroom on the right is generated, not recovered. That is the kind of thing we tell you we did.

Detail of the same photograph showing a scratch across a girl's skirt removed and the fabric weave sharpened. — Detail at full size. The diagonal scratch across her skirt and the dust across her collar are gone, and the weave of both dresses comes back — that texture is in the negative, it was just buried in the scan.

Detail at full size. The diagonal scratch across her skirt and the dust across her collar are gone, and the weave of both dresses comes back — that texture is in the negative, it was just buried in the scan.

And then upscaled with AI

A third step, and a different kind of one: the restored frame put through an AI upscale. This is the same photograph again — the left of this slider is the finished restoration above, not the original scan.

The face of one of the girls in the photograph, shown as restored and as AI upscaled. — We picked a face on purpose, because it is where this matters. The eyelashes, the separate strands of hair and the line of her mouth were not in the scan — they are the model's best guess at what a face like this looks like. It is a very good guess. It is still a guess, which is why the restored frame is the one we file as the master and the upscale ships beside it.

We picked a face on purpose, because it is where this matters. The eyelashes, the separate strands of hair and the line of her mouth were not in the scan — they are the model's best guess at what a face like this looks like. It is a very good guess. It is still a guess, which is why the restored frame is the one we file as the master and the upscale ships beside it.

Tape transfer

Open now

Any analog tape format, digitized to modern digital masters. Send the tapes; they come back with the files.

VHS & VHS-C

Hi8 & Video8

Digital8

MiniDV

Betamax

U-matic & more

Something not on the list? Ask — odd formats are usually the ones worth rescuing.

AI enhancement

Open now

For footage that is already digital — our transfer, another lab's, an old DVD rip, a film scan, a camcorder capture. Nothing here needs a deck, so you can send files today.

Upscaling to HD or 4K

From DV, VHS and SD captures. Sharper and bigger — not more of what the tape never recorded.

Noise and grain reduction

Video noise, tape dropouts and film grain reduced without smearing the motion.

Proper de-interlacing

Interlaced tape captures resolved to clean progressive frames instead of combed ones.

Stabilisation

Handheld shake, telecine weave and gate judder settled down.

Colour and exposure recovery

Faded dye layers and colour casts brought back toward what was actually shot.

Detail and face restoration

Soft faces and signage recovered enough to read. Applied lightly — a heavy pass changes whose face it is.

Frame-rate smoothing

Interpolated to 50 or 60p where the footage suits it. Optional, and easy to overdo.

Audio cleanup

Hiss, hum and camera-motor noise removed; speech brought forward.

What AI enhancement does, and does not, do

It invents detail. It does not recover detail that was never recorded. Used with restraint it makes a VHS transfer genuinely watchable on a modern screen; pushed hard it starts rewriting faces and hallucinating text that was never on the sign. We keep it on the restrained side and tell you where the line was on your footage.

Every job comes back with the untouched version alongside the enhanced one. The archival master is always the copy nothing was added to — if you only want one file, that is the one to keep.

Photographs

Open now

The same job, done in software rather than on a deck: prints, slides and negatives scanned at archival resolution, then repaired — tears closed, creases flattened, colour casts and fading corrected.

Print, slide & negative scanning

Tear, crease and scratch repair

Fade and colour-cast correction

Stain and water-damage retouching

Black & white restoration

Enlargement for print or framing

8mm film transfer

In development

The one thing on this page we cannot do yet — the capture hardware is still being finished. Tell us what you have and we will come to you first.

Super 8 (silent & sound)

Regular 8mm