We see many damaged tapes in our day to day transfer work and often have to deal with people's precious video tape memories that have been damaged by poor storage conditions, heat, mold, or water.
Interestingly when stored correctly Video (and audio tapes) can be water tight - the layers of tape are actually closer together than a molecule of water, so apart from the outer layers which may be damaged (often irretrieveably) we can quite frequently retrieve a vast amount of information from the tape.
Often we have to replace the video housing with a new one, which can be a bit time consuming and replace the tape hubs, clean the outer layers of tape and then run the tape to check it will play ok.
We can then transfer the video content to a format such as DVD, BluRay which can be less prone to problems. We often make a duplicate copy to portable harddrive as well so that the content can be instantly accessible for editing family compilation videos for birthdays, anniversaries, weddings, funerals and other events.
If you have problems retrieving your video content from damaged tapes, before throwing them away as irretrieveable, consider sending them to us for assessment. In some cases this process maybe covered by your home and contents insurance.
Contact us on 1300 4 PROCOPY or (08)93753902