HVT is a locally owned and operated business. We work at our residence in Centerville, Ohio, and we consider ourselves to be your neighbor. Paul will actually meet and talk with you about your project and offer helpful tips about preserving your precious memories. Our rates and quality are highly competitive. We have consistent fees and won’t trick you by offering huge discounts to get the cost down to where the rates should be. Also, we can usually get your material back to you within 2 weeks.

We are located in Centerville, Ohio, which is convenient to a large service area, including the entire Miami Valley region. We have a one-way pickup service within a 15-mile radius of Centerville. (Pickup is limited to orders of over $125.) You can also mail your material to Hometown Video Transfers at 9820 Atchison Rd, Centerville, OH 45458.

For a standard order of 12-25 tapes, we can usually get your project back to you within 1-2 weeks. Larger orders of 50 or more tapes will get back to you promptly, usually between 2-3 weeks.

Flash Drive, Hard Drive, or DVD. We recommend either Flash Drive or a Hard drive. If you get your movie files on DVD, all you can do is watch them. With the drives, you can make your own copies, edit and share. Also, we can only put 2 hours on one DVD. We can add many movie files onto a digital drive.

File formats:
Video and Film: MPEG4
Photos, Slides, and Negatives: JPEG

(Slides and negatives can be scanned at multiple resolutions for an extra charge)

There are two ways to get DVD copies:

The first and recommended way is to have your tapes transferred to a digital format, then make a DVD. This is a bit more expensive, but with the digital file, you will have more options, such as making your own copies, sharing, or editing. Plus, we will keep your digital file here for one year in case you need more copies, or something happens to your files.

The second way is to make the DVD copy directly from your tape. This is the same cost as transferring to a movie file. However, you will not have the files stored here and not have the flexibility of making your own copies, sharing, or editing.

With orders over $150, we include one free flash drive.

With orders over $250, we also give the My Living Legacy Book as a complimentary gift ($40 value).

Bring us your old VCRs or camcorders (must be fully operational) and receive a $50 discount on your order. Use code TRADE at checkout or mention the offer when dropping off your materials.

Yes, there is a $25 minimum charge.

Yes, we offer editing services. We can help with anything from simply cutting out dead spots on your tapes to film and photo enhancements. For special occasions, we can cut together sections of videos or sequences of photos and add music and graphics. Editing possibilities are endless. We will consult with you to achieve your goals.

For tapes and film reels, please number your tapes or film reels. The name of the digital file will correlate with your numbers. If you have the capability, please rewind your tapes. If not, we will gladly do it for you.

Photos, slides, and negatives have a different process and will be transferred close to the order you put them in, but we can not guarantee they will come back in the original order. However, once you get the digital files, you can rearrange them however you want and name the folders and files however you want. (This is another great reason to get your files on a digital drive rather than a DVD.)

Before bringing your photos, they must be removed from the album. They will be returned to you, but not in the same order received. You can organize them however you want and separate them using envelopes or baggies. You can name them by dates, people, or events. Whichever way you choose to name them will be how we name the folder in your project. For example, you can name by date range, such as 1965-1968, and all the photos will be digitized and added to the folder called 1965-1968. (We name all the individual files with the prefix of your last name, then the dates or whatever you choose such as, <Name_1965-1968.0001>. Once you get it back, you can rename and rearrange the folders/files however you want.) Our system also reads both the front and back of photo prints. If there is writing on the back, such as names, dates, or notes, the machine will digitize the back too. This is something we can turn on or off to your choosing. The photo rate is per scan, which includes the back when that feature is chosen.

For the really old albums, we use a flatbed scanner. We only use this process if it is impossible to remove the photos. These are the ones that have been glued in with the little corners on the black felt paper and similar ways. There is an additional charge for this process.

As with anything we digitize, adding your photo files to Flash Drive is what we recommend. This is a longer-lasting easy-to-use way of making your own copies, sharing, editing, and uploading to the cloud.

If your tapes are over 20 years old, they are at risk of being unusable. This depends on how they have been stored over the years. Videotape has an organic element which is a urethane binder material containing magnetic oxide particles. This element can lose its properties over time and start to flake off and/or become demagnetized.

However, I have experienced that most tapes, even from the early 1980s, are still viable, play fine, and make a very nice digital copy. But, if you have been thinking of preserving your tapes, waiting is probably not a great idea. They will eventually disintegrate.

Flash Drives
1. USB flash drives/portable hard drives have larger storage space. You can currently get a 2 terabyte Flash Drive which is 2000 gigabytes. The average of 2 hours of videotape converts to approximately 3.5GB. So, you can add almost 600 tapes to one 2TB Flash Drive. This is an extreme example. Most people have between 15-30 tapes that can easily fit onto a 32GB -124GB drive.

2. There are fewer ways to have something go wrong. Flash drives are solid-state media with no moving parts. DVDs require motion to play, so there are things that can happen that will make them unplayable such as scratches, cracks, dirt, dust, or broken DVD players.

3. Flash drives simply take up less space and are significantly less expensive. It is also easy (and recommended) that once you get your fash drive, to copy the files over to the hard drive of your computer or an external hard drive. This way you have a secure copy.

4. The quality is significantly better. When converting to digital and adding to DVD, there is a compression that occurs that degenerates the look of your video.

5. With the MPEG4 files we create and add to the flash drive, you can make your own copies, rename the files and create your own folder/file structure, share, edit, and upload to the cloud. Also, you can play your videos either on a computer or, most modern TVs have a USB port that allows you to play videos.

6. No matter what technology comes up next, you will always be able to copy your files stored on a flash drive from one format to the next. This allows you to truly preserve your precious memories for generations to come.

DVDs
1. The storage space is much less. You can only put 2 hours of footage and up to 4.7 Gigabytes on one DVD. If you have many 2-hour tapes to convert, you will only be able to put the contents of one tape onto one DVD. If you choose both a thumb drive and a DVD, you will incur not only the transfer conversion charge but also the cost of making a DVD copy.

2. It is not easy to make your own DVD copies. And all new laptops do not have DVD slots anymore.

For all practical purposes - all you can do with a DVD is watch it. And DVDs are becoming more and more obsolete day by day.

Yes. If you’ve already had your tapes transferred to DVD and want to put them on a flash drive, we can do that for you. We cannot transfer store-bought or copy-protected materials.

Yes. In many cases, your tape(s) can be fixed. There is a $15 fee for fixing tapes.