Delray Beach Media Preservation | VHS, Photo & Film Digitizing
By Heather F.
Our table at 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. Every order starts with somebody going through the box by hand. Delray Beach customers get the same call, and the same table.
Does Forever Studios serve Delray Beach, Florida?
Yes. We drive to you, and your collection never enters a shipping network. There is no drop-off counter in Delray Beach, no partner shop and no franchise. We come to the house, sort the collection with you, and the same company that picked it up is the one that digitizes it, 6 miles up the road.
- The studio
- 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. 6 miles from Delray Beach. One building, no partner shops.
- Getting it to us
- Concierge pickup across Delray Beach, Tuesdays. Free on orders of $250 or more, otherwise $30 plus mileage.
- What it costs
- Per item, not per box. $12 a tape, $0.50 a photo, $0.75 a slide, $15 a film reel or cassette, $13 a disc, $35 a hand restoration.
- How long
- 3 to 4 weeks standard. Rush is +25% at five days, +100% next day.
- What comes back
- Your originals, insured at declared value, with the files on USB, DVD or digital delivery.
Not sure what you have? Describe the pile over the phone and we will tell you what is worth doing.
Call (561) 235-7808. A real person answers, Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5.
Where we actually are
Close enough to drive. Or we come to you.
We are one studio in Boca Raton, about 15 minutes from Delray Beach. Bring it in yourself and hand it to the people who will do the work, or stay home and we will collect it on Tuesday.
What matters is not how close the drop-off is. It is how many buildings your originals pass through between leaving your house and coming home.
For us that number is one. For a mail-in warehouse, nobody will tell you.
Or bring it in yourself
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
Driving directions from Delray Beach1
building your media ever enters
15 minutes
door to door, Delray Beach to us
Logged by name on arrival. Checked three times by hand. Brought back the same way it left.
Call the studio
A real person answers.
Tell us what is in the box and we will put a pickup on the Tuesday route to your Delray Beach address.
What Delray Beach sends us
South Florida collections, mostly.
Since 2007 you start to recognize a city by what turns up in its boxes.
From $0.50 per photo
Photo and slide scanning
This is the heaviest slide city on the route. The households that bought west of I-95 in the seventies and eighties were forming families in the fifties and sixties, when a Kodak carousel was how you showed anybody anything, and the carousels came south with them. Under the slides: shoeboxes of prints, studio portrait packs, and self-adhesive albums whose pages yellow and grip harder every year.
- 600 DPI archival scanning, prints, albums, slides and negatives
- Carousels unloaded and scanned in order, then reloaded as they were
- Prints stuck to magnetic album pages separated by hand, never forced
From $15 per reel
8mm and 16mm film
Most of the film that comes out of Delray Beach was shot before anyone in the family had heard of Florida. Regular 8 and Super 8 from the fifties and sixties, filmed in the northeast, moved down once and then left in a closet for forty years. That double history is why we inspect every reel before quoting: vinegar syndrome and shrinkage are common here and neither is automatically the end of a reel.
- Regular 8, Super 8 and 16mm, sound or silent
- Frame by frame, cleaned and spliced by hand first
- Vinegar syndrome and shrinkage assessed before you commit
From $12 per tape
VHS and camcorder tape
The tape here is mostly grandchildren, and it is mostly east-side and mainland families rather than the condo communities. VHS and VHS-C through the eighties and nineties, then Hi8, Video8 and MiniDV: beach days, Atlantic Avenue, school shows at Old School Square. We transfer the audio exactly as recorded, because the voice behind the camera is usually why the tape matters.
- VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Hi8, Video8, Digital8, MiniDV, Betamax
- Mold on the tape and in the housing cleaned before any playback
- One MP4 file per tape, audio transferred untouched
Published pricing, no estimate games
Ten tapes is $120. That is the whole quote.
No box fee, no bundle you have to fill, no per-order minimum. Call with a rough count and we will price it at your table in Delray Beach before anything goes in the van.
Everything we accept
If it holds a memory, we have seen it.
Bring us the formats nobody else will touch. We keep the decks running for machines that stopped being made decades ago.
VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, S-VHS-C, Betamax, Hi8, Video8, Digital8, MiniDV, MicroMV, and 3/4 inch U-matic
8mm, Super 8 and 16mm reels, sound or silent, up to 400 feet, scanned frame by frame to true 4K
Loose prints from wallet size to 11x14, bound and self-adhesive albums, 35mm slides, Kodachrome, medium format, and color or black and white negatives
Compact cassette, microcassette, reel-to-reel, DAT, vinyl records, and 8-track
DVD, mini DVD, CD, Blu-ray, and legacy data discs recovered where the surface allows
Not sure what you have? Photograph the pile and call. Most people describing “old home movies” turn out to have two or three different formats in the same box, and each one needs a different machine.
Why Delray Beach collections do not wait well
Seventy-five percent humidity, most of the year.
This is not a scare tactic. It is the reason we tell Delray Beach callers not to leave it another season.
~75%
Average relative humidity in Delray Beach
85%+
Routine wet season readings
Palm Beach County humidity sits around 75 percent most of the year and pushes past 85 percent in the wet season, and almost two thirds of the housing in this city went up before 1990. That matters because the storage in a 1978 condo is a single-skin closet on an exterior wall, not a conditioned room. The binder holding magnetic particles to the backing of a tape absorbs moisture, softens and sheds onto the heads the first time you press play, and acetate film in the same closet goes acidic and shrinks.
Frances and Jeanne both crossed Palm Beach County within three weeks in September 2004, and Wilma followed in October 2005. Irma came through on September 10th 2017. Every one of them took the power out across this city for days at a stretch. A week without air conditioning is a week at outdoor humidity, and a closet that had been stable since the Carter administration does its damage in that week.
Where they end up instead: a climate-controlled floor, not a garage in August.
Every year a tape waits in a Delray Beach closet is footage you do not get back. We are in Delray Beach on Tuesdays.
(561) 235-7808How it works from Delray Beach
Four steps, no guesswork.
Step 1
Call and describe it
Tell us roughly what you have. We will tell you what is worth doing, what is not, and what it costs, before anything moves.
Step 2
We come to you
We are in Delray Beach on Tuesdays. We come to the house or the condo, help you sort what is worth doing, and carry it out ourselves.
Step 3
We log it by name
Everything is counted and recorded against your order the day it lands, so you get a real number before any work begins.
Step 4
It comes home
Checked three times by hand, then your originals come back to Delray Beach alongside the finished files. Turnaround is 3 to 4 weeks.
If you are still comparing
The mail-in companies put this in their terms, not their ads.
We are not going to characterize them. These are their own published words.
“YOU RECOGNIZE THAT YOU MAY NOT RECEIVE YOUR MATERIALS BACK … BY PLACING AN ORDER WITH LEGACYBOX, YOU ACCEPT THIS RISK.”
Legacybox Services Terms & Conditions. Capitalization theirs.
“…we may choose to compensate you for loss or damage; or we may decline, entirely, to issue a refund or provide any compensatory monies.”
Southtree Services Terms & Conditions.
“IMEMORIES MAXIMUM LIABILITY … WILL BE LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT OF FEES ACTUALLY PAID BY YOU TO IMEMORIES FOR THE APPLICABLE SERVICE … FOR THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PERIOD IMMEDIATELY PRIOR TO WHEN ANY CLAIM OR CAUSE OF ACTION AROSE, OR $100, WHICHEVER IS LESS.”
iMemories Terms of Service. Capitalization theirs.
Legacybox, Southtree and Kodak Digitizing are the same company, AMB Media LLC, in the same Chattanooga building. For what it is worth, nobody outside our own staff handles a Delray Beach collection at any point.
One building
Once it reaches us it stays here.
Never sub-contracted, never sent on.
Zachary Goldberg
Founder and Owner, on site in Boca Raton
We built Forever Studios because every family deserves to have their memories preserved the right way, by real people, with real equipment, under one roof. Delray Beach families trust us because the process is simple: we come to you, we carry it ourselves, and our own team does the work.
Delray Beach, Florida
The city your collection came from.
Delray Beach is two cities in one postcode. East of the tracks it is a hundred year old town with five historic districts in it. West of I-95 it is condo country, built between 1973 and 1990 and sold to people who had already raised their families somewhere else. That is why a box from Delray is as likely to hold Kodachrome slides from 1961 Queens as it is to hold a camcorder tape from down the road.
Museum and garden
Morikami Museum and Japanese Gardens
On Morikami Park Road west of the city, the museum and its gardens keep the memory of the Yamato Colony, the Japanese farming settlement that worked this land at the start of the twentieth century. It is one of the most photographed places in Delray Beach, which means it turns up in family albums from every decade we scan.
Civic and arts
Old School Square
The 1913 and 1925 school buildings on Atlantic Avenue, saved from demolition and turned into the arts campus that anchors downtown: the Cornell Art Museum, the Crest Theatre and the outdoor pavilion. The surrounding historic district holds 176 structures built between 1902 and 1945, the largest of the city's five.
Historic site
Delray Beach Historical Society
The society keeps the Cason Cottage campus on North Swinton Avenue along with the city's archive of photographs, plats and papers going back to the 1894 founding as Linton. If you have film or slides of this city before the condos, they are usually glad of a copy.
Museum
Spady Cultural Heritage Museum
The Solomon D. Spady House on Northwest 5th Avenue, built around 1926, is now the museum of Black history in Delray Beach and Palm Beach County. It sits in the West Settlers District, the neighbourhood founded by the city's original Black and Bahamian settlers in 1894.
Nature
Sandoway Discovery Center
A 1936 beach house on South Ocean Boulevard, kept as a nature centre with shark tanks, a coral reef exhibit and a hammock garden. It is one of the last surviving houses of its kind on that stretch of A1A, and generations of Delray schoolchildren have been photographed on its steps.
Park
Wakodahatchee Wetlands
Fifty acres of constructed wetland on Jog Road with a three quarter mile boardwalk over it, run by Palm Beach County Water Utilities and visited by more than 178 bird species. It is the reason a surprising number of Delray camera collections are as much heron as heron.
Where our Delray Beach customers are
70K+
Population
1911
Incorporated
6 mi
To our studio
15 minutes
Drive time
Or bring it yourself
Rather not wait for the route?
You are welcome to drive it down and hand it to us. Same studio, same people, about 15 minutes from Delray Beach.
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
What Delray Beach-area customers say
Rated 4.9 from 3,937 verified reviews.
★★★★★
The films you worked with were 80 years old. I was very impressed with the sections of movies you were able to copy and enhance. My family couldn't believe how good they looked.
★★★★★
Received my link, very easy process. Shipping, status updates, app usage all were terrific. Even came through with a delivery right before Christmas. Was able to re-live memories with all my families over the holidays. Thank you Forever Studios
★★★★★
I've always hesitated to drop my valuable memories in a box and ship it off to parts unknown, but Forever Studios has made converting my old tapes easy. Five stars!
Frequently asked, Delray Beach
The questions South Florida callers actually ask.
Do you pick up in Delray Beach?
Yes. We are in Delray Beach on Tuesdays. We come to the house, the condo or the storage unit. Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more, and $30 plus mileage below that. We count everything with you before it goes in the van, so you know what you are paying for. It is a six mile drive for us, so we can usually be flexible about the time.
How far is your studio from Delray Beach?
About 6 miles, roughly 15 minutes down Federal Highway or I-95. It is the closest city on this route to our building. That is our only location. There is no drop-off counter in Delray Beach and no partner shop. Everything is digitized by our own staff in our own building in Boca Raton.
What formats are most common from Delray Beach households?
Slides first, and more of them than anywhere else we go. Carousel after carousel of Kodachrome from the fifties and sixties, because the people who bought west of I-95 brought their family archive down with them. Then prints and self-adhesive albums, then 8mm film, and tape last. East of the tracks the mix flips and it is mostly tape.
I have forty slide carousels. Do I have to unload them?
No, and please do not. Bring them as they are. We unload each tray, scan the slides in the order they sat in it, and reload the tray exactly as it came, because the order somebody put them in forty years ago is information. If a slide is stuck in the gate we free it by hand rather than pushing it through.
Can you digitize a whole estate or a condo clear-out at once?
Yes, and in Kings Point, Huntington Pointe and the Villages that is most of what we do. You do not need to sort anything first. We catalogue every item on intake, so you get an actual list of what was in those boxes, which is often the first time anyone in the family has known. At that volume the Tuesday pickup is free.
What does it cost in total?
Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more. The digitizing is per item, not per box: ten tapes at $12 each is $120, photos are $0.50 each and slides $0.75. Estimates are free, so call with a rough count and we will give you a real number before we come out.
Preserving Florida's most important memories since 2007
Why Delray Beach families hand it to us.
One studio
Everything happens at 1000 Clint Moore Road. Never sub-contracted, never sent on to another facility.
Insured
Shipped back at declared value, or collect it from the studio yourself.
A+
BBB rating, with thousands of reviews across Reviews.io, Google, Facebook and Yelp.
3x checked
Every tape, reel and photo reviewed by the technician, the studio leader, and your project manager.
Talk to a real person right now
Tell us what is in the box.
We will tell you what it costs and what is worth doing, before anything moves. One call and we will put you on the route.
Pickup in Delray Beach
We come to you on Tuesdays, free on orders of $250 or more and $30 plus mileage below that. Logged the day it lands, digitized in Boca Raton, carried back to you.
Or bring it yourself
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton, FL 33487. Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5.
Everything we do
Nearby locations
Forever Studios · Owner-operated in Boca Raton · Helping Florida families since 2007
Ready to digitize it right the first time?
Bring your tapes, film, and photos to the team that treats every project as irreplaceable. All work is handled in-house in Boca Raton, never outsourced.
