Fort Lauderdale VHS to DVD & Photo Digitizing | Service Directory
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. Fort Lauderdale customers get the same call, and the same table.
Does Forever Studios serve Fort Lauderdale, Florida?
Yes. We drive to you, and your collection never enters a shipping network. There is no drop-off counter in Fort Lauderdale, 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, 24 miles up the road.
- The studio
- 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. 24 miles from Fort Lauderdale. One building, no partner shops.
- Getting it to us
- Concierge pickup across Fort Lauderdale, Thursdays. 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 35 minutes from Fort Lauderdale. Bring it in yourself and hand it to the people who will do the work, or stay home and we will collect it on Thursday.
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 Fort Lauderdale1
building your media ever enters
35 minutes
door to door, Fort Lauderdale 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 Thursday route to your Fort Lauderdale address.
What Fort Lauderdale sends us
South Florida collections, mostly.
Since 2007 you start to recognize a city by what turns up in its boxes.
From $12 per tape
VHS and camcorder tape
Most Fort Lauderdale tape was shot between about 1984 and 2001. School programs, Little League, confirmations, boat days off Las Olas, and long unedited stretches of grandchildren in a Victoria Park back yard. It has usually stayed in the one house since, on a garage shelf against an exterior wall.
- VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Hi8, Video8, Digital8, MiniDV, Betamax
- Cleaned and inspected before anything touches a deck
- MP4 on USB, DVD or digital delivery, priced per tape
From $0.50 per photo
Slide and photo scanning
The families who arrived in the fifties and sixties shot Kodachrome, and we see a lot of it: carousels of the new house going up, the beach before the hotels, boats on the New River. Prints from those same households are usually in magnetic albums, and near the coast they lift off the page and curl at the corners first.
- 600 DPI archival scanning, prints, albums, slides and negatives
- Carousels and trays unloaded and kept in their original order
- Color-shift correction on faded Ektachrome and Kodachrome
From $15 per reel
8mm and 16mm film
The reels out of this city run older than the tape, mostly fifties through seventies, and they are often the only moving pictures a family has of the people who came down first. Beach days, the Intracoastal, Christmas with the jalousie windows open, and a fair amount of footage from the spring break years.
- Regular 8, Super 8 and 16mm, sound or silent
- Frame by frame, cleaned and reconditioned first
- Vinegar syndrome and shrinkage assessed before you commit
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 Fort Lauderdale 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 Fort Lauderdale 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 Fort Lauderdale callers not to leave it another season.
~75%
Average relative humidity in Fort Lauderdale
85%+
Routine wet season readings
Broward humidity sits around 75 percent most of the year and pushes past 85 percent in the wet season, which runs May into October. On the barrier island and along the Intracoastal you get salt on top of that, and the houses in Victoria Park, Rio Vista and Coral Ridge that hold most of this city's older media were built long before anyone thought about where a box of film should live.
On April 12th 2023 Fort Lauderdale took 25.91 inches of rain in about twelve hours, the wettest day ever recorded here, and a lot of garages on the mainland side stood in water for days. Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017 did the other version of the same damage: the power goes, the air conditioning goes with it, and a closet that was stable for thirty years spends a week at outdoor humidity.
Where they end up instead: a climate-controlled floor, not a garage in August.
Every year a tape waits in a Fort Lauderdale closet is footage you do not get back. We are in Fort Lauderdale on Thursdays.
(561) 235-7808How it works from Fort Lauderdale
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 Fort Lauderdale on Thursdays. 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 Fort Lauderdale 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 Fort Lauderdale 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. Fort Lauderdale families trust us because the process is simple: we come to you, we carry it ourselves, and our own team does the work.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
The city your collection came from.
Fort Lauderdale had about two thousand people in it in 1920. Everything in a family album here was made by somebody who arrived with a camera and started shooting from their first week, which is why the collections skew to slides and 8mm from the fifties and sixties, and why they have all been sitting a few blocks from salt water ever since.
Bonnet House Museum and Gardens
A 1920s waterfront estate on 35 acres between the Intracoastal and the beach, kept as the Bartlett family left it. Generations have walked the grounds on school trips and at the orchid shows, so it turns up constantly in slide trays and on camcorder tape.
Official site → Photo Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Stranahan House
The oldest surviving house in the city, built in 1901 by Frank Stranahan as a trading post on the New River and later the family home. It anchors every local school unit on how Fort Lauderdale started, so most people who grew up here have a photograph of themselves on its porch.
Official site → Photo Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Fort Lauderdale Beach
The public beach along A1A, with the wave wall and the promenade rebuilt in the 1990s, and the stretch that made the city famous during the spring break years. It is one of the most photographed places in Fort Lauderdale and it is in nearly every collection we open.
Official site → Photo Infrogmation of New Orleans, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale
The city's main art museum, in the 1986 Edward Larrabee Barnes building on Las Olas at Andrews, holding the William Glackens collection. It has been a downtown fixture for four decades and shows up in a lot of photographs taken on Las Olas outings.
Official site → Photo Wmpearl, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
Riverwalk Fort Lauderdale
A linear park along the north bank of the New River through downtown, launched by a 1986 bond issue and now the setting for the city's festivals. Families have been filming the same stretch of river and the Andrews Avenue bridge since the late eighties.
Official site → Photo Phillip Pessar, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
State park
Hugh Taylor Birch State Park
A 180 acre state park between the Intracoastal and the ocean on A1A, the former estate of Hugh Taylor Birch, with a freshwater lagoon and one of the last stands of maritime hammock on the barrier island. It has been the default Broward picnic and family reunion spot for generations.
Where our Fort Lauderdale customers are
182K
Population
1911
Incorporated
24 mi
To our studio
35 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 35 minutes from Fort Lauderdale.
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
What Fort Lauderdale-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, Fort Lauderdale
The questions South Florida callers actually ask.
Do you pick up in Fort Lauderdale?
Yes. We are in Broward on Thursdays and Fort Lauderdale is on that route. We come to the house, the condo or the boat. Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more anywhere in the county, and $30 plus mileage below that. We count and tag everything with you there and leave you a written list before anything goes in the van.
How far is your studio from Fort Lauderdale?
About 24 miles, roughly 35 minutes up I-95 or the Turnpike depending on the hour. That is our only location. There is no drop-off counter in Fort Lauderdale and no partner shop, so it is the Thursday van or a drive up to Boca. Everything is digitized by our own staff in our own building.
What formats are most common from Fort Lauderdale households?
Three things, mostly. VHS and camcorder tape from the mid eighties to the early two thousands. Carousel trays of 35mm slides from the families who came down in the fifties and sixties. And 8mm home movies from those same decades. We also get a steady amount of loose prints in shoeboxes and magnetic albums, which in this climate are usually in worse shape than the tape.
My VHS tapes are from the early 1980s. Is the content still recoverable?
In most cases yes. Tape that has sat in a Broward garage is often stiff, sometimes sticky, and sometimes has mold on the edge of the pack, but it generally still plays once it has been cleaned and the shell has been dealt with. We inspect every tape before it goes on a deck. If one is genuinely gone we tell you that and you are not charged for it, rather than handing you a file of noise.
Can you digitize a whole estate or a condo clear-out at once?
Yes, and a lot of our Broward work is exactly that. If you are emptying a parent's house on a deadline, call and we will get the van out on the next Thursday run or sooner if the closing is tight. We take the whole lot, count it at the studio and send an itemised quote before any work starts, so you are not deciding what matters while standing in a garage. Nothing is thrown away without asking you first.
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 Fort Lauderdale 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 Fort Lauderdale
We come to you on Thursdays, 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 — handled in-house in Boca Raton, never outsourced.
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