Hollywood, FL Media Preservation | VHS, Photo & Film Services
By Greg E.
Our table at 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. Every order starts with somebody going through the box by hand. Hollywood customers get the same call, and the same table.
Does Forever Studios serve Hollywood, Florida?
Yes. We drive to you, and your collection never enters a shipping network. There is no drop-off counter in Hollywood, 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, 31 miles up the road.
- The studio
- 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. 31 miles from Hollywood. One building, no partner shops.
- Getting it to us
- Concierge pickup across Hollywood, 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 45 minutes from Hollywood. 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 Hollywood1
building your media ever enters
45 minutes
door to door, Hollywood 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 Hollywood address.
What Hollywood 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 Hollywood tape was shot between the early eighties and the early two thousands, and it follows the city's calendar: birthdays in Emerald Hills and Hollywood Hills back yards, anniversaries booked into halls off Hollywood Boulevard, and a great deal of footage shot walking the Broadwalk with the camera pointed at the water. Tape out of a beachside storage cage often arrives soft, with white specks at the edge of the pack.
- VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Hi8, Video8, Digital8, MiniDV, Betamax
- Cleaned and treated before anything goes near a deck
- MP4 on USB, DVD or digital delivery, priced per tape
From $0.50 per photo
Slide and photo scanning
Hollywood has been photographed by its own residents since it was a vacation town, so the print and slide boxes here are usually the deepest part of a collection. Kodachrome carousels of the beach and the Broadwalk, envelopes of drugstore prints from Young Circle, school and church photographs. Prints stored near the coast fade and cockle, and slides pick up mount warp in the carousel.
- 600 DPI archival scanning, prints, albums, slides and negatives
- Oversized and panoramic prints handled flat, one at a time
- Color-shift correction on faded Ektachrome and Kodachrome
From $15 per reel
8mm and 16mm film
This is the section that matters most here, because the film predates the tape by two generations. A city that filled up in the twenties and kept growing through the forties, fifties and sixties produced a lot of home movies: the beach and the Broadwalk, the old beach hotels, band concerts at the bandshell, first houses going up in Hollywood Lakes. Acetate that old shrinks, goes acidic and parts at the splices, so the work is as much careful handling as it is scanning.
- Regular 8, Super 8 and 16mm, sound or silent, any reel size
- Frame by frame on a gentle path, not a camera pointed at a screen
- Splices repaired and dry reels conditioned by hand before anything runs
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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood callers not to leave it another season.
~75%
Average relative humidity in Hollywood
85%+
Routine wet season readings
Broward humidity sits around 75 percent most of the year and pushes past 85 percent in the wet season, and the muggy stretch here runs close to eight months. On the beach side you get salt on top of that, working on tape shells, reel cans and slide mounts. The low-lying blocks along the Intracoastal, on Hollywood Beach and near the C-10 Canal sit in active flood zones, and that is where a lot of this city's oldest media lives.
Wilma flooded the city in 2005 and Irma took the power out across it in 2017, and the storms that matter most for the film we receive are older still: Cleo in 1964, Betsy in 1965, David in 1979. Every one of those weeks is a week a closet spent at outdoor humidity. Sixty year old acetate does not get a second chance at that.
Where they end up instead: a climate-controlled floor, not a garage in August.
Every year a tape waits in a Hollywood closet is footage you do not get back. We are in Hollywood on Thursdays.
(561) 235-7808How it works from Hollywood
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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood 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. Hollywood families trust us because the process is simple: we come to you, we carry it ourselves, and our own team does the work.
Hollywood, Florida
The city your collection came from.
Hollywood was laid out in the 1920s as a planned city with a beachfront promenade and circles instead of intersections. That means the family media here starts earlier than anywhere else in Broward. We regularly open boxes from Hollywood addresses holding 8mm reels shot decades before the first camcorder existed.
Hollywood Beach Broadwalk
The paved oceanfront promenade running along Hollywood Beach, lined with small hotels and cafes. It is one of the most filmed places in the city, and almost every Hollywood collection we open has Broadwalk footage in it, often the same stretch shot again and again across four decades.
Official site → Photo Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
ArtsPark at Young Circle
A park filling the traffic circle named for the city's founder at the head of Hollywood Boulevard, with an amphitheatre, an arts pavilion and a standing events calendar. The circle has been the centre of town since the twenties, so it appears in everything from fifties film of parades to camcorder footage of concerts.
Official site → Photo Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Hollywood Beach Theater and Plaza
The open-air bandshell and plaza on the Broadwalk at Johnson Street, a free public performance space that has hosted band concerts on the beach for generations. Free beachfront concerts are a classic reason to bring a camera, which is why this spot shows up in both 8mm reels and later camcorder tape.
Official site → Photo Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
The Center, Hollywood Art and Culture
The city's nonprofit visual and performing arts centre, open since 1975 in a 1920s building near the Intracoastal and known as the Art and Culture Center of Hollywood until its recent rename. Generations of Hollywood children took classes, performed and had work hung here, which is exactly the sort of thing parents shot on Super 8 and later on camcorder.
Official site → Photo Ebyabe, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Downtown Hollywood
The original 1920s commercial spine running west from Young Circle, still lined with the low storefronts from the founder's plan and now a walkable restaurant and gallery strip. Anyone who grew up here has photographs taken on this boulevard, and it is the backdrop that most obviously dates a photo by decade.
Official site → Photo Tamanoeconomico, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Anne Kolb Nature Center
A county coastal mangrove preserve on the Intracoastal side of the city, with an observation tower, exhibit hall, marina and boardwalk trails. It is the standard Hollywood school field trip, and the view from the tower is a photograph almost every local family has taken at least once.
Photo quyentr, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Where our Hollywood customers are
155K+
Population
1925
Incorporated
31 mi
To our studio
45 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 45 minutes from Hollywood.
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
What Hollywood-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, Hollywood
The questions South Florida callers actually ask.
Do you pick up in Hollywood?
Yes. We are in Broward on Thursdays and Hollywood is on that route, whether that is a condo on the beach, a house in Emerald Hills or a unit off Hollywood Boulevard. Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more anywhere in the county, and $30 plus mileage below that. We sort the collection with you before anything goes in the van.
How far is your studio from Hollywood?
About 31 miles, roughly 45 minutes straight up I-95 with no tolls. That is our only location. There is no drop-off counter in Hollywood and no partner shop. Everything is digitized by our own staff in our own building, which is why we can tell you where your originals are at any point.
What formats are most common from Hollywood households?
More old film than we see from the newer Broward cities, which makes sense for a city laid out in the 1920s. Regular 8 and Super 8 from the forties through the seventies comes in constantly, along with 16mm from families who bought the better camera. After that it is 35mm slides and carousels, albums of prints, and then VHS, VHS-C and Hi8 from the eighties and nineties. Most Hollywood collections are all of it in the same closet.
Is 1940s film or a 1980s VHS tape still recoverable?
Usually yes, and the film is often in better shape than people expect. Acetate that has shrunk, gone vinegary or dried out at the splices still scans, because we pull it frame by frame on a gentle path and repair the splices by hand first rather than running it through a projector. Tape is the more fragile of the two. A 1980s VHS with mold in the pack is recoverable if it is cleaned before anything plays it, and that order is the whole thing. Bring it in before you try to play it.
Can you digitize a whole estate or a condo clear-out at once?
Yes, and a lot of our Hollywood work is exactly that. If a parent has passed or a condo has to be emptied on a deadline, we come out, sort the collection with you on site so you are not paying to digitize things you do not want, and take the whole lot back in one trip. You get an itemised count before any work starts. Pickup is free at that size.
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, film is $15 a reel. 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 Hollywood 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 Hollywood
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. All work is handled in-house in Boca Raton, never outsourced.
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