VHS Conversion & Photo Scanning in Plantation, FL | Forever Studios
By Zachary G.
Our table at 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. Every order starts with somebody going through the box by hand. Plantation customers get the same call, and the same table.
Does Forever Studios serve Plantation, Florida?
Yes. We drive to you, and your collection never enters a shipping network. There is no drop-off counter in Plantation, 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, 26 miles up the road.
- The studio
- 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. 26 miles from Plantation. One building, no partner shops.
- Getting it to us
- Concierge pickup across Plantation, 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 Plantation. 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 Plantation1
building your media ever enters
35 minutes
door to door, Plantation 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 Plantation address.
What Plantation 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
The tape from Plantation runs from the early eighties through the two thousands and follows the city's own build-out westward: recitals and graduations, birthdays in the back garden of an acre lot, weekends at Heritage Park, and a great deal of footage shot around the malls and the golf club. 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
From $0.50 per photo
Slide and photo scanning
The original acre-lot neighbourhoods are old enough that what comes out of them is slides: Kodachrome and Ektachrome from the fifties through the seventies, still in carousels and trays, photographed when the streets were new and the trees were not. Alongside them, album pages from the eighties and nineties in the western neighbourhoods. Fifty years on, the dyes have shifted, and the shift is not reversible in the carousel.
- 600 DPI archival scanning, prints, albums, slides and negatives
- Carousels and trays unloaded and sequenced by us
- Color-shift correction on faded Ektachrome and Kodachrome
From $15 per reel
8mm and 16mm film
Film here is the first layer, and it is the layer nobody has looked at since the projector broke. Regular 8 and Super 8 from the late fifties and the sixties, shot on streets that had just been cut out of the farmland. Reels that have sat in a Florida garage often have vinegar syndrome or shrinkage, and once vinegar starts it spreads to whatever shares the shelf.
- 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
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 Plantation 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 Plantation 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 Plantation callers not to leave it another season.
~75%
Average relative humidity in Plantation
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. The county takes about 60 inches of rain a year. None of that troubles a tape in air conditioning. It is a serious problem for a tape in a garage on an acre lot, where the binder holding magnetic particles to the backing absorbs moisture, softens and sheds onto the heads the first time you press play.
Water has been in this city's story since the beginning: the first houses here were flooded and many destroyed during 93 consecutive days of rain and two hurricanes in 1947. Wilma crossed Broward on October 24th 2005 with a 99 mile per hour gust recorded at Fort Lauderdale and knocked out power to more than three million customers. Irma followed on September 10th 2017, six to ten inches of rain across the county. 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 Plantation closet is footage you do not get back. We are in Plantation on Thursdays.
(561) 235-7808How it works from Plantation
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 Plantation 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 Plantation 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 Plantation 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. Plantation families trust us because the process is simple: we come to you, we carry it ourselves, and our own team does the work.
Plantation, Florida
The city your collection came from.
Plantation was sold as acre lots. The first houses opened on East Acre Drive in 1947 at ten thousand dollars for two bedrooms, room for a garden and fruit trees, and the city incorporated in 1953 with under five hundred people in it. That original core is old enough that the earliest reels we open from this city are 1950s film, while the bulk of the tape comes from the westward push that followed.
Regional park
Plantation Heritage Park
An 88.5 acre county regional park on South Fig Tree Lane, open daily from eight in the morning. Its signature features are the Anne Kolb Memorial Trail and a grove of rare tropical fruit trees, along with Heritage Hall, disc golf, fishing and a nature trail. It is the default place in this city for a family gathering, which puts it on a great deal of tape.
Local history
Plantation Historical Museum
The city's own museum on North Fig Tree Lane, covering the Everglades drainage that made the land, the founding and build-out of the city, the original fire engine and early department equipment, and Seminole and Tequesta material. It is open Wednesday to Saturday and runs tours for schools and camps by appointment.
Museum
Young At Art Museum
Founded in 1987 and opened as a storefront in Plantation in 1989, the children's art museum spent two decades in Davie before returning here in March 2021, to a space inside the Broward Mall on West Broward Boulevard. It draws around fifty thousand visitors a year and is open Wednesday through Sunday. Two generations of Broward children have a birthday or a school trip here somewhere in the family footage.
Golf and parkland
Plantation Preserve Golf Course and Club
The city-owned course opened in February 2006 on the site of the Plantation Golf Club, which dated to 1950 and was one of the first things built here. It plays 7,148 yards from the championship tees with a wetlands preserve dividing the nines, and the property carries a 55 acre linear park with a mile and a half of multi-use trail open to everyone, not only golfers.
City park
Rae Carole Armstrong Liberty Tree Park
A nine acre park on Northwest 5th Street, opened in 1976 as 5th Street Park and renamed for a national oak-planting project marking the Liberty Tree in Boston, then renamed again for the city's mayor from 1999 to 2011. The city bought adjoining land from the Elk's Club in 2003 to expand it. The brick paths and the bronze statue around the tree were given over the years by the Plantation Junior Woman's Club.
Civic
Helen B. Hoffman Plantation Library
The city runs its own library, independent of the county system. It began in 1961 as a volunteer project in a sixth-grade classroom at Peters Elementary, moved into the Community Center when the city took it over in 1963, and opened its own 9,700 square foot building on October 6th 1968. The children's wing was dedicated in 1980 and the council gave the library its present name in January 1981.
Where our Plantation customers are
99K+
Population
1953
Incorporated
26 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 Plantation.
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
What Plantation-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, Plantation
The questions South Florida callers actually ask.
Do you pick up in Plantation?
Yes. We are in Broward on Thursdays and Plantation is on that route. We come to the house. Pickup is free on orders of $250 or more anywhere in the county, 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.
How far is your studio from Plantation?
About 26 miles, roughly 35 minutes up the Turnpike or I-95 depending on the hour. That is our only location. There is no drop-off counter in Plantation and no partner shop. Everything is digitized by our own staff in our own building in Boca Raton, so nothing is shipped out of state or handed to a third party.
What formats are most common from Plantation households?
It depends which side of the city you are on. The original acre-lot neighbourhoods send slides and 8mm film from the fifties, sixties and seventies, often still in carousels. The western neighbourhoods send VHS, Hi8 and MiniDV from the eighties through the two thousands, and album pages. A lot of households here have both, in the same closet, and have never looked at the older half.
The slides are in carousels. Do I have to take them out?
No. Leave them in the trays and hand us the carousels. We unload and sequence them ourselves and keep the order they were in, which matters more than people expect once there are a thousand of them. Kodachrome and Ektachrome from that era have almost always shifted colour, and we correct for that at the scan rather than leave you with the magenta.
Can you digitize a whole estate or a house clear-out at once?
Yes, and that is a large part of what we do here. 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 Thursday 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 Plantation 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 Plantation
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.
