Tampa VHS to Digital, Photo Scanning & Film Transfer | Forever Studios
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. Tampa customers get the same call, 265 miles away.
Does Forever Studios serve Tampa, Florida?
Yes. By mail, or the drive down if you would rather hand them over yourself. There is no drop-off counter in Tampa, no partner shop and no franchise, because every tape, reel, slide and photograph is digitized by our own staff in our own building. When it is the only copy your family has left, that is worth the extra step.
- The studio
- 1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208, Boca Raton. 265 miles from Tampa. One building, no partner shops.
- Getting it to us
- Prepaid insured kit, out the same day you call. About two days by USPS Priority.
- 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
265 miles away, and that is the whole point.
Plenty of companies will tell you they have a location in Tampa. We have one studio, in Boca Raton, and your media never leaves it.
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 Tampa265
miles, Tampa to our door
1
building your media ever enters
Logged by name on arrival. Checked three times by hand. Shipped back insured.
Call the studio
A real person answers.
Tell us what is in the box and we will get a prepaid insured kit out to your Tampa address the same day.
What Tampa sends us
Bay Area 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
Gasparilla parades, Bucs tailgates, holidays spanning decades. Florida humidity is already working on them.
- VHS, VHS-C, S-VHS, Hi8, MiniDV, Digital8, Betamax
- Frame capture, one tape at a time
- MP4 on USB, DVD or digital delivery
From $15 per cassette
Audio cassette and reel-to-reel
Family stories and music recordings. Tape stock from that era is fragile now, and the playback decks are getting scarce.
- Studio transfer, both sides captured
- Hiss and noise reduction, MP3 and WAV
- Reel-to-reel quoted per reel
From $0.50 per photo
Photo scanning and restoration
Prints, albums, slides and negatives. Including the box nobody has opened since the move.
- 600 DPI archival scanning
- Color and contrast restoration by hand
- Every print size, originals returned protected
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 from Tampa and we will price it before the kit goes out.
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 Tampa 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 Tampa callers not to leave it another season.
~75%
Average relative humidity in Tampa
85%+
Routine wet season readings
Garages, attics and storage units stay hot and damp for months at a time. Seminole Heights, Ybor City, Palma Ceia and South Tampa are full of older properties where collections have sat in spaces that were never climate controlled.
Add hurricane season and the flood risk in the low-lying areas near Hillsborough Bay and the Hillsborough River, and every year of delay costs real footage. Mold, binder breakdown and mechanical failure do not reverse.
Where they end up instead: a climate-controlled floor, not a garage in August.
Every year a tape waits in a Tampa closet is footage you do not get back. Start with a phone call, not a box.
(561) 235-7808How it works from Tampa
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 ships.
Step 2
The kit arrives
Prepaid and insured, sent to your Tampa address with padded inserts. Drop it at any shipping location, two days by USPS Priority.
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 return to Tampa insured 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, our own return shipment to Tampa is insured at declared value.
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. Tampa families trust us because the process is simple: request a kit, ship your collection, and let our team do the rest.
Tampa, Florida
The city your collection came from.
Tampa grew up on cigar smoke and shipping lanes, built by immigrants who carried their stories in photographs and handwritten letters. The families who shaped Ybor City, West Tampa and the waterfront left behind collections that deserve to outlast the humidity.
Tampa Riverwalk
A 2.6 mile pedestrian trail along the Hillsborough River linking the downtown parks, museums and waterfront. The final stretch was completed in 2016.
Official site → Photo Miosotis Jade, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Ybor City
Founded by cigar manufacturer Vicente Martinez Ybor in the 1880s and a National Historic Landmark District since 1990. Brick streets, wrought-iron balconies, and Cuban, Italian and Spanish heritage.
Official site → Photo SharkshockUSA, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Henry B. Plant Museum
Housed in the silver minarets of the former Tampa Bay Hotel, built between 1888 and 1891, chronicling the Gilded Age tourism boom that put Tampa on the map.
Official site → Photo Ebyabe, CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
The Florida Aquarium
A 250,000 square foot aquarium on the Channelside waterfront, open since 1995, with more than 7,000 aquatic plants and animals.
Official site → Photo MatthewHoobin, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons
Tampa Museum of Art
On Curtis Hixon Waterfront Park beside the Riverwalk, showing classical antiquities and contemporary art in a modernist building overlooking the river.
Official site → Photo Chan Bliss, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Busch Gardens Tampa Bay
A 335 acre African-themed adventure park combining roller coasters with a large zoological collection. Open since 1959 and a Tampa institution ever since.
Official site → Photo FirstDrop87, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
Where our Tampa customers are
410K+
Population
1849
Incorporated
265 mi
To our studio
3 hours 45 minutes
Drive time
Or bring it yourself
Rather not mail it?
You are welcome to drive it down and hand it to us. Same studio, same people, 265 miles from Tampa.
1000 Clint Moore Road, Suite 208
Boca Raton, FL 33487
Open Monday to Friday 9 to 6, Saturday 10 to 5
What Tampa-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, Tampa
The questions Bay Area callers actually ask.
What do Tampa families usually send?
VHS is the top format, often Gasparilla parades, family gatherings in South Tampa, Ybor City outings and youth sports across the Bay Area. We also see plenty of Hi8 and MiniDV, 8mm film, photo albums and 35mm slides.
How do I get my media to you from Tampa?
Call and we send a prepaid kit with packaging, insurance and tracking included. Drop it at any shipping location in the Bay Area. USPS Priority Mail from Tampa reaches us in about two days. You are also welcome to drive it down, about 3 hours 45 minutes, but nobody has to.
Can you digitize Gasparilla and Ybor City footage?
Yes. Gasparilla footage is some of the most recognizable media we receive from the Bay Area. We also see a lot from Ybor City, Channelside and Bucs games. All of it comes back as high quality MP4.
I have 8mm cigar factory home movies from my Ybor City family.
That is exactly the kind of film worth doing properly. 8mm from Ybor City's cigar industry era is historically significant as well as personal. We scan frame by frame at high resolution, and we handle vinegar syndrome and warping.
Is shipping safe for irreplaceable tapes?
Our kits include padded inserts and sturdy boxing, and we insure every shipment in both directions with full tracking. At the studio each item is logged against your order on arrival. Thousands of customers have shipped to us without incident.
What does it cost in total, including shipping from Tampa?
Shipping is included in the prepaid kit, both directions. The digitizing cost depends on what you send. Ten tapes at $12 each is $120. Estimates are free, so call with a rough count and we will give you a real number.
Preserving Florida's most important memories since 2007
Why families send it 265 miles.
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 ships. One call and we will get a kit out to you.
Ship it from Tampa
We send a prepaid kit and cover the shipping both ways. Logged on arrival, digitized in Boca Raton, returned to you insured at declared value.
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.
