Am considering taking advantage of the year end sales at Legacybox to do a boatload of home movies etc. in formats ranging from Beta/VHS to Hi-8 and DV.

Other than costs (which are reduced at the moment) has anyone had any issues with their services?

Thanks in advance for any shared experiences.

I'm kind of surprised that nobody's chimed in. Not completely sure how to interpret that.

I looked into it a few years ago and for the quality I was wanting and the volume I had, it would be cheaper for me to purchase the equipment.

Some of these companies will send that box overseas to places like India to have it physically scanned. If you have one of a kind family heirloom photos, I personally would not take that risk.

I have also heard that if you have your items in a particular order, chances are they will not be in that order when return. If you do send something, you may want to number those items in some way.

I just looked for their technical specifications on scanning photos and can find nothing. Everything points back to specs concerning audio/video and it honestly doesn't tell me enough. I have researched technial specs on this stuff painfully over the past year for a project at work which will involve over one million articles to be scanned. The best resource I have found is Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative. They have a guide for still images and one for AV. These things really nerd out on the details.

With all of this said, you can probably buy a "good" quality auto feed photo scanner for under $500 if you just want a digital copy. If you have items that are damaged, torn, mold, etc. it will take a professional to fix that and LegacyBox won't do it. They will splice film, but that's about it. Everything else is automated which means you "may" lose some pixels/data. The devil is in the details.

There was some AI software that came out this past year that looks like a game changer to me. It can take VHS tapes after they are scanned and upscale them to 4K viewing. The results I saw online were extremely impressive. I'd imagine in another year, everyone and their mother will have adopted this tech. AI is probably something I will be adding to my scanning contract at work if we ever get funding.

Digitizing stuff is time consuming, particularly if dealing with dust, scratches and image enhancement. Several years ago, I spent a whole Winter doing my most important stuff. Very much a labor of love so only so tedious and it was a long Winter.

Here is a sample of an AI fix. That's probably way better than 95% of us could ever do.

Thanks for the inputs!

My application is roughly 40 family videotapes - a mix of MiniDV, Hi-8mm and VHS. I have working players (VHS deck and/or camcorders) for those tapes. There is no particular deadline.

As an alternative to Legacybox, what equipment/software would one need to connect to these and grab the tapes? With their current sale (60% off) the economics of 40 tapes at Legacybox is about $500, so think of that as an upper bound for a budget. (I won't be making any more content on those formats, so spending more than that wouldn't make a lot of sense)

RE: quality. From their website, the Legacybox video output format is 480p. website description of video output format

quote:

Your digitized tapes will be converted to 480p at about 24-29 frames per second –that’s half the resolution of HD and a lower refresh rate than today’s TVs.

Fun Nerdy Tech Specs (for those who really want to know!)

H.264 MPEG-4 AVC (part 10), 480p, 24-29 FPS, SD, Progressive, VBR 1500-3000 kbps
DVD variable encoding M2v, compressed depending on length, authored to VOB

With respect to still photos/slides, I also have those, but those I'll do myself. I'm not a pro but am well equipped (hardware, software and Photoshop add-ins) for still photos/slides and have a fair bit of experience scanning and repairing/enhancing.

That said it's a means to an end - it'll be interesting to see if the new AI features do away with the need to tweak and if so I'll be glad of the time-saving. The examples in jcsabolt2's post above are most impressive.

I have an ongoing digitizing project. I sent Legacybox 4 boxes of VHS tapes and some Hi8 cassettes. They were unable to digitize a few, the rest came back just fine. I do have a digitizer that I can use for VHS tapes; but I kept having problems with getting a tape player to play Hi8 tapes, so sent those to Legacybox. There is no loss of quality compared to original VHS, but no gain either. I would recommend them.

Like you, I am digitizing slides and prints myself, using an Olympus OM-1 (the new digital one), tethered to a computer; and a Nikon slide holder for the slides. For prints, I have a Kaiser copy stand ordered from Amazon (their cheapest one), and use either a macro lens or a regular zoom lens to photograph the print.

This was our Christmas gift from our kids a few years ago. We sent them about a dozen VHS tapes and about 75 slides. Worked out great.

The slides were all shot pre-internet so it was nice to be able to email some really special photos to family members. It had been years since the tapes had been watched and seeing and hearing family members that had passed was super emotional.

Thanks for the further experience details. Just placed a 40 item order under the Christmas sale, and will send them off a bunch of mixed video tapes shortly.

Do you get your originals back?

My wife has used them successfully twice. She thinks it’s a good deal.

quote:

Originally posted by Fenris:
Do you get your originals back?

Yes.

quote:

After the digitization process is complete, we will ship your completed Legacybox. In it you will find your original tapes, reels, and photos, along with your new thumb drives or DVDs/CDs. If you purchased Digital Access, we'll send an email with a link to your account.

link

They give you a sticker for each item. I made a spreadsheet with title, notes on content, and item number. That really helped to keep track, especially when a few tapes couldn’t be digitized.

Well, they were backlogged on 8mm tape digitizing, but I got mine back last week.

It took longer than they'd estimated (had it in hand since Jan 31, so four full months) but they did a very good job. The process was easy and well-documented and everything from boxes to labels was highly professional. If considering them, be aware while they are pricey, they routinely have pretty deep-discounted sales, so be patient, and pounce when the half-off sales hit.

My next step is to figure out how to use these .mp4 files and turn them into something coherent, vs just the stream-of-consciousness as recorded. It would also be nice to clean up some of the audio, get rid of background noise and hiss. Maybe also blend in some still images of some scanned photos? Adding titles/subtitles?

I guess that leads into full-boat video editing if I go off the deep end. I'm on a Windows 10 platform - open to buying (or subscribing) to good apps, hopefully without super-steep learning curves and opaque UIs.

What have other folks done/used for working with digitized home movies?