Betamax

TownsWeb Archiving’s Betamax digitisation service uses experienced technicians who are experts in scanning and converting Betamax tapes to digital. Turning your Betamax to digital is a prudent step, protecting your material from permanent loss or damage and making it quickly accessible.

Find out how much your project could cost

Hear what our clients have to say about our digitisation services

TownsWeb Archiving have proved very able and extremely helpful in supporting us to bring a local heritage alive for local people. We would certainly recommend TownsWeb Archiving to other libraries, museums and archives.

Lisa Keys

Exhibition and Display Officer

We are delighted with the results. Without TownsWeb Archiving’s services we could not have completed the work in time and on budget. Their staff have been nothing but approachable, helpful and attentive and I can strongly recommend their services.

Martin Devereux

Head of Digital

TownsWeb offered us a complete end-to-end service, from scanning and transcription, to web design and content management software. Their work was completed quickly and to a high standard, and we are extremely pleased with the results.

Janice Miller

Information & Archives Officer

Digitisation Frequently Asked Questions

At TownsWeb Archiving we use high-resolution scanners to capture your content, FFV1 lossless files or 10 bit uncompressed video files in .mkv or .mov containers. We create viewing files as H264 encoded .mp4 files or DVD and we are confident that we can deliver any other digital video files, according to your requirements and needs.

All content is captured by our highly trained digitisation technicians before undergoing a formal quality assurance checking procedure. The final step in the process is the delivery of your electronic files by hard drive.

As part of our audio visual digitisation service we will check the condition of the film to ensure it is robust enough to be scanned and perform minor remedial works if it is not. This includes:

Checking the perforations and splices (joins) in the film – and repairing these where necessary
Checking that there is sufficient head and tail at either end of the film – adding this if there is not

Once we have confirmed that the film is transferable, in order to ensure the clearest, highest quality scans possible we will then clean the film using our gentle cleaning system before digitising it.

Colour grading is the process of altering and enhancing the colour of a motion picture, video image, or still image either electronically or digitally.

Once we have scanned your film to produce DPX master files, our expert technicians will then adjust the chrominance and luminance of the files to produce a final grade.

As part of our film digitisation service, we also offer several additional optional services to restore and enhance the digital versions of your film.

These include:

Image stabilisation
Flicker removal
Dirt removal
Scratch removal

Each of these processes is run separately on your digitised film, so to apply all four services requires four “passes” over the digital files.

As standard we can provide:

DPX files (high resolution master preservation copy)
MOV files (“prores” copy)
MP4 files (lower resolution access copy, ideal for use on the web)
Most other industry standard formats you may require.

Capture the data within your Betamax collection

Digitisation places your betamax collection in the perfect format to capture the valuable data contained within it, offering great potential for system integration and online access and discovery.

We can capture the data within your collection with audio visual transcription. Identifying every spoken word, our specialist software captures and converts audio in a speech-to-text conversion, transcribing any text format and creating a permanent, secure and highly accurate record. Every spoken word can also be time stamped, making your audio content completely searchable.

Learn more about Audio Visual Transcription

Publish your Betamax collection online

PastView is the perfect platform for publishing your betacam online, offering great potential for access and discovery. Manage and publish your collection with:

Media Player: create engaging ways to discover your digitised and born-digital AV collections
Item Metadata: assigning attributes to create an efficient collection structure
Linked Relations: making the connections between your items that will broaden search results
Digital Downloads: making select items uniquely accessible in order to generate revenue