About Magic Memories Box

Hello,

My name is Adam and I am the creator of Magic Memories Box.  Magic Memories Box is a service, designed to make it easy and convenient, to transfer your old home movies and photos to digital while keeping them organized and providing an archival solution for your precious content.

I started Magic Memories Box after I was unable to find a company to convert my own videotapes to digital.  My background is in professional video production. For ten years I worked in broadcast television before starting a business, Santiam Media, that provides custom technological solutions to broadcasters, live streamers, and professional video creators.  Many of my early professional video projects only exist on video tape, not to mention my collection of home videos.  Knowing that videotape slowly degrades over time, I wanted to transfer my tapes to digital.

There is no shortage of businesses and individuals advertising videotape to digital conversion services, but once I started to look into these services, I became very disappointed. The vast majority of these services would simply copy my tapes to DVD.  There is nothing wrong with this if a DVD is what you want, but personally speaking, I don’t even have a DVD player in my home anymore.  I also didn’t want to replace a box full of videotapes with a box full of discs. What I wanted was to have digital media files of my videos.

Again, it was possible, without too much searching, to find businesses that would copy my tapes to a digital media file.  But, things can get complicated when you are talking about converting a videotape to a media file like this-

Back in the days when videotapes ruled, we all watched our video content on CRT televisions.  These television displays used some incredibly clever engineering to take a low bandwidth video signal and trick our eyes into seeing a sharper images with smoother motion than what should have been possible. When converting a video signal that was designed for display on a CRT television, that signal needs to be processed in some way so it can be viewed on modern displays.

From my experience in broadcast television, I knew there were high-quality signal converters that did an excellent job converting the signal from a videotape and processing it so that it would look good on a modern display. However, I couldn’t find a single service to convert my tapes that used these high-quality broadcast converters.  They all used consumer grade hardware that, to convert the video signal, would throw away half of the image resolution and half of the temporal information, resulting in a low quality video capture.

Still, I figured having a low quality digital file of my videos was better than none at all. So, even though I wasn’t enthusiastic about it, I was still going to go ahead and have my tapes digitized.  I started shopping around the various services, trying to find the most affordable one, and they all seemed very similar. Actually, they were more than similar, they were exactly the same. Upon reading the fine print I learned that all of these different, competing services, were actually just one company.  They had various different websites and even worked with popular retailers, making it seem as if there were all these small businesses and different choices for consumers, but in reality it was all just one single business behind all of it.

Their price seemed rather high, but they were offering a sale, so with the sale the cost seemed a bit more palpable.  That was, until I actually started the process.  Despite costing several hundred dollars, even on sale, I still had to pay the full cost of shipping.  Also, it turns out the price they listed (and what was on sale) only covered the digitization of my items.  If I actually wanted to get a copy of my stuff, so I could see it, I had to pay more to get a download or some other copy.  This, of course, was also charged at the full rate and not subject to the sale that was being promoted.  All this meant that the total cost would be nearly double the rate they advertised.

Afterwards, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much better such a service should be.  It was upsetting to think about how much people were paying to convert their home videos and were getting such a sub-standard service.

So, I decided to launch new digitizing service that would put the customer experience first.

First and foremost, I wanted my digitizing service to offer the best possible quality digital conversion.  If I was going to ask people to pay money to convert their home movies to digital, they deserved to know that those movies were converted professionally, with the highest quality broadcast-grade conversion available.

Next, I wanted to make it easy for customers to access their content.  To realize this goal, I created the proprietary Magic Memories Cloud platform online.  This online interface allows you to view all of your converted media online, for no extra cost, where you can download or watch it anytime you want.  Being stored online like this also gives you a backup copy of your content.  This way, even if there is some unspeakable disaster, your media will have an online backup.

Finally, I wanted to be as straightforward with the pricing as possible.  The price you see on the Magic Memories Box website is how much you pay. That is it. We cover all the shipping costs, and the lifetime cloud storage and access is provided at no extra charge. Other services will hide small fees and costs or surprise you with extra charges.  That just isn’t how we do things.

I hope that if you are in the market to convert your home movies to digital that you will consider Magic Memories Box.  A tremendous amount of hard work has gone into turning Magic Memories Box into the best possible video digitizing solution for consumers.  It is a service that I am proud to stand behind.

Thank you,

Adam