Revenge is sweet. Last year an old lady asked me to transfer some home video to DVD, she dropped off the tapes at my house. Next day she messaged via facebook wanting the tapes back undone, except one her daughters 21st birthday from 40 years ago, for which she wanted two copies on DVD, I had already transferred two tapes, but not the birthday one, my loss of time etc, so I did the birthday tape, only a 30min VHS-C tape, easy to do. Next day she picked up the tape & DVD's, complained about the cost and told me that another local had quoted her £5 per tape to run to DVD, she paid my price for the one tape and left. In the middle of the birthday tape was a 10 second clip of the old lady, 40 years previous on the floor in (I presume) her lounge wearing not so flattering lingerie, legs akimbo 🙂 If this kinda thing is ever spotted on peoples tapes, I edit out, but it is rare for me to watch more than two mins of peoples tapes, it was just chance that I spotted that clip and unfortunate that I just left it in😇

I understand that it sometimes can feel very personal as we have some interesting stories as well. Thanks for your continued support of the DCC format and DCC Museum.

To avoid these problems, make a document with conditions, an agreement, that they need to accept before any service. In this document you describe the rules of the service and what you do when things go wrong caused by you or customer. Let customers pay BEFORE any processing. After receiving the tapes, analyze the quality first and report extra costs. They must pay the extra costs before any processing take place. If they don't do it, you return the tapes, refund the costs minus administation/investigation and postage costs. This kind of info must be in this document. Also in case of somebody send you tapes without paying for it, the tapes are lost. This kind of info must be in this "general rules" document. Such document can avoid such bad customer behaviour if you document the process carrefully in any detail.

Really enjoyed this departure from the norm. Really conversational, light and easy to follow. (i.e. less of a distraction from the work I'm really supposed to be doing!)

I'm only 5 mins into this video and know I'm going to love the rest! I'm sorry that you had so much trouble. Thanks for sharing!

I can tell by watching your excellent videos here on this channel that you are a class individual and a stickler for quality. I can also tell that you really know your “stuff”. I enjoy your channel and have learned a lot from you. Don’t let a few bad idiots bother you at all. Just don’t be afraid to be up front and direct with potential customers. Tell them that full payment is required up front and all checks take 10 business days to clear before shipping back their items. If they don’t like it, tell them they will have to go elsewhere. Their money is NOT worth the potential stress you could have to deal with. Do all this informing up front to weed out all idiots, hopefully.

Throw out Harriet’s tapes. It’s been too long. In the future, on your website, or in your sales emails, you should lay out all your rules up front. If payment is not received within a certain time, they forfeit their tapes and they get trashed. But you just never know, maybe old Harriet died or got real sick.

Could you make a video about postprocessing in video capture? Do you remove head switching noise, do you crop/resize video? Are you using some denoise filters? Do you give interlaced video or do you convert it to 50fps progressive?

Thanks for these insights! I had my share with customers too ... was working many years in a computer store, on both sides, the sales and hardware support. Now I'm selling organic veggies and everything around sustainable nutrition. Whats most fascinating now are the similarities of complaints between these two businesses, in general 🙂 It really shows that most miscredit is earned by unfulfilled expectations.

You are far more patient than I. I would not have tolerated these type of idiots lol. My customers sign an agreement with me before I provide a service. I've had a few people argue the toss and I point them back to the agreement. Saved me a few times. It will also support any small claims action.

Excellent video and it's great to hear your very interesting stories. Sorry those customers proved to be so unreasonable and that they caused you and your family such awful stress. From what you say in the video, I believe those experiences were some time ago so I hope you are all ok now. It can be extremely difficult dealing with the public. You seem to be a genuinely nice person and very passionate about the work you do. I'm sure 99% of your customers have nothing but positive words to say about you, so try to focus on how those customers feel about you and your work. You must have had lots of funny experiences over the years and also many of huge gratitude from your customers for preserving their extremely prescious memories. Maybe you could regale us with some of those tales in another video ? Best wishes to you all....chin up !!

yeah, it hurts when this is your primary income and you get such customers, I can very much relate to that. Nowadays, I just expect 10% of my work to go unpaid instead of stressing about "bad customers", it's just not worth it. It's their karma, I always say, maybe at least they'll leave a good review :) I think you're in the right, holding customers' devices until they pay for the service, it's just fair to get paid for the value provided. If you want my advice, I'd just send it back and forget about it (or blacklist the customer), accept the loss and move on, it's just a part of this business. I know it's easy for me to say because my bench is not my primary income, so take my advice with a grain of salt. Thank you for the great content!

I’m glad to hear it’s not just me that get bad Customers , by the sounds of it you have the same issues as I do with 8 track tape repairs , we both go out of our way to do the best job we can and go that extra mile because we love what we do. “It’s not you “ I rest my case ma lord !

Interesting video. I've had much the same experiences as you. It's very common to have customers complain that a certain relative or family event wasn't on the tapes they provided. They somehow think it's my fault. I also had a guy recently that decided to cancel the job after it was almost complete and refused to pay, even though he agreed to the quote. Its a tough one being self employed.

I've been doing the same for almost 30 years here in Canada. Of the tens of thousands of customers, you're bound to get a few bad apples here and there. I always say, full payment before releasing anything including their masters. Yes, you do get the odd customer who complains, but generally a small discount usually solves most issues. Obviously for larger projects, we take anywhere from 50-75% in advance. If they don't like that, they can find someone else. Appreciate the video nonetheless, keep up the good work!

Great video Colin, keep up the fab work, as an electrical engineer your stories are oh unfortunately oh so familiar!

Thanks for sharing your experiences.. I run my own business as well so I can relate to much.

You were not unreasonable, 100% you did the work. You can't turn a crap quality into HD, some peoples expectations are hilarious.

I have a similar business to yours in the U.S. I have a section of a big metal cabinet dedicated to the storage of unclaimed tapes. In every case, I made multiple attempts to reunite the tapes with their owners. I stop trying after a year. If they ever show up, fine, I've got their tapes. When I retire and close down the business, they'll just be thrown out at that time. Nothing more I can do.

I didn't know about these dvd issues - surreal!

Hi Colin. I think the feedback from the comments speaks volumes. In terms of the question "is it me?" NO!! As others have said, you will always get those who are either unreasonable or want something for nothing. Keep up the good work my friend, you are dong a sterling job educating the community on the technology and your wealth of knowledge is soooo welcome. Cheers!!

Oh heck yeah, 40 mins of storys. this is gonna be a Friday banger

You are a soft touch! You could make your business a bit harder with upfront general terms in clear language, and upfront fees paid before doing the work. You might lose a few jobs, but you gain so much more from having less troubling customers to deal with. Remember the 80/20 principle, 80% of your difficulties are caused by 20% of your customers. Lose just a few difficult customers, gain so much peace of mind. And a better rate of income per your valuable time.

That was a fun listen - not fun for you at the time of course. I had a few Toms, D***s and Harriets when I was running a mail order business for a time. Great to see the Philips VCR with good heads, I remember the one you got with the smashed head tip!

Thanks for this. I get the "keep the video pure" attitude. I personally prefer de-interlaced video myself. Some of my original video transfers I made on PC with my Matrox RT2000 have severe combing artefacts and since I reencoded them back then, I'm never going to get those artefacts out. So I pretty much de-interlaced everything since then. As to getting better video when upscaling and getting wrid of in-picture text, some modern A.I. based software does a pretty terrific job, although the end result can appear a bit plasticky when there is a lot of image noise. While for "smart" upscaling camera movement doesn't matter hugely, for getting wrid of text it helps a lot. When the A.I. has to guesstimate what pixels should replace the existing ones, it really helps it if it can see what's there a few frames ago, or in the future. So artificial stabilization on cameras from the past (or having used a tripod) can negatively effect how your video ends up looking in that particular instance. Anyway, improving image quality when upscaling and removing logos or text... no longer sci-fi I'm afraid.

People are: A, good & honest... or, B, looking for an "excuse" to not pay. Having terms and conditions, typically eliminates (in most cases) those who don't play nice, I always take a pass with those folks who don't want to follow my terms and conditions, I don't need the aggravation.

i have ran a digitising company for a good 15 years now and i agree some of the customers can be , lets say testing :)

You have way more patience dealing with these bad costumers than I would, then again I'm not running bussiness that interacts with people "from the street" :D I agree with your view on keeping captured videos without deinterlacing or any other processing, it took me lot of tries until I was happy with my deinterlacing and encoding process, which other people would probably find too slow and waste of storage. 28:45 enhance is kind of possible nowadays with AI upscalers such as Topaz AI, but from my experience it sometimes removes too much details when it thinks it's noise - carpet or road for example, so close up scenes look amazing while zoomed out/blurry scenes look washed out since there's not much to be reconstructed from SD video to begin with. On HD to FHD or 4K it works pretty well.

If i bring my rolls of film to be developed to a photo lab, they always have a disclaimer somewhere that states how many months they'll keep the work before throwing it away. Sometimes 6 months, sometimes a year, rarely more. Just be very clear, have it in writing somewhere.

This kind of work is really hard. i told my father that i will transfer his tapes to a digital format, and i did know i needed a lot of equipment i bought tranfer usb on amazon but quality was bad finally i got a way to do it, man is hard than the part of deinterlace the video finamy compress it to a format that you can see it in your phone tables etc.. but for me is been emotional i have seen people and friend who are no longer here, well people wanted me to do this for them but they don't want to pay, so this job is time consuming.

I sympathise Colin, as a service manager once told me, the job would be fine if it wasn't for the customers! 🙂 Having spent nearly 50 years in the TV/Audio/Video/Computer repair trade, I've lost count of the money wasted attempting to do a repair only to be told "that's too much for me" I stopped taking in repairs in the 90s unless the customer paid a deposit on the repair first. Other small businesses were the worst payers, I chased one for 6 months for supplying a feed tray for their printer. In the end I walked into their office, turned off the printer mid run, removed the tray and walked out. Keep up the good work, I'm sure the positive responses you get far outweigh the negatives.

I really need your help I just bought a tascam 88 and the tape got stuck and a error 68 come up then error 79. The tascam 88 is a newer one is there a safety thing that tascam has done so it won't eat tapes. The tape I used was a Sony 113

Thanks for all your videos thus far - I've always enjoyed your calm demeanor and I've learned quite a bit from watching you repair equipment (even got my confidence up to successfully repair a Sony betamax deck). Not sure if you *really* want my opinion on the scenarios laid out, but it's the KZfaq comments section, so here we go. Dick: Yeah, customer is at fault here. You did your job and went above and beyond to make it right. Harriot: Yup, customer is at fault again. My course of action would be to hold onto them for 7 years then toss em. Tom: In the beginning I was on Tom's side since I personally don't see anything wrong with paying a percentage up front for a sample then paying the rest upon job completion. But, you're allowed to set whatever terms you want and if he doesn't want to abide by them, he has no right to get abusive. Maybe to avoid the situation in the future, if they want to do "payment in good faith", only process a portion of the order so you don't get overly invested if they back out later? In exchange for your stories, I've got one: I'm not a small business owner but I did do a freelance web dev job once. I built most of a website for them, presented it to them, got payment for work so far and agreed on next steps. After I got pretty far along with it (maybe a month later) I emailed them back. Never got a reply and bever heard from them again... Always worried they'd sue me for not finishing the job, but it's been 14 years, I doubt they care anymore, lol

I worked in the paint department of a home improvement store. Some customers would ask for a colour of paint to be mixed, and they would never pick it up. Though it didn't cause any financial harm to me, I felt very angry towards those people who are passive agressive, knowing full well what they were intentionally huring the company a tiny bit.

Some people are so demanding and unreasonable. I've worked in retail, I hated it. I like the CVC PortaPack. :)

love these kind of stuff, heart warming. Unreasonable people and ones who don't understand science.

So sorry to hear you have had to deal with this, you have a very unique skill and expertise which are becoming so rare. I love all your videos, I enjoy transferring between formats, but just do my own. I’ve transferred some friends and family videos, but wouldn’t really consider doing it for this very reason! Stay positive, love to all the family 🙂

Like You Colin I've been going for 20 years now transferring video and over the last 15 years cine film. Doing everything from accounts to IT, to marketing and sales. But it's the customer service element that can still rankle, even after 20 years. Things from a decade ago that I remember chapter and verse. They don't burn now like they used to, but at the time it was weeks of worry. To be frank this KZfaq video could have been three hours long and it would still be too short.

I can certainly relate to the stories in your video. I started out in 1980 transfering 8mm film from the 10 sq ft bathroom in a video rental store in the US. You can imagine how primitive that was. I was working full time working on a freight dock at night and picking up jobs that would come in to the store. I retired 16 years ago and have been doing it full time ever since. I have similar horror stories. My saving grace is that I have kept the business small and don't do any advertising out of my area. All my customers drop off there projects to my office. I take the attitude that when a customer drops off material, it is a down payment for the work performed. They have to physically pick up there materials when done. Fortunately.......... in the last 42 years I've only been burned 1 time. With a bounced check. You have been quite an inspiration to me and I'm still learning little tricks watching your vids. Please keeep up the good work!!

I don't understand what you are talking about but it is obvious that it was a nice conversation⭐️💯🇹🇷👍

With things like Stable Diffusion you can actually upscale or inpaint. It's not true to original but it really is science fiction. Also for anime things like video2x

Keep up the great work Colin. You didn't do anything wrong.

Well Im pretty sure not a lot of customers even realize that tapes capture performs in real time and not just drag and drop.

Colin, you are right, you are a softy and your customers will always take advantage of that, you need to be consistent. Put a sign up stating that, due to lack of storage space, all customer's items will be disposed of if not picked up within one month of work completion. And before starting any work, at least get the customer to pay a partial fee to cover the costs of consumables (HDD, USB STICK, DVD'S, ETC) up front, or they could supply their own. I know that sounds a little heavy handed, but you will see that most customers will accept that as par of the course, especially if it is a shop policy.

These things happen, it's to be expected. I haven't had a bad customer in a while so I'm due one lol.

You are a good and kind man ! 🙂 I was worried that I would be featured due to my recent quibbling over sending Digital-8 tapes from Sweden and attempting to DIY with a firewire card. As you predicted, this didn't work, so at some point the tapes will be sent to you ! 🤣🤣 Although I still stress about sending my single copy family memories and entrusting them to Swedish/Royal Mail. But whatever happens, paying for the services you receive is something that there should be no argument about, if you have gone to the trouble to contact you to perform a video transfer and sent the tapes, why would you even consider to skip paying for the transfer service ?

Sorry to hear about this customers can really suck, some people truly believe that they are the centre of the universe and everything should revolve around them. Love your videos I transfer tapes as well there was a comment here that said removing mode from tapes can be done quickly I'd love to know how I use a very similar system to yours to be honest I'd pretty much copy your design thanks for that. To unreel the video tapes slowly I use a jewellers watch rotating display mirror seems to work OK but is a very slow and tedious process Thanks for all your advice.

I have digitized 100's of molded v8 or hi8 tapes but with the right setup and procedure it does not take a lot of time 😄 100% success guaranteed unless the mold ate itself though the data layer. Cheers from Holland.

IN THE FUTURE, tell all customers up front that payment in full is required before anything is sent back. If they do not agree, tell them to go elsewhere and that you don’t want their business. Other than that, tell him to go to hell and he doesn’t get anything back UNTIL HE MAILS A CHECK TO YOU FOR FULL PAYMENT WHICH YOU WILL WAIT TO CLEAR THE BANK A FULL 10 DAYS. You are holding the cards once you have their tapes in hand. People are such assholes. Tell them to bugger off.

I loved the Muntz that came in !

I think it's unavoidable running into unpleasant experiences as a private business owner and even a fair amount of unpleasant people. Best to talk about it and vent frustrations and also, while sharing the experience with others, hopefully get valuable feedback how to avoid such experiences in the future or better protect your business and your sanity or even just minimize the loss or general negative impact. I think it's best to know what your legal rights are and how you should warn your clients . It's worth going to extreme steps warning your prospective clients about all the risks of the process, all the options available to them (and to you) on how to protect their property and your right to fair compensation etc., what measures you will take to protect the latter and so on. I should think that legal advice is de rigueur but as the risks are so many... also is taking a deep breath. The last but not least thing one should also do is, pricing their work accordingly to take into account such losses, aggravation, possible mistakes and mishaps etc.

Tom (and all new Customers): First Meaningful 1 Minute FullSD MP4 Sample in this Case on DVD (normal Upload). Then payment in advance or cancellation with return postage (in this case +1x demould, that can be reused by the next Victim) refund before shipping. Dick: I start from the first Frame in Pause Mode, But I admit that a jog wheel is not available on every device (N 1502😂 ). Harriet: In Germany, the bookkeeping may be destroyed after 10 years. Given the short playing time, I would only keep the MP4 files to play poker with the heirs. For archiving purposes you should always get the original format (PAL=D1) as long as there is still playback/editing software. Since the 3.15 Mhz resolution on VHS refers to -26 dB, I think you can still get something out of it if you use a digital "treble" adjuster (H sharpen only !) with 100% stop at, for example 3.3 Mhz and A.I. VNR which not only corrects the level but also the position (left/right trembling due to the carrier frequency passing by too rarely). If A.I. becomes intelligent you can certainly reduce station logos (good) and time code overlays (too big for good) in moving images. In the case of a still image (background), of course, that doesn't work at all. Sending tapes back after digitization would leave me in the dark as to whether the customer hopes in the distant future (Panasonic hasn't wanted to sell me any spare parts for over 8 years...) to find an even better transfer company (the tapes aren't getting any better !) or whether the customers basically do not have a control of data backup.

Sounds like Tom was getting all emotional/upset about those tapes. (As you then also mentioned later)

1. Tom: Well, you were in the right, I can see customer's fears however, I don't know every little detail, so I don't know if what arrangements were tried, I would have tried the approach, OK, let's do one tape, if you're satisfied, send in the rest, or something similar. But then again, I had a similar situation recentely as well, and I can take the blame for that, I left the phone on vibrations and went to another room andthe guy was calling frantically some time after the agreed pickup time, though later he calmed down and we had a chat, he said he has more tapes with obscure never before released ausience cnocert recodings, but so far I haven't heard from him since. 2. Richard: That's just the client being picky, I also always lose some frames-seconds of the start of the tape, or I cut the dropouts, or the image slowly appearing on the screen, because of erase head has partially erased the beginnings of diagonal scan lines during tape rerecording. What software are you usin so that it leaves watermark in freeware version, or in this case in error? I have a batch ffmpeg command for mp4 conversions, separate for analog and digital sources, aspect ratios, 2- and 4-cannel, etc. As for the situation, I can see how it could be partially on your side, when it comes to the converter, but then again, I don't check the files I create second by second. I always rewind the tape manually to the very begining of the leader, but even with that my DVCAM machine will display 1 second and some frames as starting timecode and there is nothing I can do about it. 3. Harnold: Completely right. I would however send a follow up note, that if I wasn't paid for the work, or just the postage to return the tapes I would dispose of them, or counting up storage charge, like shipping companies for parcels picked up after designated time. Then again, if they never contacted you again, maybe they are dead. I once sold a cassette tape, the package came back, I never heard from the buyer again, that was also years ago.

Over the years I´ve learned one thing: A shocking percentage of people in any given population are incredibly and ridiculously daft. And there is nothing we can do about it. Just wait and hope we don´t run into them too often.

Partial payment (50%) is better than no payment. Business has to take losses. Tapes have to be returned unless you have customers sign terms and condition that payment is upfront and tapes becomes your property if non-payment. Softee means no worries for revenge. Throw away the tapes since the customer don't value them but keep the MP4 files on the hard drive.

I'm a self employed Gardner had non paying customers not much money but the work was fine . you will get them extremely annoying

I've watched enough of your videos to know you're a decent man. Nothing you've said here is on you. you're definitely a better man than I am. I wouldn't have tolerated half of what you have. People take advantage of good natured people like yourself, so if there's one criticism of you I have, it's don't let them. I'd happily send you my tapes to you from Australia because I know im getting the highest quality available with you, and you won't pull any funny business.

Ne konuştuğunuzu anlamıyorum ama hoş bir sohbet olduğu belli⭐️💯🇹🇷👍

I'm familiar with all your guys.

The whole "holding tapes hostage" thing is they should pay upfront, you do your job and send the tapes back. They should sign a contract that if there is something wrong with tapes like mould, they should pay extra. You would examine tapes, figure out they are mouldy, make a picture of them as a proof, and require extra payment. If they don't pay, you send the tapes back without digitizing them, and you've already been paid for the basic digitization, so I suppose you are still in black. Your stories are actually about a solid contract that both parties are supposed to abide to, a document that can be used in court if needed. So your high quality format is DV-AVI? I would not call it "original format", it is digitized anyway. Do your customers know the output format beforehand? These times they will have better chance playing MPEG-2 or AVC than DV-AVI. Also, some people who are into digitizing (but, arguably, not with your amount of tapes to digitize every day) would say that DV-AVI is an obsolete garbage, and it does not do justice to, um, precious VHS or Hi-8. What do you think of it? To be clear, I think that DV is perfectly fine. I would be even more happy if I could transfer into DVCPRO50 4:2:2, but so far I haven't found a workflow that would generate me such a file that would be universally playable and that would have correct field order. I wonder can you pass analog video through one of your DV decks to get DVCPRO50 via Firewire as output? HDV on DVD could be an AVCHD Disc... but then you would have to re-encode MPEG-2 into AVC, and AVCHD Disc is officially capped at 18 Mbit/s.

Tom, Dick & Harriet all sound like people who just want something for nothing, and probably do the same thing repeatedly. My brother runs his own caravan upholstery business in Caister-on-Sea and he gets the very occasional customer like that. He's far more blunt than you and just says that if they don't pay, he will pull what he's done out of their caravan. He's always fully booked for several months ahead, so he's not prepared to compromise, and he doesn't need that hassle. I joined JVC(UK) in the 80s as an engineer and eventually became a TLO and then Technical Manager. One thing I remember as a TLO was I visited a shop to look at a NICAM VCR where the customer couldn't get the stereo working. I demonstrated in the shop that the VCR was fine, but the customer wouldn't have it and got very aggressive and said "Do you want to fight me for it?". I'm not sure how that was supposed to resolve his problem. Once I pointed out that I was an amateur boxer in my youth, he backed down a bit. The "fault" turned out to be the communal aerial in his block of flats which was quite heavily filtered and wasn't passing the NICAM carrier through. Just out of interest, which capture device do you use for capture of VHS/Beta playback?

Im summary Colin you answered all your own questions. The title of the goods remains yours until paid for in full. You are a decent human being but you are running a business and should protect yourself more in your T&Cs in order to avoid things like this. Personally I would have returned the goods but bulk erased them first😂

Hi Colin, You seem a nice guy, the perfect target. My wife and myself have been wedding videographers for 30 years, and ninety five percent of customers were great. The other five percent, monsters, no pleasing them no matter what. Put the monsters in the hands of your solicitors, job done. FACT some nasty people out there. Don’t let the buggers get down.😊

This is why I don’t do customer work anymore - people are not worth it …..

And this is why a nice guy needs a total git who works for him to handle the sticky business.

Don’t worry, no one will take you to small claims court. No way will there ever happen for a few hundred quid. Absolutely no way. Don’t worry about that.

You always get awkward people in life like that It sounds like to me that those people wanted it free So they didn't have to pay anything you always get people in life like that But people do not realise how long it takes to Transfer tapes over to dvd Or hard drive Please do not let it get you down What you really should do The people should pay before the work is don So when they send their tapes They should also send the money at the same time I think that is the best way to go If you were in the shop you can only take out what you have bought at that time you cannot pay for it later you cannot pay for it later so if I were you The people should pay before the work is hope this is helpful to you I think the videos that you produce are really good and also the KZfaq channel All the best to you i And your family From john

you should have burnt toms tapes and mail him a tape of that.

hey bud l think you are right as you provide a service and then agree a price with customer then you do the work you should get payed

Having sent files to you, i can say i had ZERO problems whats so ever. Ignore the "Karens" as these are just selfish bullies which you'll never please. Regarding Harriet, i would find her or her family on Facebook & message them, as its possible they don't even know of there existence.

Most customers are a pain in the backside to be honest.

Hey guys send him your tapes he's as soft as butter for payment, opportunity 's knocking

If you deal with the general public this is quite likely to happen. I tend to setup good communication and rules at the beginning. This in itself filters out the more entitled.

Please please please learn about small claims court and notice before action letters, they work wonders.

Colin, i can't see anything wrong with you. Some people just try to get everything done for nothing, they are shit bags!. You could do with adding a short reminder of the customer side of the deal. Make it clear that a customer can not change there mind after the processing has started. The fee for the work must be Payed up front. Faults on the original tape can not be removed.

I thought you were going to say the cereal guy stopped responding because he had been locked up for a murder or something. Turned out even better haha

Mad man munts as they called him his sets were budget and cut down to a bare minimum so the video would have been a budget Lol interesting 1702 . As for awkward customers when will my tapes be done ( what tapes you ask me ) the ones that are still in my loft ! .

You could have offered Dick a refund on that tape that was captured twice, haha

Sorry to be blunt but your part payment system is the problem. Perhaps because you are too nice. Just do the work and send the finished product through the post. Caveat Emptor on their behalf. If you are decent you will not rip them off. Just like we do whenever we buy anything through Ali Express. Unless you are charging hundreds of ££ for the work though, that would make it different I've still got a plumber who ripped me off for £200 from 2019 still going through the courts so it is customers as well as supliers who are tosspots.

Was that 'Tom' G?

I love your repair vids, and am sorry for the trouble you have had with some customers and the effect its had on you! Thats tha way some people are these days.you should stick to your guns and get payment for the work you do?

Yes, it's you Colin, You've been too soft on those A holes. Tom is a type of customers that want to scam you, You should have just sent him a percentage of capture from each tape according to his percentage of payment. I don't want to sound pessimistic but highly unlikely that you will receive any more money from him. Dick, and as the name indicates, he wanted to get a free job with a stupid excuses. I don't know about the UK but here in the US holding something hostage to cover your expenses is perfectly legal because if it ever goes to court the judge may grant you a judgement but the court will not collect it for you, so holding something hostage is your legal right to get your money.

Hello! I hope you are all well.🤗 I have a problem with an Akai VCR which i bought it in a bad condition, i serviced the whole mechanism etc.. But in playback (or search mode) the picture is problematic: -Upper half picture good, the rest snow -or bottom half good, the rest snow -or full snow without picture -or perfect picture (rarely). There is no stable condition!! Is it a head switching problem? A servo problem? Bad alignment? The mechanism feels like it works flawlessly. Thank you very much!!😩😩

You're far too nice. There's no shortage of videos of builders ripping up driveways, tearing down fences etc when the customer doesn't pay but in some industries you're just expected to bend over backwards, or dash out refunds for the slightest of errors. I also have no doubt in my mind that if Harriet rocked up ten years later you'd exchange the transferred material for the originally agreed price, posted in a timely manner and no charge for storage.

Take Tom to the small claims court.

Seems like you're a nice guy, and people are taking advantage of your nice nature. maybe in future you need to toughen up a little bit, if you've done work for people and they refuse to pay, then you have every right to keep their tapes until they pay up. which is exactly what I would do. I wouldn't send them work for free, not a chance in hell you're a nice guy...

If he's paying half the bill, you should send half the video!

HI there's alot of silly people out there i have a mate that has mind things in his head he can't hold down fall time work i used to work with him in the past he used to use dvd recorders i went over to computer video editing software like the sony vegas line used the tiger SD cards for along time maxed out as far as they would go in the day the thing i used to get alot of drop out with usb video units now today i have a amd4 B450 motherboard the thing is windows 10 pro don't like the old tv tiger pci-e card same with the scsi 320 cards so it's a mine field what is the best video input unit for the money it's all pic-e now if i was in you line of work i would run many jobs a once i know you are low on space there you said in a video sony -ray BD-RE drives i had one when they first came out ide and the burn time was very long i inport from usa you are right the sony vegas has all the kit for it the only thing i love in sony vegas is the dvd-a 4 channel incoding it doe's take time there;s alot of new old stock around funny thing my mate has a sony 950 he was up set big time the sound on my betacam.s is far better than this deck audio drop out's on the sony 950 betamax was very bad a lot of heavy wear this is funny in away i used to have a lego bricklink shop i still have all i sell to is pro model maker beware i used to get alot of new bee's all the time when i said i can over deal with older fans the kids go to there dad's and i used to get alot of mail the kid know there parts there need sorry to all out there with along text i plan to put out video's some time when i can find away around the tec things bob

Payment in full thanks. No ifs or buts or begging, or go elsewhere and see how you get on. Tom is a ***** and we can only hope he will see this video and realise what a horrible man he was. Dick is a Dick. Harriet the Grinch When I was scanning cine film on the cheap as chips scanner I had very many customers, I did something similar to you, I had a closed FB group where I could show clips of completed scans so they could see before they pay. I'm fortunate I didn't have one bad apple among all the customers I did cine for. In several cases I got tips and gifts too..despite me losing one customer reel of cine before I had even scanned it. I've never forgiven myself for that mistake.

WOW! I'm sorry to hear that, but people sucks sometimes. You have a business not a charity. I think you were such a good person for this d********.

The public can be such a$$holes don't let them rip you off!

I like this video I am normally a silent subscriber but I had to make a comment on this I can understand it can be upsetting if you have put in time and effort with equipment and time capturing and people refuse to pay what you should do is take some kind of small advance fee. Moldy tapes are a risk to health you should avoid them, DV avi is not a good way to capture VHS I would not pay someone to do it I would have a go at it myself if I had more than 20 tapes to convert the problem with DV avi capture is chrome and luma information is compressed from 4:44 to 4:2:0 information is lost and so is color. Why would you not capture VHS lossless since you are charging people lossless are easy to edit if customers want the final file on a memory stick you can compress the lossless file to 15,000 bitrate to h264 or if they want a DVD you can re encode the original lossless file to mpeg2 but if you re encode DV avi to any format you will he losing more information you have lost chroma and luma already by compressing DV you will be introducing artifacts and if the final output file needs de-interlacing since you have mentioned uploading online to a video hosting site for your customers to view online to save on postage, what if this video hosting company goes bust the customers will lose his or her files? Normal tapes have 2 mins of test bars but if its a home recording what you should do is capture the video in paused mode for 2 seconds then save that file, do the rest of the capture go into editing software set the 2 second paused file at start then the rest of the movie or home video. I have done that myself sometimes in a rush not knowing when something was going to be on tv and its worth recording. Maybe the guy in your case didn't want to pay so he was looking for an excuse not to pay and found one mo matter how small it may sound to your viewers. De-interlacing means more quality loss because you can other blend the 2 captured fields or interpolate not making it worth while paying anyone to capture, if it's only 5 or 10 dollars pounds its worth the gamble otherwise I would give it a go myself. DVD recorder HQ 1hr SP 2hrs 3hrs LP is better then DV avi because the DVD recoded file will not be compressed but the problem is its being captured mpeg2 at a low bitrate, anyone can record using a DVD player why would a transfer business use a DVD recorder? It sounds so amature people ok on ebay offer services like that for 2.99 lol. The equipment that studios own is expensive hard to maintain and not available professional capture cards are not available either I don't think it would be worth buying. If customers don't pay the tapes are normally disposed of destroyed after 90 days (3 months) of order date, if you stated hording tapes of non paying customers you wouldn't have any space lift im assuming u work from home because I've seen 2 young boys helping you out in some of the videos they must be your children I'm guessing? Company going out of business is just bad luck but since it was a company you should have asked for an advance fee that way not all of your money would have been lost but it was lucky you had made money from the first batch of tapes you were probably thinking repeat customers nothing to worry about but this must have been during the resession of 2009 lots of companies went under. Age of the tapes by how old the children are how stupid are some people how do you work out a childs age count the rings on their forehead LOL. Sometimes adverts can be nostalgic for some people and bring back memories of a past good time in life. Upscaling VHS is not good zooming is not good it will just blur the original source because of the low resolution only good for KZfaq because KZfaq give you more bitrate on a 1920x180 movie. You could extract a DVD in handbrake without losing quality as long as it isn't copyright protected it will rip in mpeg2 at the same bitrate as recorded. Burnt in subtitles on some old movies are a pain you could crop top and bottom with black bars. John mix up should not have happened you should mark each job with a job number for each person like shop made CDS and DVDS have a catalogue number on them.

I think you're far too reasonable to be honest Colin. Sometimes you have to be rude with some people.