Digitizing a tape gives you a file. Rediscover does everything after that — the safekeeping, the searching, the tagging, the reels. Here’s the whole path, from a box in the closet to an archive that answers questions.
The files a service handed back — Legacybox, iMemories, Costco, a drive from the shop — or the original tapes themselves. Any format, any mess. We inventory every file: its format, its length, and a real poster frame pulled from inside it, so your archive is never a hundred identical blue rectangles.
First, every original master is copied into your private cloud — hashed and verified, the copy that outlives the closet. Then we cut fast streaming versions so anything plays in an instant, even raw DV a browser can’t normally open. Finally the machines do the tedious pass: they find where every face appears, mine dates from on-screen stamps and spoken words, and measure each tape’s era. They map where the people are — never who they are.
Watch, and press a key. A number names whoever’s on screen without even pausing. One key marks a moment — that’s funny, that’s the one, use this in the reel. Say a date out loud on the tape and log it; give the tape a name. A two-hour tape gets tagged in a single sitting — by anyone, including the relative who was there but has never opened an app in their life.
Point at one face — “here’s Grandma” — and it searches all your footage for her. Every appearance you confirm joins her reference, so the next pass knows her at more ages, more angles, through more cameras than the last. And when two relatives start to blur together, it catches the confusion and lets you split them apart — so one person’s face is never quietly learned from another’s. The archive gets more right every time you touch it.
Assemble a birthday montage or a memorial reel from the moments you marked, score it with music on a drag-and-drop timeline, and play it full-screen on the TV. Or export a clean shot log — merged ranges, real timecodes — that a professional editor can cut the finished film from. Nothing here is scratch; the archive and the reel are the same thing.
A machine finds where the people are.
A person says who they are.
That’s the whole idea — and why it’s right.