Digitize your memories.
Stream them forever.

Who we are

The expertise behind Chicago's digitizing industry — now at its source.

The professional workflows and A/V systems running at other Chicago digitizing studios? We built them. Scan5 was founded by the person who established those labs' SOPs from the ground up. When those businesses kept the name and the equipment, we kept the knowledge — and kept developing it.

Our co-founder is a Chicago-based artist and media preservation specialist with nearly 20 years of experience in film, television, and theatre. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he brings an artist's sensitivity to preservation — with client work spanning The Field Museum, the CTA, and The Innocence Project, and production credits including American Idol. Analog is physical, chemical, and temperamental. This is someone who has lived inside the medium.

Most digitizing services are optimized for clean, well-preserved media. We're built to recover difficult material — degraded tape, underexposed film, damaged or inconsistent rolls. We don't run your memories through a machine and hope for the best. We interpret your media the way a photographer or filmmaker would, because that's what we are.

The national services that dominate search results are high-volume operations built around throughput, not craft. Your media moves through an assembly line. At Scan5, every order is handled by working artists and media practitioners — people who actively shoot on film, who understand what analog media is supposed to look like, and who treat your memories with the same care they give their own work.

Learn more about us