How many times can you record on an MQ tape?

borgkingkong

borgkingkong

Active member
How many times would you or can you reuse a Panny MQ or PQ tape before it starts getting degraded and suffer from drop outs? knowing this will certainly help in me buying my tapes and how many to get.

Thanks
 
But again.

But again.

I really wouldn't use any tape more than once. Two reasons. You always run the risk of having some kind of tape problem, drop out, glitch etc... And then if I don't go over the tape I always have a back up of what I am doing. It's amazing how many times client have come back to me and said "Oh hey it would be cool to to etc..." and then I get paied twice for shooting work once. I also always shoot more than I think I am going to need, or other stuff. But back to tapes, I think that everybody will tell you that unless you are needing 10000 tapes to do something with, just get new ones every time.
 
If you're like me...you're cheap and want to use and reuse a tape over and over. I have done lots of tests to see just how long I can use a tape until I get drop outs. Here's what I've found, there is no magic number. One PQ tape went over 20 times before drop outs, another only went 10. Drop outs can also happen for other reasons too so it's hard to say why you get a drop out, was it the tape? Was it the heads? I use a tape about 4-5 times then if I use it again, I clean the heads first and test it. I'd say if you are shooting very important stuff that you can't re shoot later, you better use fresh tapes, if it's something that you can re shoot or something just for fun, reuse.
 
I never use a tape more than once. I like to keep what I've shot as archival backup. If you've ever "lost" any footage on a hard disk you'll be thankful you've still got it on tape. I also load the "raw" footage on the tape onto DVDs as a second backup. Redundacy is also crucial for important footage. Believe me, I learned the hard way.

I had a drive failure and while I had all the original footage, the recent edits weren't properly backed up, nor were some of the audio files we recorded, including looping. It was a lesson well learned.

But back to the question...use them once. That said, I do have one "test" tape, I use just to throw "test" footage on. After a couple of uses, though, I retire it. At $4-5 dollars for a 63 minute tape, I'm comfortable using new tape each time.
 
I am a little surprised though someone hasn't come out to do some some sort of test on this issue.. if there was a test that people would be interested in, i guess this would be it.. I doubt Panny or any other brand would actually step up to do these tests though...
 
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