Reusing tapes - - Erasing the olds??

ryan brown

ryan brown

lOwEr CaSe Member
Remember those old magnet thingy's that would erase VHS tapes? Is that possible with mini dv tapes, too? anyone?
 
please dont reuse tapes. they are 5$. i used to do this then i taped over something important by accident. its bad.
 
I'm only doing it cause I've been doing a lot of location testing, and I'm sick of wasting a bunch of tape's on "tests".
 
yes, its possible to use one of those magnets that will erase a vhs to erase a mini dv, I've known people to do that before.
 
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Yeah, you can definitely reuse tapes. I would never reuse tapes for production footage, but for other stuff that isnt life or death, sure. I've shot over 60 hours of BTS footage over the past 6 months and as I dont keep track of and rotate tape use - I just grab some tapes and go - I've reused one maybe 20 times. I have finally retired a tape. The first minute was all messed up. Heads clean on both my DVX and capture cam so it must be the tape. It was just my 1 minute preburn so it wasnt important, but I dont want to take the chance with that tape again so into the trash it goes.

For production footage on a project that you care about, dont be cheap, stick in a new tape. For testing steadicams or 35mm adapters or terrorizing your cat, reuse a tape. Dont waste a new one on that crap.

BTW, ZERO cropped frames from any of my reused tapes. I had a number of dropped frames near the beginning, assumed it was tape reuse. Bought a new, more powerful computer and haven't had a single dropped frame since.....

....until I had a dropped frame last week.... on a brand new production tape.

Pissed me off. But the reused tapes are doing fine.

-GageFX
 
Just get good tapes, and you won't have problems. Panasonic Advanced Masters are perfect for me.

On the other hand, if you have the budget, get a Firestore and forgo tape altogether.
 
Yeah, I always use panny master (dv63me) tapes... and always use new on productions. I was just wondering if you can erase the old footage before reusing the tape. My reasoning? I've reused tapes a couple of times in the past year or so, and when I log the reused tape footage, there's always been a minute or so somewhere throughout the tape that has these strange "interlaced" clips, and you can see the old footage laced in with the new.

It's not a big deal, as it only happens for a minute on a 60 minute tape, but it is annoying.
 
yeah, thats wacky. never had that happen. dont know about bulk erasing, though, sorry.

- GageFX
 
rcbrown23 said:
when I log the reused tape footage, there's always been a minute or so somewhere throughout the tape that has these strange "interlaced" clips, and you can see the old footage laced in with the new.

It's not a big deal, as it only happens for a minute on a 60 minute tape, but it is annoying.
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I know exactly what your talking about. I've been given tapes that have been "re-used" and I've dealt with that before. It can be annoying but I find its mostly during a section wheres there is a timecode break, or somewhere when you start or stop recording.
 
rcbrown23, I too had that venetian blinds effect on some of my footages. It is actually dropping frames effects and the reason might be the overused tapes or you maybe have dirty heads in your camcorder. Try using new tapes and if the problems continues it is the video heads problem.
 
tapes

tapes

rcbrown23 said:
Yeah, I always use panny master (dv63me) tapes... and always use new on productions. I was just wondering if you can erase the old footage before reusing the tape. My reasoning? I've reused tapes a couple of times in the past year or so, and when I log the reused tape footage, there's always been a minute or so somewhere throughout the tape that has these strange "interlaced" clips, and you can see the old footage laced in with the new.

It's not a big deal, as it only happens for a minute on a 60 minute tape, but it is annoying.
Click to expand...

i think that happens cuz the magnet thing you used to blank the tape did not wipe out the entire tape and left patches of the old video underneath and thats what u saw. the best thing is to do is stick the tape in a cam with lens cap or a deck and black the entire tape from start to finish the hour goes by fast.

:beer:
 
I've had mixed results with bulk erasing MiniDV tapes. They don't seem to erase as easily as VHS tapes. I have also seen the stripping pheonomea on reused tapes. Specifically on Sony Premium tapes. But this never happened to me with Panasonic Advanced Master tapes... yet.
 
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