Will re-useing a tape hurt my DVX?

F

Filmfanatic

Active member
Kind of a Part 2 to my previous post.
I'm shooting unimportant test stuff. Lots of footage on the same few tapes.
Is there any harm that could be done to the heads or any other part of the camera or its performance. I'm just being (over) carefull. Thanks
 
Re: Will re-useing a tape hurt my DVX?

Tape is bascially plastic, glue & rust particles.

From the top of my head I'll try to remember this stuff...

When the tape runs through a head it knocks off particles, depending upon many factors, tape mil, glue, particles, bonding proces, etc... these particles end up somewhere...yes, in your camera...gumming it up.

Good tape is better because the plastic tape is better, (more consistent, therefore predictable) the glue keeps the particles on the plastic tape better & the rust particles are finely ground, similair in size and evenly packed for a smooth surface.

To answer your question, you can run the tape as much as you want but you'll run the risk of gumming up your heads & rollers, then you'll need to clean it. Most shooters seem to minimize this exposure and save the heads from wear. Loose particle and garbage can & will scrape the head then it's retrofit time.

My experience goes back a few years with multi track tape decks for music so I'm assuming the principles are fairly the same, if not, some one speak up!  We use to loosen up tape by always running it through a winder so loose particles would fall off before we put tape to the heads and then the tape would repack for useage. audio multi track tapes were very robust because we would spin them back an forth all the time, (stretching would be a diasater!) It seems like the same practice would apply here, but many don't like this at all.

Mini DV is delicate, the mil is zilch so it's prone to stretching , the digital track is the size of a hair presenting potential trouble, that's one reason mini Dv isn't a pro format. That's why I'm all in favor of digital S by JVC. Digital info to VHS cassettes. they're big, thicker mil and everywhere....a bigger camera would'nt hurt my feelings and they could run 20 DV binary streams with massive data, but that might really make the techno-monopolist gods angry!
A few years from now data will be cards like we cuurently use for digital still cameras. A 1 gig chip is the size of a couple thumb nails. DV uses 13 gigs per hour so a memory card the size of a DVX battery would give ample memory space.

Oh yeah, your answer, keep tape reusage low, very low.
 
Re: Will re-useing a tape hurt my DVX?

The number of times you'd need to reuse a tape before you might run into any problem, is "much" greater than tends to be implied on these forums.

Use common sense, and you won't have any problems.
 
Re: Will re-useing a tape hurt my DVX?

I think the bottom line is....try not to reuse the same tapes over again. They are relatively (relative to the servicing, head replacement costs) much cheap.

But...on the other hand..

In my own case, during the last 9 months I have used each one of the 5 PQ tapes, 3 times over, with only one single drop out so far. Though I am particularly vigilant about the dust....for instance I have never changed tapes outdoors so that the chances of exterior factors ...dust, humidity etc ...inetrfering with the head become minimal.

In the nutshell...there is no harm reusing the tapes...but try not to do it often.
 
Re: Will re-useing a tape hurt my DVX?

I have a tape i have used more tha 35 times and still no dropouts. Its a Panasonic DVM60ME
 
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