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Erase Tapes?
I have a lot of old material on tape (recorded once) that I will probably not need so rather than buy new tape I was thinking of backing up material to them or recording over them. Do you think there will be much of a quality issue recording over the old material or should I buy a tape (electric-magnetic)eraser device and then use the erased tapes to record on? Any suggestions about what make or model of eraser to buy? Thanks in advance.
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8 Replies
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If they are for your personal use, you have nothing to gain by bulk erasing.
Gary
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What kind of tapes are they??
John Hartney
werks.tv
Elgin, Illinois – Chicago area
847.608.1357 -
Maxell xr-metal Digital 8 and maxell mini dv. Gary, are you saying it’s worth bulk erasing for non-personal use?
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Those are metal evaporate tapes and don’t hold up nearly as well as metal particle, which are used in dvcpro line, beta sp, 3/4inch, MII, etc…
dv tape holds a very strong signal and running it through a demagnitizer doesn’t work.
If you want to erase all the previous material, I’d suggest stripping it with black and no audio.
John Hartney
werks.tv
Elgin, Illinois – Chicago area
847.608.1357 -
[Mike Minske] “Gary, are you saying it’s worth bulk erasing for non-personal use?”
Only if you need to make sure that the footage that was recorded over doesn’t peek through.
Gary
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“Peek through”?
Do you mean “print through” as when an old image shows up in an analog tape playback?
It doesn’t happen in digital recordings because the next time you record data, it replaces whatever was there before.
Steve
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Mostly I am referring to the secondary recording being shorter than the first, however there can be an occasional tape glitch where the previous recording is not totally overwritten.
Gary
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I have not had good success rerecording on DV tapes. Sometimes it will work and other times the previous picture shows through. This might be ok for video taping the family dog but when you need to capture the best picture with no glitches use new tapes.
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