I'm a pretty organized guy, so I figured I'd come up with my own brilliant system for keeping track of the piles of DV tapes I've accumulated.

Well, after multiple attempts over a rather long period of time, I have to admit I'm not much further along with an effective tape organization/storage strategy than I was when I started.

Interested to hear what others are doing. I normally don't reuse tapes, but if I start a tape and run off 5 minutes or so, I might eventually rewind it and start over w/ a newer/longer project. But between all the plastic cases, the various stickers & labels, the multiple drawers & shelves & ... too many times I simply lose track of what's what. Or else I write some scrawl on one of the labels that appears as Greek text weeks or months later.

When I am able to set aside time to go over all the tapes and come up with yet another fool-proof organization plan, within a couple of weeks-- yep, it's a mess again. Please lead me toward the light...

Title changed from "What a MESS!" to "Tape Storage" (please avoid ambiguous thread titles. Moved from Open DV to our Tape forum.

Title changed from "What a MESS!" to "Tape Storage" (please avoid ambiguous thread titles. Moved from Open DV to our Tape forum.


Hi Chris,

Well, ok. No problem with the title change, but I don't agree with the move. IMO it's more about overall organization strategies in general than about the tape itself.

But hey, you're the mod and as this is perhaps the best run forum I visit regularly, I'll cut you some slack... [g]

And I'll cut you some slack when you send me an email and tell me which user account you'd like to keep (only one is allowed, since we're strictly real-names-only around here). Until then, you're locked out.

I simply label my tapes with a serial number. Then use an Excel database to keep track of them, with fields for date, location, subject, actors, project name, etc. Use pretty much whatever you want. Then just store them in numerical order on your shelf by the serial number and grab the one you need when you need to get at it. Just make sure to keep multiple copies of your Excel spreadsheet in different places in case one gets deleted!

But actually, I'd start getting away from tape--start archiving your tape to hard drive or blu-ray and junk your tapes. They won't be much longer for this world anyway.

Pretty much my scheme of things too. Date and main location on tape label, stored in boxes of 50 in date order. Cross reference on excell spreadsheet - includes in and out times of specific clips that I might want to use again later. Those clips are also stored on an external hard drive, and referenced back to the original tape in their title.