if i stripe them?

As a general rule of thumb, many people only reuse tapes if it for non-essential shooting. For paying clients etc a fresh tape is recommended.

Striping and re-using tapes are mutually exclusive topics. Do a Search (http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/search.php?s=) on reusing tapes and you'll find many opinions, as this is a well-worn topic.

Basically, use new tapes for important work. They're relatively inexpensive. You can reuse tape at least a few times before they may pose a head or performance hazard.

Tape is cheap, much less than $5/hour of real (not reel) time.

Talent and crew time is not cheap, if a retake is needed, and many of life's events are one time deals.

That said, tape should be OK for many reuses, but there is some risk of added drop outs, etc as tape is used more often. To minimize risk, avoid reusing tape

for the price of DV, go ahead and label and file all your old video. Be sure to label as I have taped over old tapes erasing footage I will never be able to get again. I use shoe boxes and small 1x1 inch tabs to label......

Would you go out on an important shoot with an untried, untested piece of kit? No, you wouldn't, so don't think that unwrapping a new tape gets you off the hook. If you're buying 70 metres of tape for $3 then every now and then there's going to be a duff one come off the production line and get past the inspectors. It's the law of the land.

If you shoot and dump to the timeline you'll have proof positive that that tape is 'perfect', devoid of dropout and damage. Don't feel in any way obliged to discard it simply because you've found this out.

tom.

hmm... seems like there are arguments for both. i just wanted to make sure that there wasn't some definite image quality loss when you reuse a tape.

i'll try it and see...