How often do you (should you) clean the Canon GL2 tape heads with the dry cassette cleaner?

I shoot a lot of events, and can't afford to stop in the middle of an event and clean the heads when I get a message to do so. On the other hand, I don't want to "overclean" the heads so much that it damages or reduces the life of the heads.

So, I would like to establish a SOP of cleaning the heads every X hours.
What should X be?

Nobody has a reliable rule for this, Pete. All you'll get here are peoples' anecdotal best practices ranging from, "Only when the picture gets messed up" to "Every 5th tape". The fact is that "xx hours" is generally a poor meter, as it does not factor the amount of playback on the heads.

So "every so often" will likely be the best guide. No regimen of prophylactic cleaning will offer failure protection. For that you need a second camera, like professional still photographers carry.

Hi Ken, thanks for the feedback.

I guess the engineer in me just won't be satisfied with "every now and then" :)

While nothing is for sure in life [except "death and taxes" :) ], I'm a big believer that reasonable precautions can help. Over some amount of time and use, this should become a fairly predictable event, particularly for a given camera. I guess I subscribe to the theory "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

So, you can choose "every now and then" if that suits your needs, but for me I would like to establish a regular cleaning interval. Of course, this would be based on total usage, not just record time.

Surely I'm not the first to address this issue. Anyone else perform scheduled maintenance of their GL2?