Problem with one tape...

[Ian Slessor]

Hi gang,

I rented a GL1 & GL2 for a dance recital. Apart from the GL1 not telling me the battery was dead and losing a good 6 minutes of footage trying to figure out what was wrong I have a problem with one tape.

I'm using Fuji tapes. Brand new.

I left the last tape in the GL1 overnight. Show done at 9pm, tape out of camera by 9am the next morning.

Now neither camera will take the tape. I keep getting "Remove The Cassette" with both cameras when I try to capture! All of the other tapes work fine although I did get minor problems with the same message but after a couple of tries the other tapes that gave me problems were fine.

So. I need this tape. It has about 40 minutes of footage from the second half of the show. How can I rectify this situation?

BTW. It's Sunday morning and the cameras go back on Monday morning. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

ian

[Ian Slessor]

Wahoo!

Let's hear it for these forums.

Before my initial post I'd gone through them looking for an answer to my above mentioned problem.

I had tried what one poster had suggested. On the underside of Fuji tapes, between the spools there's a little notch with a movable "switch." Well I move the switch and that allowed me to manually spool the tape using a pencil. It didn't work and in despair, but then hope, I posted above. Then decided to try again and I spooled a bit one way and then the other and voila!

The tape works again!!! Yay! It would appear that the tape was sufficiently "tight" that neither camera was interested in dealing with it. A little gentle manual manipulation and everything is good with the world.

Thanks all.

sincerely,


ian

[David Ennis]

I've been convinced for a long time that this problem is a combination of unacceptable frailty in the GL1/GL2 tape transport combined with variabliltiy in spool friction from cassette to cassette. The sounds that my Maxell rewinder makes and the fact that it shuts itself off with some cassettes clearly tells me that cassettes aren't all created equal, even within the same brand.

[Waldemar Winkler]

Back in the 1980's, when I was doing what we then called :multimedia shows" with computer driven slide projectors, all of our music and program data was stored on 7" reel audio tapes. After every presentation we always carefully wound our tapes on to the take-up reel by allowing the reel to "play out" at normal playback speed. The reason was to reduce the possibility of print through of audio and data tracks if the tapes ended up being stored for a long period of time.
Video tapes, primarily because of their size, were much stronger and less prone to print-through. They were usually rewound at high speed. This introduced a lateral slip of tape wraps which sometimes bound the tape inside the reel so tightly it would stop a vcr. As a precaution i would always completely fast forward and then rewind a presentation cassette to evenly "pack" the tape into its reel. I treat my mini-dv tapes the same way and have yet to have viewfinder warning message that I can attribute to undue friction inside the cassette.

[David Ennis]

Point taken, Waldemar. But in my case, to be more clear, it's friction and binding between the plastic parts of the assembly, and it does not correct after several cycles of tape winding. I throw them away.