Could it be that a 3 year old tape messed up my cam corder?

I recently loaded an old tape in the camcorder to capture its footage and noticed there were a lot of dropped frames. After that none of my recent recordings would play correctly, they were pixelated in the middle of the screen. The camcorder was repaired by adjusting the tensions and a mechanical re-alignment.
All of my old tapes have been stored in the desk drawer in the air conditioning.
So now I'm afraid to use any of these old tapes.
has anyone had any experience with this? Cam corder is a digital 8mm Sony, model DRV-720.

Thanks

Ouch... This has happened to us all. I am afraid what happened was that all your old tapes that arent playing back properly were recorded with the bad alignment. When you had the camera fixed, you lost the ability to play back those old tapes as they will only play back correctly on the machine that was not aligned properly.

In this case what you should do in the future is copy all your tapes with the misaligned cam as the playback and another properly aligned cam/deck as the record.

As far as I know, this footage cannot be rescued, you might try a high-end digi 8mm deck but I doubt it will work.... SORRY!




ash =o)

Definite ouch. Just be glad your tape didn't snap inside the camera and get stuck in the motors. I had that happen to an old Panasonic I was using with a tape that was a few years old and had been re-written 5 times (That was before I learned to not re-use tapes).

Actually the recent old tapes (less than a year or so) did playback correctly after the camcorder was repaired.
Fortunately, I didn't shoot any video after I found out the recent old tapes wouldn't play so I didn't lose anything.

I'm just not sure I should chance playing the old, old tapes. (2 years or more).