Ok first off im very sorry if there is already a thread on this I couldn't find anything when I searched. I just found a camera in my house that i am planning to use as a rewind camera, but I know how using different tapes in cameras is bad for the heads. I am not worried about ruining the old cam but can the its in turn ruin my good cam if I put the tape i rewind back in my fx7?

Yes i know the way i worded this is probably confusing; writing is not my strong suit.

If I understand you correctly, you found an old cam (are you sure it's MiniDV?) and want to use it as a rewinder for the tapes you shot in your FX7. You're concerned that doing this might either ruin the tapes or transfer dirt to the FX7, possibly ruining it?

As long as it's got the right type of tape deck section, just give it a good cleaning and you should be fine. A proper repair shop can do a better job of cleaning it and checking it out to make sure it's in good working order than you can. If the old cam gets a clean bill of health, no worries.

But you should know that you don't really need to do this; your FX7 is meant for using the deck for playback at a reasonable level. I'm not sure I'd use it for capturing ten hours a day, but for moderate use you'd be fine.

Yeah its mini dv not hdv, but I figure I could at least rewind the tapes on it to save the heads a little bit of wear. and realistically I will be shooting maybe 2 or 3 hours of footage a week, so maybe ill just skip it and rewind on my good cam.

It's really not the rewinding that would be the problem -- it would be all the shuttling back and forth if you were capturing a lot of individual clips from each tape with unique in and out points. Especially if you are capturing each tape all in one go, you should be fine using the FX7. Generally it's not the heads that are the issue, it's the motor.

Oh then I should be fine. I don't have enough patients to try to find clips on tape anyways I would rather just do the whole tape then set in and out points in final cut.

If you're rewinding after stopping it the heads don't come into contact with the tape. If you're rewinding while previewing the heads are affected. As long as the tape formats are the same, there shouldn't be an issue.