Sony premium MiniDvs degrading - are my memory's lost forever?

[Tony Carroll]

Hi

I have just found 12 Old Mini DV tapes from 2002 and wanted to put them onto my hardrive. There are 5 panasonic, 5 sony premiums and 2 fuji's.
The Panasonic and the fuji ones are absolutely fine, however all the sony ones seem to have degraded, there is no sound or sporadic sound and the image is pixilated. When I try to play the sony ones the camcorder puts up the message "your tape heads need cleaning" however it always plays the panasonic ones and the fuji ones fine.
Are these memory's gone or is there a way of recovering the data??#

Info:
I Have cleaned the heads, it makes no difference.
The tapes were simply in and old bag in the back of the wardrobe and have not been stored in any extreme environments.
All the Sony's were in perfectly watchable condition when last viewed about 8 years ago

The camcorder is an old JVC GR DVX 707 would trying the tapes in a more sophisticated machine help?
If I simply take the tapes to a photo shop to put them on a disc are they likely to have more luck or will I just be charged for un-watchable video?

Any advice would be appreciated.. Thanks

[Gary Huff]

Would these tapes have all been recorded with the exact same camera?

Might be possible to playback the Sonys with an actual Sony player/camera.

[Shaun Roemich]

Someone is likely to "flame me" for stating this but in my personal experience, JVC and Sony DON'T play well together in terms of heads/tape formulations. Every single head clog I have EVER had has been from either JVC tape on Sony heads or vice versa. Every one.

Play Sony tape in a Sony device. Rent or borrow one if you need to.

[Tony Carroll]

All these tapes were recorded with the same camera within a 6 months period. I bought the camera to take on my honeymoon (thank goodness that footage was on two of the Panasonic cassettes) and bought a HDD camcorder the following year.

I find it really strange and very surprising that every single one of the sony products has failed.

Unfortunately I don't know anyone with a sony minidv camcorder I could use. What do you think of my suggestion of taking the cassettes to a photo processing shop. Might they have more luck?

[Andrew Smith]

If possible, find someone with a professional Sony tape deck such as this one, and have them capture from the HDMI or composite output (and not the firewire connection). I've found that my Sony deck does some cleaning up of playback glitches that you won't see if you grab the actual data through the firewire connection.

Granted, your case sounds like it is more at the extreme end, but it's worth a try and might make the difference.

Andrew

[Tony Carroll]

Thanks for all your reply's.

Following a quick shout out on facebook I found someone with a Samsung camcorder which I have borrowed and seems to play them all fine.
It appears my camcorder is out of alignment in a way that only reveals itself with the Sony cassettes.

How odd!!

[Bruce Dempsey]

Way back when tape was 4" wide it seems to me we were told to spool back and forth once in a while to minimize creep where something or other would want to migrate from one layer to another but I dunno if that still applies

[Andrew Smith]

4" wide tape? LOL. There's no way I can beat that,

Andrew

[Jim Andrada]

I remember 2" magnetic tape and 3/4" tape but never saw 4". I did see 4" paper tape for some of the older computers though (or maybe it was 3" - I sort of forget - the machine that used it went out of service in 1959.

[Bruce Dempsey]

Sorry I mispoke they were called Quads and used in tv production studios to record and edit studio productions but the tape was 2" not 4"

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...V_cassette.jpg

[Brian Berg]

I was told that the different manufacturers used different lubricants on the tape, and when you use different brands you run the risk of the lubricants not playing well together. I've always stuck with one brand and never had any issues.

[Jim Andrada]

@Bruce

I think the reason for spooling back and forth was more to minimize air entrapment between the wraps which could cause creep if the reels were under tension..

The biggest 2" reels of tape I ever personally saw were almost a meter in diameter and were used for radar signature analyses of incoming missiles to develop algorithms to distinguish a warhead from metallic chaff that was there to lead radars astray. One drive was on Kwajalein Atol (the target for test launches from Vandenberg AFB) and a lot of radar/telemetry data were fed to it from a variety of sources. The tape was then sent to Hanscom AFB outside of Boston for analysis at MIT's Lincoln Labs. There were small custom built forklifts that were used to mount the reels on the drives. Someone told me that there were 7 miles of tape on the reel - a mile of leader for the reel to come up to speed, 5 miles of data, and a mile of trailer for the machine to slow down and stop without ripping itself off the floor. I watched it in action a couple of times. It was quite impressive! The analysis was done by a roomful of analogue computers that did first pass analysis and digitization and then the data were fed to a roomful of IBM 7090 computers.

I know it won't help the OP with his problem, but it might be an interesting footnote to the saga of magnetic tape. Which is still very much alive.

[Chris Hurd]

Originally Posted by Shaun Roemich

Someone is likely to "flame me" for stating this ...

Not on this site they won't.

[Andrew Smith]

Anybody who flames gets to discover where the "Obstreperous" part comes from. :-P

Andrew

[Bruce Dempsey]

@Jim
Grinning from ear to ear visualizing a forklift loading a spool of tape.
We had 4 or 5 Quads in VTR at a little Studio in the 70's. They were Ampex and B/W.
Took forever to achieve a single edit and required a guy in the VTR room cueing up the machines, a Director in the Control room calling the shots a switcher, audio tech, someone (or 2) with a stop watch counting down and somebody to run between the control room and VTR to "see what the trouble was".
The edits were done on the fly and it took 10 seconds for the machine to get to speed so you'd have a master spinning and two insert machine with a guy running between the machines starting and inserting at just the right frame. Then the master had to be stopped spooled back for playback to see if the edit was in the right spot and clean. Was quite an effort in co-ordination and took a building full of people and machines to achieve the equivalent of a mouse click these days