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This topic comprises 2 pages: 1 2
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Author
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Topic: return videotapes heads out or tails out?
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Scott Norwood
Film God
Posts: 8146
From: Boston, MA. USA (1774.21 miles northeast of Dallas)
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-04-2005 02:29 PM
Yes, videotape. I know that this is a film site, but surely there are others here who have to present video programs from time to time at festivals or other events. I've done several of these shows lately (mostly from Beta SP, sometimes Digi-Beta or HDCAM).
I "inspect" tapes by rewinding or fast-forwarding through the tape, stopping occasionally to check sound quality and make note of the program-start and program-end timecode values. As such, I prefer that the tapes arrive not rewound, since it makes the inspection process faster.
This, then, begs the question of whether or not there is (or should be) a general consensus about how to return videotapes after screenings. To date, I have returned them as they have arrived (usually rewound), but I don't know if this is how the distributors (or other theatres) prefer them to be returned.
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Mark Ogden
Jedi Master Film Handler
Posts: 943
From: Little Falls, N.J.
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-05-2005 03:38 PM
quote: Randy Stankey
As magnetic tape sits in storage, the magnetic particles in the layers of tape lying next to each other in the roll tend to have a mutual demagnetizing effect. Thus, after a length of time, the tape will naturally erase itself just by sitting in one place for a long time.
I don’t know where you got this, but I have never ever seen this effect ever, and I handle a great deal of old videotape. In fact, last year, a woman I work with brought in a 2” quad reel that contained an episode of Play Your Hunch, a game show that aired in 1959, just three years after videotape was first introduced. The episode featured her then very young son, and she wanted to know if it could be dubbed to DVD. We cleaned the tape to remove a little loose oxide, racked it up on an Ampex AVR-1, and it played almost flawlessly, with just a little bit of timing error here and there. The tape had been in storage in her closet for 45 years. In fact, when the Game Show Network channel first started, I was in touch with a buddy who was transferring a lot of the old Goodson-Toddman shows from quad to digital. He reported that the vast majority played back with no problem at all, and certainly weren’t erased with the lapse of 30 to 40 years time.
So, how long does a tape have to sit before it erases itself?
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Randy Stankey
Film God
Posts: 6539
From: Erie, Pennsylvania
Registered: Jun 99
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posted 12-06-2005 11:53 PM
Mark,
My explanation wasn't very good. Monte used the word Print-Through which is a much better term for what I was trying to describe. I couldn't remember the exact word.
I agree with you that magnetic tapes probably wouldn't spontaneously erase themselves without outside influence but I have witnessed print-through in old audio tapes that made the recording sound so bad that it was, in effect, erased.
Still, you'd have to admit that, with the difference in in the quality of television between 1960 and the year 2000, if there was degration in the tapes for whatever reason it might very well go unnoticed if it wasn't pronnounced.
quote:
Print-through
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.
Jump to: navigation, search
Print-through (sometimes referred to as bleed-through) is a generally undesirable effect that arises in the use of magnetic tape for storing analogue information, in particular music.
The close proximity of layers of tape on the spools of a cassette or reel to reel tape causes a weak imprint of magnetic information to be transferred to adjacent layers, effectively shifting a copy of the signal backwards and forwards along the tape. This can sometimes be heard as pre- or post-echo. Thinner tapes are more prone to the effect than thicker tapes, and tapes held in storage for a long period or exposed to a weak magnetic field can show pronounced print-through. Digital tapes are not affected in the same manner as the imprint is generally too weak to change the state of bits recorded on adjacent layers of the tape.
Print-through is actually used to mass-record prerecorded audio cassettes. In the duplicator, an endless loop of the source tape is forced into close contact with blank tape and run across a "print-through head" in which a weak AC high frequency sinewave is used to transfer the information to the blank tape without erasing the source tape. This permits the tapes to be run at very high speed, speeding up production. However, audio quality using this method is not as good as when the signal is directly recorded onto the tape.
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