I'm playing around with my new cam and shooting stuff that I'll never use for anything. I've got the Sony DigitalMaster tape.

Can anyone see a problem with using it as one pass? It will only be used for more test shooting and not for real source tape of a shoot.

Can the tape withstand 2 or 3 passes?

I think that people underestimate the quality of tapes these days. They will certainly allow much more than three passes...
Of course, stop/start will put a strain on a tape, but a continuous run will be fine.

Robin

I'm a big fan of one pass. Also, since this is a tape discussion, I'm moving it to our tape forum.

heath

The reason I ask is that I finished a show in 98 & 99 that was all shot on DV. The production company scrubbed the tapes for logging and digitizing the offline material. By the time I got the tape for online and color correction they were wiped out. I can't tell you how many frames I had to paint by hand to clean them up.

We did some research and learned of the "shedding" affect. Since then I've been leary of anything other than Shoot, digitize and store.

Thanks for updating me.

From what I've read:
It might be that you got problems with tpae lubricant mixing together (Sony and Panasonics didn't mix together well and you'd get dropouts when mixing brands). Sony and Maxell reformulated their tapes in 1997 to avoid this problem. So maybe you had a tape with the bad formula.

Or it could be that the tape heads in your camera are differently aligned (and they recorded LP mode).

If you're doing linear editing I suppose tape shedding would be an issue, but with a low number of passes I don't think so. I suppose it would be really easy to test if shedding is a problem by scrubbing over your tapes 20-200 times and seeing if you get dropouts. Under 20 I'd say you're safe... but I'm too lazy to test.

2- Since many editing programs can automatically break things up based on date/time information, I don't really see the point of log and capture anymore. Storage is also fairly cheap.