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

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.

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.

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?

If possible, find someone with a professional Sony tape deck such as this one (http://pro.sony.co.in/pro/product/broadcast-products-hddecks-hdv/hvr-m25ap/overview/), 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

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!!

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

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

Andrew

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.

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/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/2-inch_Quad_Tape_Reel_with_miniDV_cassette.jpg/250px-2-inch_Quad_Tape_Reel_with_miniDV_cassette.jpg

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.

@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.

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

Not on this site they won't.

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

Andrew

@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

Drifting off-topic for the poor OP now, but here's the full run-down on an Ampex Quad...

http://youtu.be/zHDU1wXw1sU

Yes, operating this thing requires a foot pedal!

I only ever messed with 3/4" U-matic, back in college.

Back to the point though: many years ago on this site we established that the "tape brand loyalty myth" was itself a myth, meaning yes, tape brands *do* make a difference and should not be mixed.

This thread will be moving to "The Long Black Line" shortly. That's our tape forum.

OK - this fits. If the reels I remember were around 4X the diameter of these, then that would have made each reel 16 times as heavy so 160kg = 360 pounds - plus the reels themselves were much more robust to handle the load so altogether it would have been 400 - 500 pounds. Hence the forklifts (and the reels were mounted one above the other so the machine was around 9 feet tall.)

Fast forward from 1966 or so to 1994/5 - I was working for IBM and we were working on a tape library automation project with Ampex - the system was built around their 3/4 inch media (or maybe it was still 1- inch - I forget). The tape reels were in a cassette - the largest of which was attache case sized. The drives had servoing heads to stay on track - still helical scan. The library was quite "stylish" looking - curved panels, two colors.

When Lou Gerstner took over as the new CEO of IBM I was tasked with putting together a demo room of all of our storage products as part of his visit to the San Jose site. It was the first thing he would see after arriving on the site. We decided to include the Ampex library as part of the show even though it hadn't yet been announced and in fact never would be.

At the time we had a refrigerator sized optical disk library in the room as well. I did my best to get the room arranged and then a few minutes before Lou showed up, our division president walked in and turned the optical disk library around so you could see the innards. As soon as he left the room I turned it around again - it was sort of like a tennis match. Anyhow, just as he finished turning it around backside out again the door opened and Lou walked in. My boss ran over to introduce himself but Lou basically told him to get the F out of the way and blew him off. He took one look at the back of the disk library and launched into a tirade screaming at everybody about why on earth our product looked like a POS, where was the logo, why would a customer want to see the guts of a system. The division president tried to get a word in about the technology and Lou just shut him up and called him 29 kinds of stupid. Then his eye caught the Ampex box and he fell in love with it. - yelling at everyone about the value of industrial Design and how all the other stuff in the room looked like SH-- in comparison.

Which might have been true, but we were selling several billion a year of the stuff that looked like SH-- and the curvy Ampex wonder box never quite made it as a data store and a few years later Ampex folded. Wonderful bunch of folks at Ampex. I never worked with them on the video recording side of things, just data storage, but their complex off of Rt 101 was a great place and they were good people..

Times change. We gotta change with them. Even old Pharts like me (55 years and counting in the computer biz)