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Home Video Hints: Get Those Tapes in Shape

No matter how casual you are about video, there's one place where you should be as meticulous as any pro tape management and preservation. For 20 years, proud grandpas and mothers of the bride have been saddened and appalled as irreplaceable video images faded into smudged ghosts and finally vanished. You can avoid that fate in today's digital world, but only if you prepare tapes to begin with, warehouse them with care, and copy them every few years or so.
We'll tell you how to do all that, and while we're on the subject, we'll also cover a simple procedure called "blacking the tape," which can reduce the tedious parts of video editing by 90 percent. Trust me, you'll like it. So, let's talk about getting tape ready before shooting and then archiving it afterwards. Finally, we'll explain what blacking the tape is, why you want to do it, and how to go about it.

The first step in readying a new tape for use is to open it. "Well, duh!" you say. But, wait. Tape packaging was designed by sadists to shred nerves and reduce fingernails to stumps, especially when you try to switch tapes in the middle of a shoot while the action is getting away from you.

The trick is to have at least a few tapes open and accessible. And while you're doing that, label each one, because there's nothing like starting to edit with a pile of equally "blank" cassettes. Also, you can pick up a full "blank" tape and mistakenly use it again, wiping out its original recording.

Start by applying face and edge labels to the cassette. Then, give the tape a unique number. Since it's hard to remember a number sequence if you're not looking at the previous tapes, simply start with today's date and then a cassette number, for instance, "06/13/0201."

Incidentally: don't omit the leading zero in the tape number. Without it, your editing database may reorder your tapes 1, 11, 12, 13 and so-on, up to 2, 20, 21, 22, etc.....

How about those tiny Mini DV labels? Anyone who can use them effectively could also engrave the Lord's Prayer on the head of a pin. So, here are some strategies for evading this problem. First, number the paper log in the tape storage box to match the cassette, and do your writing on that more capacious surface. Though tape and container may get separated, you can re-match them by their numbers later on.

Next, note recording endpoints on the cassette face label, to ensure that you start on a fresh tape the next time you use it. (Since it's common to play back the footage you've shot, you may not always leave the tape at the very end of the recorded material.) By the time the tape's full, one of my labels may look like this:

Again, the storage case insert can carry more details. Note that this is just one approach, and Videomaker would love to hear about your own ingenious system for writing on postage stamp-sized cassette labels.

With tape and box opened and labeled, the next step is to limber up the contents. To do this, simply fast forward the tape to the end and then rewind it to the beginning. This will free up any minor sticky spots and discard bits of loose oxide that could hang up on your record heads and cause problems later. (You won't leave your tape there, for reasons we'll explain in a moment.)

Finally, a word about archiving. Always store tapes in their boxes to keep dust away, and stand them upright, on end. Stashed in an environment of moderate temperature and humidity, your precious records should last for years. But they won't last forever.

Ill-informed folks insist that digital tapes will last as long as Kodachrome transparencies; but in fact, the digital signal-storage system is no different from the old analog method. In both formats, magnetizing bazillions of metallic particles encodes information, and, over time, progressively demagnetizes and degrades the signal.

The digital advantage is not in permanence, but in copy quality. Like a floppy disk, you can duplicate a digital tape through many generations without any quality loss. Moreover, even if the parent tape has just barely enough signal left to read, the copy will be as pristine as the camera original. The moral: Duplicate your stored programs every few years. How few? The jury's still out on that one, so I'll take a risk and guesstimate that every five years should do it.