You probably purchased your camcorder to record and preserve memories of children growing up, vacations, family gatherings and other important events. These tips will help insure will help insure those recordings are viewable ten or fifteen years from now.
 | Don't try to fill up a tape. Use one tape for
each important event (birth, first steps, 50th anniversary, etc). If you are
on vacation, start a new tape each day. Tapes cannot be spliced or repaired.
When a tape is damaged, the loss of one event or day is not nearly as traumatic
as the loss of an entire vacation, or year of events when your child was
growing up. Tapes are cheep compared to memories. |
| Store tapes in their boxes, in a dry, room
temperature environment, away from magnetic fields. TVs and stereo speakers
radiate strong magnetic fields that in time can degrade the information
recorded on magnetic tape. A metal file box will help shield your tapes from
magnetic fields. A safe deposit box is even better. |
| Do not use your original tapes for day to day
playback of those memories. Copy them on to another tape, then store the
original in a safe place as mentioned above. You can always make
another copy if needed, but once the original is damaged, the memories are
lost. |
| Remove tapes from the camcorder and return to
their original box when finished recording for that session. When the tape
is in the camcorder, it is loaded around the tape guides and video head
drum. When powered off, it is possible for vibration to slack the tape,
allowing it to slip off the guides and/or contact lubricants on the
mechanism. This is probably the number one cause for damaged, tangled, and
jammed tapes. |
| Magnetic recordings do not last for ever. This
is a topic the manufacturers do not like to talk about. Improperly stored,
the data recorded on tape can be damaged in seconds. Properly stored, the consensus
seems to be that good quality tape may show noticeable degradation
after 7 to 10 years. Armed with that information, it would be wise to make
copies of your master tapes about every 5 years, and keep those copies with
the masters in the event the masters become unusable. |
Courtesy Halle's Service, Inc.