8mm Cassette Camcorders
Erased tapes?
I have some hi8 and 8mm cassettes that I’m trying to play for my boss, but all I can get out of them is static. I tried them on two camcorders that are known to work. These tapes are only 5 years old at the oldest, and I wouldn’t think that the tapes could degrade so badly after such a short period of time. I did a quick 3 second test-record on one of the tapes, and that plays back fine. The only conclusion I can think of is that the tapes have somehow gotten erased, maybe by an airport luggage scan or metal detector or something along those lines.
Any ideas?
The airport security systems will not erase your tapes. Storing them too close to an audio speaker or other device which generates a strong magnetic field can erase them but that is not very common. Exposing them to high temperatures can also erase them but you will usually see damage to the cassette shell if this is so.
It is possible that the tape path around the record heads of the camcorder which made the recordings was drifting out of alignment when the tapes were made. This was a common problem with some camcorders, especially those made by Sony. If this is your case, then your older recordings might have even played okay soon after they were made but will not play now because the tape path has drifted even further away from standard alignment. Usually when this happens you can occasionally see a picture or partial picture containing multiple horizontal snowy bands.
In mild to moderate cases of alignment drift a tech can intentionally misalign a playback machine to make a good copy of the content from the out-of-spec recordings but this is a very time-consuming and expensive process.
Also, the recorder may have had clogged record heads when the recordings were made. In this case they would not have played back clearly from the beginning. Also, this is not a recoverable failure since the information was never actually encoded onto the tape.
WK
Sony CCD-TRV65 Hi8 Camcorder from 1998
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