Cleaning 8mm Tape
This isn't really that closely related to computers I know, but my friend has given me an 8mm (anologue) tape to digitize and edit, I've got a Canon Hi8 video camera, the Formac DV Studio and iMovie.
I've been trying to play this tape on my video camera, but it will only play for a few seconds before it cuts off to scrambled flickering video, and my camera will not play any other tapes until I run the head cleaner, but even then, this 8mm tape will only play for a few seconds before cutting off again.
I think when I play this tape, something must be rubbing of onto the head of the tape deck and stopping it from reading the tape, is this a common problem and is there anything I can do to clean or restore this tape so I can play it again?
Andrew
I've been trying to play this tape on my video camera, but it will only play for a few seconds before it cuts off to scrambled flickering video, and my camera will not play any other tapes until I run the head cleaner, but even then, this 8mm tape will only play for a few seconds before cutting off again.
I think when I play this tape, something must be rubbing of onto the head of the tape deck and stopping it from reading the tape, is this a common problem and is there anything I can do to clean or restore this tape so I can play it again?
Andrew
Comments
are you sure, it is just dust and not the tape itself? some go' ol' magnetic tapes have some kind of self destruction included: the brownish finish, the magnetic surface itself is "glued" on a crystal clear piece of clear pvc
this "glue" in some cases "dries" out - over here in germany, one of the big tv players had the problem, that tenthousands of hours of material from the 70ies were rotten - the brown magnetic dust "killed" the heads of every player!
have a look onto the tape...- no chance to repair that
<worst case scenario off>