Memories Of Video

Going back to head cleaning cassettes, was there anyone, or do you know of anyone, who, once their head cleaning tape reached the end, rewound it, and tried to use it again?

I would have thought the heads would have been dry second time round.

LOL! A former neighbour alleged that the local shop, which had a head cleaning cassette to rent out, rewound it to use again. She claimed you would be getting other folks dirt!

I've heard of dirty movies but...

I dug out my old VHS recorder today - it'd been gathering dust (literally caked in it) for at least 10 years in plastic cupboard in an underground but exposed-to-elements car park. It couldn't track the first tape I tried, but the second, a Disney VHS of Bambi worked perfectly.

Anyway, it got me to wondering - how were VHS tapes like Disney ones mass-produced? Would it have been banks of high-end recorders, or something more industrial? Would they have been recorded at high speed? Would they have had machines loading tapes in and out, with humans just there to tidy up the spools of tape when it went wrong?

There was an article on the Dr Who Restoration website about VHS duplication problems on one of their releases and they said that "real time" duplication offers the best results, as opposed to at speed.

As to video duplicating, apparently you could mass produce them using "high speed thermal-magnetic duplication". See here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20121222142455/http://www.otari.com/support/vintage/t710/index.html

Managed to get to some of my archives today and found this substance on some of my tapes. Is this mould or dust and can it be easily be cleaned/removed?

Dust would be more "grey" I would have thought, more along the lines of what happens if you don't dust a shelf for a while.

Mould looks more white chalk like and grows over time. Dare say it'll be terminal eventually.

Might be of interest:

Digitise the tape while you can, if you haven't already, I'd say.

That's a good idea. The best way is by using one of these:
https://tinyurl.com/v68xfbn

(Might be worth checking your PCs specs first.

As we've been discussing head cleaning tapes...

If I'm getting a good picture out of my VCR, no dropouts, no flicker, no white bits, tracking seems solid, and it's reading the HiFi stereo track, am I likely to get any improvement on the picture from using a head cleaning tape? Or is it already as good as it'll get, seeing as there are no tracking problems?

Hmm. That's a good question. I would say if it ain't broke don't fix it.