Cleaning Noisy tape in miniDV and VHS

[adnana1]

I played back some miniDV tapes and found that some portion of the video had disturbance and mosaic type lines. I read it because the tapes may be old. How can this be cleaned or solved?

Also for the VHS tapes, I don't have a player to view them and so don't know if they work good(~25 years old). Is there any maintenance tips or any particular spot in the tape to be cleaned? 

Thanks

[Sean_Mc]

Hi there,

Hopefully someone in the community might be able to advise you further.

It might also be worth getting in touch with the Sony Support team here for further advice.

Best wishes,
Sean 

[darkframe]

Hi @adnana1,

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@adnana1  wrote:

I played back some miniDV tapes and found that some portion of the video had disturbance and mosaic type lines. I read it because the tapes may be old. How can this be cleaned or solved?

Also for the VHS tapes, I don't have a player to view them and so don't know if they work good(~25 years old). Is there any maintenance tips or any particular spot in the tape to be cleaned? 

Thanks

---

I'm afraid that there's absolutely no direct solution to your problem.

Well, if the noise/disturbance shows up throughout the complete tape there might be a slight chance to improve the situation by using a cleaning tape for the playback device in order to clean its read/write head.

However, you wrote that the disturbances show up in a portion of the tape only. There are several reasons by which those disturbances can be caused:

• wrinkles in the tape,
• dirt on the tape's surface,
• partial loss of magnetisation in the tape's surface,
• cross-fading/copying of the magnetisation from one part of the tape to the other,
• damages in the surface of the tape at some positions,
• uneven winding of the tape.

The last problem could possibly be solved by winding and re-winding the tape several times (this can remove dirt at the same time).

Anyhow, you've got to face that the quality of tapes is deteriorating over years. This simply is a natural process. The best way to treat tapes would be to wind/re-wind them at least once a year (better every 6 months). By doing this you could prevent from the cross-fading effect. This effect happens due to the fact that the tape's surface is magnetic. Now, when storing the tape for a long time without winding it, the magnetisation of a certain portion of the tape affects those portions which are lying directly above and below it, often resulting in a ghost image.

Damages like the ghost effect and all the other causes which I've mentioned above cannot be cured, sorry (well, a bit of dust maybe). There's nothing you can do about it. Whatsoever, I absolutely warn you against trying to clean the tape itself manually. It's more than likely that you would worsen the situation.

To cut a long story short: I'm afraid that you've got to live with those disruptions. Better try to digitise your tapes as soon as possible because your tapes will certainly lose even more quality year by year. In case you cannot do that on your own (or don't know anybody to help you with it) you need to find an affordable copying studio. I do know one or two in Germany but none in the UK, sorry. Maybe there's somebody else around being able to help you with this.

Cheers

darkframe