Can you repair damaged camcorder tapes?

Answer 1

not usually a good idea. the damaged part will never work again, but sometimes the unaffected parts can be salvaged. the damaged section has to be pulled out and removed from the cassette, then cut off. VHS shells have a brake mechanism which makes it tricky to loosen the tape. the remain good tape has to be spliced together. it is important that the splice never be played over the heads. so recover the remaining video before and after the splice, by copying onto a new tape. toss the old when done because you never want to record on that tape again.

Answer 2

your digital8 camcorder can only record in digital format, not analog. so your tapes, even the 2003 ones would be digital. i would try running a cleaning tape. if some of the cassettes were marked for Hi8 MP type, then that may be the problem. The MP tapes had binder failure issues that allowed the particles to spall off the tape which clogs the head almost immediately on playback. Digital8 and ME type tape do not have this problem. If you have a combination of ME and MP tapes, try playing just the ME ones, if that works then that is half the problem solved. getting another camcorder just to play 10 tapes is not reasonable especially if the problem is the tape. stick with what you have until you get it to work.

Answer 3

I do not recommend that you do it yourself, but what you can do is go to a local video rental store or a video production house and they will be able to fix it for you. The reason why that you should not do it your self is that when you take the screws off of the video cassettete case is that their are springs that come off and you have to know how to re thread the video back in the casset the right way. if you mess it up you will have one big headache!

Thank You,

Bob