I have often heard people suggest pre-striping tapes. I never pre-stripe...however, can you explain the process of pre-striping and the apparent benefits of pre-striping?

I'm considering "bulk erasing" as merely a means to destroy the tape's content. I do some very special seminar work that requires me to "hand over" all materials. I've been told I could keep the original tapes if the content is destroyed. Just looking for a fast way to accomplish this.

The simple way to pre-stripe a tape is to stick it in the camera or a deck and record something from beginning to end of the tape. If you put it in your camcorder then you can simply leave the lens cap on, although it doesn't matter if you record whatever the camera is pointing at. If you do it in a deck you'll have to feed the deck a video signal unless the deck can supply it's own. Traditionally color bars are used, but it really doesn't matter what picture is recorded.

The biggest benefit is that no matter ho many pauses & starts you do while recording, even if you take the tape out and reinsert it, you'll end up with continuous timcode from beginning to end. When the camera starts recording it does a very brief preroll and reads whatever timecode is on the tape and continues from there when it starts recording. If the tape is blank then if you start recording after a gap, the preroll won't find an existing timecode and the camera will start over at 00:00:00;00.

Prestriping was almost essential when insert editing on analog tape. It allowed the recording deck to sync up frames for each new section.

Thanks for the explanation. Pre-striping seems like an awfully tedious process. I feel sorry for those who end up using 10 or more tapes during shoots.

That's why you have the flunky or the secretary do the prestriping. Heck, if you've got an overnight janitor you could even train him/her to pop in a new tape and press record every 64 minutes or so.

Biggest problem is actually erasing any DV tape. We have a bulk tape eraser, one of the things where the tape goes along a conveyor. One or two passes with any analogue tape and there's zip left on it. With DV even after 10 passes you may still be able to get bits off it.
Bob.

I have a "High Power" hand-held bulk eraser that I bought at Radio Shack for $30 about 15 years ago that will obliterate the bits on a MiniDV tape. The thing draws a little over 9 amps and can only be used for about 45 seconds at a time before it overheats and shuts itself off. Nevrtheless, that's plenty of time to erase a MiniDV tape or two. Unfortunately, they don't sell them any more...

John

Radio Shack might not sell them anymore, but someone is!

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=294&item=5728179400

I have two of these babies and I'll agree that they do a good job of setting any magnetic media back to "factory defaults."

Hey, I was browsing the local Radio Shack last night and found two of these high-power tape erasers on the clearance table, marked down to $20 from $40. If anybody wants one I'd be happy to pick one up for you, probably wouldn't cost more than $5 to ship it to you.

Id love one actually. shoot me an email patrick.masters at gmail dot com.