I personally never re-use master tapes either. Tape is cheap enough so that it should never be an issue.
I work at a community college and have seen what happens when students re-use tapes a number of times. Digital dropouts are not nice :-(

Mike

almost never - I do sometimes but that's only if I'm in a bind - forgot to grab a clean tape / grabbed the wrong tape.

Dave

"degaussing them in between each use"

A waste of time.

It's an anachronism of the early analog tape days that is completely unnecessary with digital recording.

Steve

Paid jobs. Never. My experimenting all - the time. If my nephew EVER gets any of his cameras to work, he gets them! But at £1.65GBs for SONY premmies, not a consideration. If something SHOULD go wrong on a paid job I can always say"This was a new tape" IF THEY should ask. But we all know that people think that re-used MUST be bad. Soooo... I Head them off at the pass by always using new on paid jobs. Period!

Grazie

Never. The material is so cheap, that I always maintain the original footage.

Never.

Never. I always keep the original footage for the future.

Dave T2

Probably nothing bad will happen if you reuse a tape a couple of times, but why take the chance? I was told that the brand of tapes (I shoot with can be reused safely several times but the only time I would is if I'll be taping over it with something unpaid and not critical .

Almost never, only if I'm in a real pinch. If its "important" enough for me to get my camera, load it up, and film it, than its important enough to make sure I actually get the shot.

- Ray

Almost never, but only because if I'm shooting raw video then I want to keep that raw video forever. But I think the dropout issue is way overblown. Back in 2001when I used Studio7 as my NLE, we didn't have the luxury of hundreds of GB of storage. Fortunately, Studio7 allowed users to edit a proxy of the raw DV footage, and when finished, the user could then tell Studio7 to go back to the tape and pull in the actual DV material in full resolution. For a one-hour movie this meant the camcorder was constantly fast-forwarding and rewinding, going from one clip location to another. Even so, those original tapes play fine today.

So my conclusion is that a tape can be used dozens of times on a properly-adjusted camcorder. I just never have the need to do so.

The high end formats like DigiBeta and SP will withstand a lot of reuse but MiniDV forget it, some cheapskate gave me some footage on an old 'test' tape and the thing wrapped itself around the guides in my VCR. So be warned, you're not just risking what's on the tape, your gear can be at risk as well and the stuff IS so damn cheap.
Bob.

Never had reason to.
Jimmy

I re-use the full size DV tapes sometimes, but never the miniDV.

John

The way the mag layer is vapor deposited on the substrate is really ...ummm....flaky. excuse the intentional pun. re-using a tape increases the probability that the mag material will flake off of the substrate. in my own experience, somewhere around ~5 uses starts causing the mag material to flake off sufficiently to cause dropouts.

The way the mag layer is vapor deposited on the substrate is really ...ummm....flaky. excuse the intentional pun. re-using a tape increases the probability that the mag material will flake off of the substrate. in my own experience, somewhere around ~5 uses starts causing the mag material to flake off sufficiently to cause dropouts.
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Usually that is the case with Dry lube tapes not wet lube tapes. Panasonic MQ tapes are dry lube for example, but PQ are not.

Apparently PQ and MQ tapes are both dry lube tapes.

I believe Jan Critteden (Panasonic rep) used to say they were different, but I think Jan later admitted that was wrong. (I may be wrong about that. Working off memory here.)

2- I don't re-use DV tapes because I might accidentally kill something due to user error. I've done it once :(