Working With Tape

Over the last few years the education system has followed industry practice and gravitated towards shooting video on solid state media formats such as Compact Flash or SDHC cards. As a result, there is a proportion of students entering the industry who have never used tape before and who are blissfuly unaware of tape's little idiosyncrasies that tend to get in the way of a successful shoot.

Tape is not dead, and probably never will be as far as historical archives are concerned. All those old masters gathering dust in museum basements are not likely to be destroyed, but it is not the playback of old masters that I am concerned about here. 

As a recording medium, tape is still occasionally being used.

The post-graduate applying for their first job may end up working for a community project group that is still shooting DV, DVCAM or HDV on tape. 

Foreign students returning to their own countries may find that the broadcasters are still shooting standard definition on BetaSP, DigiBeta, DVCAM or DVCPro cameras. 

Owners of hybrid cameras who have been shooting on solid state media may find that they need to shoot a slow motion sequence that can only be done on tape. This holds true for HDV cameras such as the Sony HVR s270 and the HVR-Z7.

Then there are those hi-end cameras that cost as much as a small house, HDCAM, HDCAM SR and DVCPro100. Equipment that cost so much money to buy new is not going to be consigned to landfill after only a few years of usage.

Most of us were glad to see the back of tape and rejoiced at the advent of solid state media but whilst we hated the drop out issues, the ingest problems and the messing about with time-code, we did at least manage to learn how to tame the beast.

So, for those that have never learned how to tame the tape, here is the idiot's guide to recording with tape.

First, a word about drop-out. Recording tape is made up of a layer of flexible plastic coated with magnetic particles. These magnetic particles orient themselves according to the magnetic field applied to them at the record head when an electronic signal is applied to the head. As the tape passes across the head, a recording of audio, video or timecode is captured onto the tape. Drop-out is missing bits of the video, audio or synch signal due to missing magnetic particles at various points on the tape. Wherever their is missing oxide, there will be drop-out.

With old analogue tape formats such as BetaSP, VHS or U-matic, the symptoms of drop-out showed up as spots or "comet tails" in the picture, brief losses of audio, and in worst cases, loss of time-code and synch signals that resulted in the tv monitor being unable to display a locked picture.

With digital formats such as DV, DVCAM, DVCPro and HDV, the picture would freeze or become heavily pixellated, the audio would mute and time code information would be lost.

In order to avoid the dreaded drop-out problems it was essential to adopt certain rules of thumb. First of all, it was good practice to never re-use your tapes. Always use virgin tape in your camera to reduce the risk of head clogs caused by drop-out. Secondly, it was good practice to use the same brand of tape in the camera. This avoided different types of binding agents used by different manufacturers coming together on the surface of the tape transport mechanism with unknown or unpredictable results. The third point was to avoid using the very beginning or very end of the tape as these were the places where most drop-out occurred.

The first thing to do after loading a tape into the camera was to go into the menu and navigate to the TC/UB section (Time Code & User Bit). Under "Preset", go in and change the Preset value to read 01:00:00:00 which is 1 hour, 0 minutes, 0 seconds and 0 frames. If this was the second tape of the shoot, I would set this to 02:00:00:00 or 03:00:00:00 for the third and so on.


Then press okay and move down to the Rec Run/ Free Run option in the menu. For most shoots we want the counter to start only when we press the record button, so we use "Rec Run". Only rarely do we ever use "Free Run" as the counter will be running all the time resulting in breaks in time code every time we hit the pause button.




The next thing we need to do is navigate to the Preset/Regenerate option and select "Preset".

Next, we need to turn on the colour bars, usually via a switch labelled "Bars" on the outside of the camera, but occasionally this may be found in the menu. Once bars are turned on, we need to record one minutes worth of bars on the front of the tape. If required, we can also record a line up tone from our external sound mixer at the same time.


After recording a minute of bars we need to go back into the menu and change the Preset/Regen option to "Regen", come back out of the menu and turn off the colour bars.





Now we are ready to start recording. Every time we hit record, the tape will now wind back a couple of seconds, read the last bit of time code on the tape, then drop into record mode with the result that the new shot will have time-code that continues from where the last shot left off. Thus we will have a tape full of our shots with time-code running from start to finish  This will help alleviate most of the problems experienced when trying to get the material into the edit suite. After our last shot, it is a good idea to record another 20 seconds or so of bars and tone at the end. Alternatively, put the lens cap on and record 20 seconds of black. I generally record some bars onto tape each time I finish at one location and move on to the next. This helps as a visual identifier when fast forwarding through tapes in the edit suite.

A further point on the use of tape is to ensure you record soft ins and soft outs. This practice should equally be followed when shooting on solid state but is even more important as tape takes a couple of seconds to get up to speed.  The usual process is for the director to call "Run to Record", the camera operator presses the record button and responds with "Rolling". The director will then call "And, in your own time...". The talent should then take a beat before starting to act. At the end of the action the talent should follow through, giving a second or two for the editor to cut away from the shot in post. The director will pause, then call "Cut' and the camera operator will stop the camera. Recording soft ins and soft outs in this way will help the editor get the best timing for each edit. Hard ins and hard outs are a pain to edit as they restrict the editors creativity, and can also cause problems capturing from tape if there are any breaks in the recorded time-code.

And now you know why we were so joyous when solid state media came along.