Which Mini DV Tape is Best?
Penguin July 10th, 2007
On Friday, I found that one of my mini DV tapes was broken. The little plastic flap under the tape came out of its slot. Since I only had two tapes left, for 2 hours of SP shooting or 3 hours of LP shooting, I figured it was time to buy some more tape.
I swung by Worst Buy because I thought I might shoot on Sunday. Looking at the variety of tapes, it quickly dawned on me that I had no idea what I should buy. I guess this is the problem of most blank media. What kind of CDs do you buy? What kind of DVD-Rs do you buy? And now, I can add miniDV to that mix.
I don’t know if it’s just the marketing, but I was drawn to a set of Panasonic Professional 80 min tapes. In the corner, it declared that it was made for 3ccd cameras. I was using a 3ccd camera, it makes sens that I would use this tape, right? This is one of the cases where the “Professional” held me back. Was it the marketing department trying to sell to an unknowing consumer the prospects of being pro? Or was this really designed for “professional” applications? Whatever that means.
I ended up picking them up. My reasoning was, these were the only 80 min tapes on the shelves. And, I believed the 3ccd hype.
This morning, I did a little bit of research and found that there really is a difference between professional and consumer tapes. It has to do with how they create the magnetism on the tapes. In the consumer grade tapes, they use ME, or “metal evaporate” which are less reusable. The professional tapes use MP, or “metal particle” which is more durable and has fewer dropouts.
In my research, I also read something about not mixing different brands of tapes. There seems to be an issue, especially with older tapes, where the lubricant will rub off onto the heads. When the different lubricants mix, they tend to gum up the heads.
Happy filming!
-Penguin
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Everything else you found out is definitely true. I usually shoot on MiniDVCAM, which is sony's pro tape for their DVCAM format (can't use these on non Sony Cameras). These are 40 min tapes. It costs me almost twice as much, but the tapes have less drop outs and come in cases that seal them better from outside dust and moisture. The length isn't a problem because I never shoot more than 40 mins in one take.
I've also shot on TDKs and Sony's Premium MiniDV tapes. Both are aite, but I never shoot important stuff on those and I try to avoid using them too too much cause they dirty the heads more than the pro tapes. I've heard good things about Panasonic's tapes. There's a pseudo format war between them an Sony. DVCPro vs DVCAM. And now of course there's HDDV. My own personal drool-cam is this one: http://www.gizmag.com/go/7522/. Shoots on solid state memory and has better resolution and and much better color depth than DV or HDDV.
It's definitely true that you should avoid mixing tapes and tape brands as much as possible. It's a good idea to have the camera's heads professionally cleaned every so often too. Otherwise you'll start seeing this weird digital banding thing where parts of previous frames are visible over the current frame. I've actually found that DV camera are more sensitive to dirty heads than their analog counterparts.
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I read about the DVCAM tapes, considering I'm using a Canon GL2, I don't think those are an option ;)
Thanks for the info, Jeff!
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