I have cleaned many broadcast u/matic tapes. Although from my home made oven 6 hours is plenty of time to do the job, cooling down as suggested is perfect. But this process does not remove the binder that is now not sticky . I had the facility to use a cleaning machine that has tissue rolls and razors to scrape the gunk off the tape. But if you dont have one then the next best thing to do is dont play the tape after baking but spool it 3 times or more cleaning the guides and head between spooling. This is next best thing to a cleaning machine. PS the tapes that are baked only stay stable for a couple of weeks and revert to their previous condition. Also rather than place the tapes on anything metal in the oven use a ceramic saucer as it does not transfer large amounts of heat into the cassette cartridge. Wish you all well. This is a good thing you are doing preserving memories and events.
Don't be afraid to remove at least one half of the cartridge shell. Leaving the shell on prevents heat from penetrating the entire tape spool at a decent pace. Even after playing baking tapes I strongly recommend cleaning the entire tape path as even baking doesn't prevent excessive buildup on guides, heads, etc.. Good luck!
The other commenters are correct. With any videocassette, I always take the shell apart and bake the tape reels alone. This also gives me a chance to clean the tape guides in the shell, as they are often gummed up from prior play attempts. The eject problem you experienced is likely a problem with your deck, probably a loading belt that needs to be replaced. (I own a VO-9800, which is identical to yours except it has no tracking meter.) You might also try a tad higher temperature. I usually bake at 140F. The melting point of the binder is about 135.
This what happens if 1991 French Canadian VHS of Fantasia is messed up the picture due to tracking problems, and won't rewind or fast forward it gets eaten up by loud squeaking noise.
This is an interesting process. I was intrigued to see UofO since I am in Springfield. I am trying to determine if this will work to recover a huge trove of old floppy disks I recently received since many of them have local historical value but the oxide layer comes off onto the drive heads making the disks unreadable. I will do some testing, thanks for the great information!
@@unofficialkbvr-tvarchive1426 Wow, small world! I just checked and the blog contact form was not pointing correctly. It should now take you to the contact form on my shopify site. There is also contact info on my about tab on the main channel page.
It's fairly complex. I have an old DPS digital timebase corrector, which does a great job at stabilizing videotape standard-def sources and converting them digital to with 10-bit resolution (instead of the 8-bit you get in consumer devices). It outputs to SDI, which capture with a Blackmagic interface (there are several to choose from) to ProRes format. From there, I deinterlace using JES deinterlacer (which only runs on older versions of MacOS, I keep an old computer around just for that.) There are newer deinterlacing products that may work just as well but I haven't experimented lately and JES does just what I need. I hope that helps!
as open reel tapes in most cases need 24 hours (or even much longer...) I think cassettes should be way longer in the oven to get good results; and IN ALL CASES: do copy the tape immediately, the effect of the baking method does not stay for a long period of time
I jabe baked over 700 reels of tape and 200 3/4" video cartridges. I would highly recommend you pull the spools out of the cassette before baking. I restore and operate 2" quad broadcast video tape machine and will not playback any tape that has not been baked. Its so funny that Ampex, the king of magnetic recording made horrible tapes, both audio & video 3m had the best consistent quality
Someone asked for clickable links to the resources I mentioned at the end of the video. I'm posting them in this comment and will add them to the RU-vid description: Sticky-Shed Syndrome Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sticky-shed_syndrome Curing Sticky Tape Problems by Baking Mike Rivers www.josephson.com/bake_tape.html Analog Tape Restoration Eddie Ciletti with notes by Wendy Carlos www.wendycarlos.com/bake%20a%20tape/baketape.html
I'm getting bogged down by too much info. Use a convection oven, use a food dehydrator, etc. Which one works best? Maybe i'll have to try both methods. Don't want to attempt wet solutions like using diluted Nu Finish on anything other than audio tapes. There must be a time chart somewhere for baking various kinds of media but I haven't found it yet. U-Matic times can't be the same as Beta or VHS or 8mm just because the volumes are different. Thanks for the video though...
