The age and stock of the tape is a significant factor in determining your rate of progress.
Tapes that have to be baked and then left at room temperature for several hours before playback will consume a lot of time. Sony's not as bad on bake times, compared to Ampex/Agfa/Dupont/Switzerland tape. If you have Scotch or Fuji, you likely won't need to bake at all. I've had Sony from the 80s that took a few hours of baking, but also a Sony tape from the 90s that required no baking.
If a tape is sticky, it can squeak and clog your video heads to a snowy picture rather quickly. Stop tape immediately before it damages your player, clean the heads, and bake the tape. For some brands, it's an automatic bake and not worth trying to skip. Not sure if newer generations of Ampex ever got rid of the Sticky Shed problem, like Sony seemed to. Not enough experience there.
If you have a mix of good and bad, perhaps you can bake the bad tapes "in parallel" while digitizing the good ones.
A good reference is
http://www.specsbros.com/white-paper...cassettes.html
Even when tapes are baked, they may still get your video heads rather dirty after playing just one tape. They still can shed enough to get the heads dirty, just not enough to clog and damage things.
Best of luck to you!
