Capturing Hi-Band SP U-matic with this setup?

[Billybob]

I have a Sony VO9850P and a batch of high quality Hi-Band SP tapes, all in excellent condition. I also have some Low-band tapes in not so great condition. I want to capture them to digital for archiving and Youtube uploads.

I am aiming to capture component from the DUB output of the VO9850. I appreciate this requires either a convertor (such as the Dub Optimiser at £495) or a compatible TBC that has a DUB input and will output component video suitable for the S Video connector.

I can then input into the S Video of the Sony Z1 Camcorder which will capture directly to a 2017 Macbook Air.

I also have a Sony DSR-80P DVCam, but bizarrely it has no digital output or Firewire. Not a problem as I can just record directly to tape and put it into my Z1.

The question is, should I invest in a full sized TBC, or could I rely on the circuitry of the Sony DSR-80P to stabilize the footage and capture directly to DV tape?

I appreciate a standalone TBC would be better, and I have a budget of a £1000 to buy one, but I have no idea what models I should look out for - presumably on Ebay? I'm wary of investing in TBC equipment I know very little about and experiencing further problems, or potentially introducing noise and other errors because the machine is old or defective in some way.

And am I still going to have to fork out for the Dub Optimiser to work with a TBC in this workflow?

[aramkolt]

The Dub Optimizer is kind of sub-optimal (ironically) in my opinion. It grabs the chroma from the composite signal which has already been mixed with luma by that point. The main reason to use DUB is to use "never mixed" chroma and luma which reduces interference. It's akin to using S-Video versus composite, so performance gain may vary, but it should never be inferior to composite. Perhaps it is possible that one can accurately "subtract" luma from a composite signal if you have both, but it still doesn't seem ideal.

I believe PAL has less overlap of chroma and luma in composite, so I don't know if the advantage to keeping chroma and luma separate is as much as it potentially is with NTSC. Video99uk swears by DUB transfers as being superior, but he hasn't posted a direct comparison of what using one of his DPS-375 units to S-Video via DUB versus the standard composite output. I've asked for this comparison in a comment that would make a very interesting video to show just how visually superior it is transferring the same tape both ways, but he hasn't posted such a video yet.

You do have a couple of other options though. There is VHS_Decode/Domesday_Duplicator which does support Umatic and can be done inexpensively if you modify a CX PCI card which you can find some tutorials for. These captures are multistep and take a fair amount of time to process, but if you aren't doing a ton of tapes, might be worth at least trying to see how much better if any it is for U-Matic. I've not been super impressed with results for VHS in my very limited testing, but for Umatic, it probably would be easily superior to composite if you have the time and the software doesn't frustrate you too much.

Lastly, you can just directly grab chroma and luma separately off of the demodulator board before it gets mixed into composite. That'll essentially be S-Video though probably with the wrong "levels" in terms of waveform amplitudes. Figuring out where you'd need to tap that would involve an oscilloscope and probing around while a color bar tape is playing. I was able to do that with a VP-9000 (NTSC) machine (which doesn't even have DUB output) and got the results below, The S-Video mod is sample 2 and the image on the right in the PNG file.

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/uffik...us54z6zfx&dl=0

Alternatively, you might be able to just disconnect the luma line going into the YC mixing point (where luma and chroma mix) and then it should output the PAL-modulated chroma alone through the composite jack and then you can get the luma off of the dub output which doesn't require further modification to use as S-Video. The YC mixing point should be a variable resistor that is shown/labeled in the service manual. You might still need a proc amp to get the levels to exactly where you want them though.

There are also other vintage U-matic DUB transcoders that aren't TBCs, but I'm not sure what the models would be for PAL-Land.

If you don't want to modify your player, then options are more limited and there's always the risk of damaging your machine with mods, so would just take all of the above with a grain of salt, but those are the possibilities as I see them.

All that being said, if you don't want to modify your machine and you want something that just works out of the box, I suppose the dub optimizer is reasonable to use to get to the rest of your chain - presuming your demodulator board isn't full of poor brands of caps. That also would make it so you don't have to mess with making or finding your own DUB cable since the optimizer already has the end needed on it. I personally don't think you'll need a separate TBC if going through your DV camcorder, but if you do experience audio sync issues or dropped frames, then your options for TBCs are much wider and more modern for an S-Video source (rather than DUB).

If you do buy one, I'd love to see what's actually inside. Seems like it would just be a filter to remove the DC part of composite (leaving just chroma which is purely AC) and then pas through the luma from the dub connect to an S-Video connector. Seems like one could make such a thing for less than $50 with the most expensive part being the dub connector which is around $22 shipped from China.

Just for fun, see waveform below of color bars from a unit that did have bad capacitors on the demodulator board. Looked perfect after the recap.

IMG_5414.jpg

[latreche34]

What's the point of wanting component when you are going to capture 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 (PAL), If you are going with a high quality component processor you will need to capture lossless AVI 4:2:2.

[keaton]

The VO-9XXX series does playback both SP and non-SP formats. I'm in NTSC land (US), not PAL. NTSC doesn't have the separate High & Low Band modes as PAL does. But your player should handle both since it's the final 9 series that they made.

I don't have any of the equipment you mention, so I cannot speak to that. So I'll tell you what I've learned from my experience with this format.

I am a hobbyist who's done a few tapes just for me. So I have tried to scrape by with the bare minimum, because I didn't think it was worth the money to go from my VO-9600 up to a 9800 or 9850 to get Dub nor Dub related equipment, including a Broadcast TBC. I don't doubt my results would likely have been better and probably much less trouble to deal with had I got a proper broadcast TBC.

I hear you about broadcast TBCs, they are very old and getting one that's in proper working order could be a bit of a journey that might involve not so trustworthy second hand sellers.

The Broadcast TBCs are much different than the TBCs used for consumer formats. There's a feedback loop that the Broadcast TBCs provide when connected properly to the Tape Player so that the drifts in time and damaged signal in the video off the tape can be adjusted to when generating a video out. It also helps with the drop out compensator built into the player. Without that, I don't think the drop out compensator does much good. From what I've been told, without a proper Broadcast TBC connected, the player's drop out compensator can generate some random black horizontal lines in some frames, which is what I've seen on some poor tapes.

My VO-9600 has a TBC switch, but there is no TBC built-in, it's meant to be used if an external Broadcast TBC were connected. It made no difference for me in either setting. I don't recall if the 9850 has an internal TBC, or if that's only in the higher end BVU models. If so, perhaps it's just a line TBC? Not sure about that either.

I tried a DataVideo TBC that I use for VHS, but it did not help. What did help me a lot was a Panasonic DMR-ES10 (or ES15 is similar) as the video pass through between the player output and the Capture Device Input. I connected composite out from player to Line 1 input of ES10, then ES10 S-Video out to capture. It's a pretty strong frame sync for tapes that may have rather poor signal quality.

I believe there's an ES10 and/or ES15 PAL model. Search the forum for more info. I think the one caution would be they may have been built with poor capacitors. The one I bought several years ago second hand had a lot of capacitors replaced. A properly working ES10 is a very cheap alternative that may help, if you find you're having trouble keeping the picture stable or the video and audio in sync due to drifting video signal. Newer (90s or 00s) tapes in excellent condition may be in good enough shape that you won't need much help correcting the timing. But with 70s and 80s tapes, you will likely have more challenges. But that depends on the brand and how they were stored.

Perhaps the SP tapes you have are newer and came after the Sticky Shed Syndrome issues were resolved. But the older tapes, depending on the year and brand, may have to be baked before they will play and not harm your machine. The brand can also determine how much time is needed to bake.

Here's some posts of mine from my little bit of experience in baking

https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/med...-research.html
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...html#post80989
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...html#post98311
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vcr...html#post87808
https://www.digitalfaq.com/forum/vid...html#post88487

Since these posts, I've also had experience baking the feared Ampex and a "Made In Switzerland" (Dupont in my case) tapes. For those, I did somewhere between 12 and 16 hours at once. I've been told that if it doesn't resolve after 16 hours, there's not much point in additional baking. As with all tapes I baked, I manually wound the tape so there was a similar amount of tape on each reel, then took the shell apart and just baked the reels. This prevents the shell or a thick reel (especially for a 60 or 90 minute tape) from restricting heat to the tape closer to the plastic reel.

I won't even get into mold. I hope you don't have any of that to deal with.

Best of luck to you!

[aramkolt]

I'll provide some further info.

Almost no Umatic machines had internal TBCs outside of the BVU-9x0 series (900,920,950) and possibly one or two of the BVU-8x0 models. Just having those models doesn't guarantee there's a TBC in it either, because they were optional cards in all cases other than the BVU-920 which had dynamic tracking and trick slow motion effects absolutely would not work without that installed.

The optional TBC/noise reduction cards that are there in the few models that could have had them unfortunately process only in composite, so you can't grab chroma and luma off of the TBC's output, but I'm told they can give pretty stunning, seemingly noise free results on certain tapes that look pretty bad on other machines. Would be interesting to compare that to something like the Domesday Duplicator for sure. They do monitor both luna and chroma raw RF signals though according to the circuit diagrams and I believe they can store up to 16 lines digitally which is quite a bit.

I believe the switch for "TBC" on some models is to tell the machine to look for an "advance sync" signal input which basically allows an external TBC to control the precise playback rate, so if the external TBC's clock thinks the frames are arriving too fast or too slow, it can actually change how fast the servo circuits move the tape, or that's my understanding anyway. It might also turn off the internal dropout compensator.

DOC (DropOut Compensation) output is the RF output directly from the heads, so if the TBC monitoring that sees the RF level dip below a certain threshold it'll start repeating the last known good line which is stored in digital memory as part of its buffering. The advantage of a separate TBC doing that is that the lines for repeating are stored digitally and not in a type of crystal that weakens over time. We've all no doubt seen the sort of "purple/grey hued" lines that happen during rough video with VHS, that's the dropout compensator re-tapping a progressively weakening analog signal bouncing around in a crystal inside the machine. Without that, you'd just get static instead.

This paper does a way better job of explaining dropout compensation than I ever could haha:
https://www.digiommel.fi/images/Vide...log%20VCRs.pdf


Oddly, the RF output for DOC on Umatic machines is only the luma portion of the RF waveform, so you can't just connect something like the domesday duplicator directly to it, which would have been extremely convenient - or you can, you would just get no color information theoretically (haven't tried it myself).

What is unclear to me is to what degree the external TBCs act as "line" TBCs. Odds are that they do not, but there's really no reason that they couldn't.

I suspect why Keaton got the best results with an ES10 is because that does have line-TBC-like effects, however, I think most DV conversion chips do as well, so using something like the ADVC range should work without an ES10 if you're capturing into DV anyway - worth a try at a minimum since it requires no extra hardware in your setup. You'll know if it's working if you don't see wavering horizontal lines usually more pronounced at the top of the image. You can actually "induce" lines like that with the "skew lever" just below the right of the tape slot which affects tape tension. I think what Video99uk mainly uses his DPS-375 for is conversion of DUB to S-Video and from there it goes into an ADVC box, but the odd part is why the DPS-375 doesn't seem to bake in the line errors first.

My very limited testing with a DPS-275, I did get top-image tearing/flagging, but that may be due to a misadjustment somewhere. I did not try capturing that signal with an ADVC box though as maybe for some reason it doesn't bake in the errors like say a TBC-1000 (and most frame TBCs) are known to do.

As far as "misadjustment" for DPS units go, there are no service manuals out there that I'm aware of for the models that do handle DUB signals natively, so could just be a matter of adjusting some things. Simple things like chroma and luma levels are labeled inside, but many variable resistors are not, and then there's also the order of adjustment that can matter.

If you are looking for perhaps a less sought after model that can also process Umatic, the I.DEN models can as well, though those do grab chroma off of composite too. I actually just was working on a IVT-9Plus that has a specifically labeled U-Matic Dub input listed and that still grab chroma off of dub input alone it turns out.

I also second others here that the older DPS units should be assumed not to work out of the box. I even questioned whether my first unit for testing had an issue, and it still could just be an adjustment problem. The most recent DPS unit I was working on, the seller said it powered up fine, but when I got it, the display didn't come on and multiple of the power rails were shorted. After many hours, I found no less than 5 different shorted Tantalum caps (they are the yellow-bulby looking ones), photo attached to give an idea of the complexity of these....

IMG_6084.jpg

I.Den models seem to be more reliable in general in terms of still passing a signal, but they might distort the image without appropriate adjustments (and of course no service manuals out there for those either to know what to adjust and in what order). For PAL-Land, you'd want a model that has "P" at the end like IVT-7P if you see one.

As for mold, ya, I've dealt with that too haha, see before and after below. Oddly, that tape played just fine after I spent a very long time cleaning it, also baked beforehand.

You must be logged in to view this content; either login or register for the forum. The attached screen shots, before/after images, photos and graphics are created/posted for the benefit of site members. And you are invited to join our digital media community.

Modly Umatic.jpg

[Billybob]

Wow! An amazing response. I was not expecting all of that. It was also a lot to take in, so I've been researching some of the answers you all gave.

"What's the point of wanting component when you are going to capture 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 (PAL), If you are going with a high quality component processor you will need to capture lossless AVI 4:2:2."

How dumb do I feel? I just assumed DV is digital and U-Matic is analogue, so - duh! - if I capture on DV through the component it will capture everything U-Matic has to offer. So, yes, consider me now educated on 4:2:0. It was quite a shock.
So would the Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle for Firewire be a better choice than my Z1? The Thunderbolt version. As I can get these on Ebay relatively cheap. The modern ones only seem to have HDMI and USB C ports only.

"The Dub Optimizer is kind of sub-optimal (ironically) in my opinion. It grabs the chroma from the composite signal which has already been mixed with luma by that point."

The Dub Optimizer I looked at (and the review I read) had a DUB cable fitted to it as well as a BNC. It said that it took Luma and Chroma separately from the DUB. However, I admit I am a bit wary of paying £500 for something that turns out to be nothing more than a simple circuit I could have built myself. I also have a DUB cable that was supplied with the machine, so I could strip that for free.

"Perhaps the SP tapes you have are newer and came after the Sticky Shed Syndrome issues were resolved. But the older tapes, depending on the year and brand, may have to be baked before they will play and not harm your machine. The brand can also determine how much time is needed to bake."

All my tapes come from 1991 - 1993, and are all Sony. They are mostly the short portable compact tapes. However, the larger full sized 60 minute tapes are not so great. I knew nothing about the tape shedding until I experienced it last week. I put the full sized 60 minute tape into the machine, that has not been played in 30 years. Did some previewing of it. Found some amazing footage I didn't know was there on High Band SP - family stuff. Looking on my JVC CRT monitor I was amazed at the quality. Easily comparable to my digital DV tapes from 2005. I couldn't believe how sharp and colourful the images were. And not a hint of drop out.

I then rewound it to play it back for a rough capture onto DV, and... hang on,what's this? Where did all this drop-out suddenly come from? I only twigged when I got to the end of the capture that the tape must be shedding. Too late now! It still plays but the drop out gets worse each time. Fortunately, the compact tapes do not seem to be shedding the same way, but I haven't played them more than twice, and many are still unplayed. Is it too late to bake them? If so, what should I use?

"Lastly, you can just directly grab chroma and luma separately off of the demodulator board before it gets mixed into composite."

I read about this. It's a great idea. I'm happy to give it a go. The problem is, I don't have a monitor with an S-Video input. I don't want to plug leads onto the S Video socket of my Z1 in case I place it onto the wrong board and cause damage. So I'm wondering what a cheap low risk way of testing it would be. I've got an old 8mm video camera with an S-Video connector but not sure if it will allow input video.

And of course, the biggest drawback to this is locating the boards. I've spent days researching all of this online and never found anybody who had identified the correct boards on the VO9850. I found a technical manual with a lot of board spec, but it was over 360 pages long and was the proverbial needle/haystack. I don't think I can add a link here but the manual was referenced as manual_VO9850P_SM_SONY_EN and is available on the books section of the internet archive. No downloadable version though.

So, this is definitely going to need some more research. A lot more thought. And I'm really glad I found this forum, so thank you everyone. Guess I need to rethink my setup from scratch, so any pointers would be greatly appreciated.

One last thing, the reason I haven't asked a transfer company to do this for me, is because most of them don't reveal enough about the equipment they use, and I'm wary of paying good money - and risking my tapes - just to get back a composite transfer on 4:2:0 that I could have done myself.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Billybob

Wow! An amazing response.

Yes indeed! I'm proud of our community here.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Billybob

"What's the point of wanting component when you are going to capture 4:1:1 or 4:2:0 (PAL), If you are going with a high quality component processor you will need to capture lossless AVI 4:2:2."
How dumb do I feel? I just assumed DV is digital and U-Matic is analogue, so - duh! - if I capture on DV through the component it will capture everything U-Matic has to offer.

That's the wrong way to look at it. The DV process is not capture everything available, but rather losing data during processing.

Pretend you have a small 400ml bottle of expensive wine. You must dump it all out in a single cup.

- PAL DV (4:2:0) is a 300ml cup, NTSC DV (4:1:1) is 200ml cup.
- The digital equivalency of your analog source (4:2:2) is a 400ml cup.

Now pour until empty.

If you used DV, you wasted something precious!

And video is usually irreplaceable history -- and is just as precious as any bottle of fancy French bubbly.

[latreche34]

I digged up an old write up of a guy who did the Y-C MOD on a different machine than yours, Had to use the Wayback machine to get the pictures back, Scroll down to the comment section, there are good suggestions of TBC boxes that convert DUB to S-Video.

Also check video99.co.uk YT channel, he has some videos about the subject.

[admin]

Quote:

Originally Posted by latreche34

I digged up an old write up

Me am re-posting bot:

Quote:

Outsmarting Sony (or, Stupid U-Matic Tricks!)

So, part of the reconfiguration of my edit suite/man cave has been to recable everything to use S-Video instead of composite video for the highest quality video I can get from my collection of professional and prosumer gear. This was pretty easy on the S-VHS front since that's where S-Video was developed to begin with, and my Betacam deck does S-Video natively as well. Same with my Hi-8 camera.

This left one format conspicuous by its absence -- my trusty old BVU-870 U-Matic deck which was designed and built before the idea of S-Video (Y/C 3.58) output was conceived of. However, U-Matic machines did use a special 7-pin component output (officially Y/C 688 but generally just called "Dub") which was intended as a short cable, straight-through connection for tape duplication. And while the luminance (the high-detail B&W; part of the video signal) is identical in output to modern S-Video, the chroma (the low-detail color part of the video signal) is encoded differently and is not S-Video compatible.

Now, years ago there were two companies who made gear that would transform dub output to S-Video but it was never made in large quantities and is now very hard to even find information about it. But while Googling I found a forum posting with a not-very-detailed account from someone with a different model unit than mine. He was able to attach wires to specific points on the circuit boards inside the unit and obtain a Chroma signal that was actually S-Video friendly. Since I have the service manuals and wiring schematics for my machine, I spent a night pouring over the diagrams until I found exactly which circuit boards I needed to study and some likely locations where I could "steal" the signal. My guesses turned out to be pretty shrewd because I was able to get a watchable signal the first time. It wasn't perfect, of course, and it took a few more tries to find the best points to tap the signal from, but suddenly I was getting video that was visibly better quality than anything I was used to seeing from the U-Matic format!

From there, it took me three trips to the local electronics shop to figure out what I actually needed to wire things up permanently, and I spent a night Googling just to find that special 7-pin connector so I could obtain the luminance signal from its proper location. Ultimately, I decided to use female BNC connectors so I could use my existing video cables to run the separate chroma and luminance signals to the rest of my gear. After a couple evenings with my soldering iron I'm proud to say I have something that looks pretty damn good and works a treat!

um1.jpg

Here's where I pull the color signal from the Chroma Decoder board's test points. Only after spending an hour trying to find the test points from the schematic did I realize the service manual also included a map of the circuit board.

(left) The custom cable feeds out the back of the unit to this nice connector.
(right) This takes just the luminance signal off the Dub Out port.

um23.jpg

To give you an idea of just how much of an improvement this makes, here are screenshots from the composite output (above) and the S-Video output (below) from the same segment of videotape. Note how much "cleaner" the color bars are!

And lastly, I've captured one frame of video using both sources and made a composite using a checkerboard pattern to show off the differences. I deliberately used a low-quality piece of video which has been copied several times from a very old (1973) source tape. This is why the S-Video output appears much grainer than the composite video. But even so, look at how much more detail is in the reporter's jacket!

[aramkolt]

The question is whether the signal off of the test points can be loaded with 75ohms which typically happens with S-Video. The luma can be used as is off of the Dub port since your machine has one as the levels for that are the same for that and S-Video. The luma part is bit more of a challenge if the machine you are using doesn't have dub out (as is the case for the VP9000).

Chroma is kind of odd in that the receiving device might just be looking for differences in the amplitude of the color burst compared to the signal waveform. I've found that if you actually amplify the entire wave (which includes the colorburst), it often doesn't affect the chroma levels shown on a vectorscope by much at all. It could vary based on your capture card and chain though. I don't know if feeding more amplified chroma signals into an S-Video receiving device has the potential to damage anything though, so that's where the risk is with the mod shown for the BVU-870. It's not uncommon for chroma test point signals to be 2V peak to peak whereas I've seen S-Video usually noted as 0.3V peak to peak when under the 75 ohm load.

[keaton]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Billybob

"Perhaps the SP tapes you have are newer and came after the Sticky Shed Syndrome issues were resolved. But the older tapes, depending on the year and brand, may have to be baked before they will play and not harm your machine. The brand can also determine how much time is needed to bake."

All my tapes come from 1991 - 1993, and are all Sony. They are mostly the short portable compact tapes. However, the larger full sized 60 minute tapes are not so great. I knew nothing about the tape shedding until I experienced it last week. I put the full sized 60 minute tape into the machine, that has not been played in 30 years. Did some previewing of it. Found some amazing footage I didn't know was there on High Band SP - family stuff. Looking on my JVC CRT monitor I was amazed at the quality. Easily comparable to my digital DV tapes from 2005. I couldn't believe how sharp and colourful the images were. And not a hint of drop out.

I then rewound it to play it back for a rough capture onto DV, and... hang on,what's this? Where did all this drop-out suddenly come from? I only twigged when I got to the end of the capture that the tape must be shedding. Too late now! It still plays but the drop out gets worse each time. Fortunately, the compact tapes do not seem to be shedding the same way, but I haven't played them more than twice, and many are still unplayed. Is it too late to bake them? If so, what should I use?

Yes, the resolution and color of the broadcast formats is really stunning compared to the consumer formats from the same era.

Strange to see no drop outs on the first try and so many on the second. My only guess is perhaps the CRT monitor has some sort of drop out compensation? I really don't know if that's a feature of those, but it sure would explain the difference.

From what you describe, it doesn't sound like you have any significant sticky shed from the tapes you played. But if you did, it's not too late to bake them.

Sticky tapes can be hard to wind and would most certainly have clogged your video heads in short order so that the picture was very snowy or just no video at all. Then you would have had no choice but to clean the video heads and the rest of the tape path before playing any other tapes. Once the heads are clogged, no tape is going to show good video. Drop outs occur on non-sticky tapes and on baked sticky tapes. It seems to be more related to the age, brand, storage, and wear of the tape as to how many drop outs there are. In my experience with older Sony tapes, they have a lot of drop outs.

Baking is more to get the microscopic layers of tape that have separated from the binder layer and are causing too much friction for the tape to move normally and causing those separated fragments to get sheared off and clog up heads and dirty up the tape path with debris.

If the tape is not sticky, perhaps there's less drop outs when baking, but I don't have any data to prove that. I've only baked tapes that needed it to be playable. I've seen plenty of drop outs on old tapes that were thoroughly baked. I think the part of the tape with drop outs is already damaged/lost and nothing can bring that back.

As mentioned before, perhaps a broadcast TBC would help reduce those drop outs. Since I don't have one, I capture losslessly and use tools like Avisynth to digitally remove those white streaks.

I haven't had to bake tapes from the 90s. So I'd say your SP tapes wouldn't require baking, and what you described seems to confirm that.

You can read the few links I included in my first post on baking. But here's an overview of what I've learned so far for tapes that are 70s or 80s stock.

Ampex, AGFA, Made In Switzerland tapes are the stickiest and I give them a 16 hour bake.
Sony tapes are usually much milder and so I bake them about 4 to 6 hours. If not enough, bake for a few hours more.
I have had a few 3M Scotch tapes, and none of them needed baking.
I had one Fuji tape from late 70s and it did not need baking.

For all cases, I
- Don't leave the house while doing this.
- Wind the tapes so even amount on each reel, remove the reels from the shell and bake reels (or just leave the top part of shell off).
- Bake at about 54 degrees Celsius in a Food Dehydrator. For sample pics of what I used, it's in the second link in my first post.
- Let the tapes cool overnight and play them within the next couple of weeks or so before they start reverting to their original state.

[lordsmurf]

Quote:

Originally Posted by keaton

For all cases, I
- Don't leave the house while doing this.

Not this exact process in this thread, but I often stay nearby, check progress every 10-15 minutes (or less, or more, depends on task, but never more than 30 minutes). Sometimes I won't even listen to podcasts/whatever, I want to hear what the gear is doing at all times, even if I'm not watching it constantly.

This attention to detail is why people trust us. It's essentially the anti-LegacyBox/etc attitude.