How to Protect Camcorder Tape Footage

"Hello! I’m Ross on behalf of expertvillage.com. Let’s talk about consumer camcorders. How do you protect your tape? “Hey! take care of it.” Well there’s two things to think about one is the physical tape itself and the other one is the ability to write on the tape. It’s interesting but tapes have this locking write protection thing on the back. As a matter of fact I have a few couple of different tapes here’s a VHS tape. In here there’s a hole now on the back. Used to be a tab here but if you break it out so that the hole is showing then what you have is a tape that won’t be able to be recorded to, because there is a little switch in the VCR that says “oh! That’s broken out so don’t record to it.” Mini DV tape has a little sliding panel on it here. You take a look there’s a little piece right there and right now it’s closed. So you can write to it. Now it is open it says “oh! You know what don’t record to this tape.” So if you’re done recording to a tape and pull it out, you say “I want to slide that tap and protect it.” Here is the caveat and I don’t know why they did this. 8 mm tape so the 8 mm high and digital 8 has the sliding tab also. It’s just the opposite direction of everything else I know of. Now even computers and floppy disks three and a half inches slide it close right to you open up the hole so you can write to it. On this format of tape you need the hole to be showing to be able to write to it and if you slide it so that is closed no hole, it is protected and you can take it and even read it on there. And it says record and safe. Safe is this way with a closed record is the other way. If you put the tape in and can’t record to it take a look at your tab, read the label see what it says. The other thing is don’t leave them in direct sunlight, don’t let them get too hot, don’t let them get moist. This is metal particles in here. This is a tape and you can oxidize if it gets too much moisture. So you want to keep it indoors. You don’t want to stick it on the basement where it can pickup moisture and start rusting and ruin your tapes."