Cleaning Your VCR: The Right Way

Why Your VCR is Dirty

If you’ve noticed a drop in the quality of the picture you’re getting from your VCR, be it general fuzziness, static, or lines through the picture, your VCR probably needs to be cleaned. The element in your VCR that’s probably dirty is the VCR read/write heads, which translate data from the tape to the screen. While there are fast methods to clean them, we don’t recommend them. Use the following method instead.
 

Why Clean your VCR Heads?

If you still own and use your VCR, the chances are that it has a tendency to create unwanted effects on your tapes like static, or lines through the picture. This is usually due to having dirtied up heads on your VCR. It’s possible to clean the VCR heads, but it’s also very easy to do it wrong and damage the delicate heads. Since the production of VCRs is discontinued as of 2016, it’s even more important now to make sure that you take care of yours. New VCRs are increasingly unavailable and expensive, so it’s much better to keep the one you have in good shape.

How Dirty Heads Affect Picture and Sound

The heads inside your VCR are called read-write heads. The heads are what actually read the data from your tapes, and then transmit that data into your television screen. If these heads become dirty, over time the picture quality will degrade further and further until you clean them. At DVD Your Memories, we’ve transferred hundreds of thousands of tapes in our video transfer service to digital files and DVDs. In our experience it’s vital to the transfer quality to keep VCR heads clean. Our best-in-class video transfer is due in part to the fact that we keep the read/write heads on our VCRs very clean.

What Not to Do

Over the years, you may have seen video tape cleaners, or cleaning devices in the shape of a video tape that you insert into the VCR to clean the heads. While this method can sometimes work, it’s not really a good idea because these can actually damage or dirty up the heads even further with repeated use. Don’t use a video head cleaner, and do it by hand. Manual cleaning is safer, more effective, and will make your VCR last longer. A damaged VCR threatens your tapes, and playing family memories in a VCR that’s been damaged by a cleaning tape threatens the picture and sound quality that actually exists on the tape in addition to the one on the screen. Clean your VCR manually, it’ll keep your memories far, far safer and looking and sounding much, much better.

Items You’ll Need to Clean VCR Heads

The best way to clean the heads is a fairly easy process, but requires attention to detail to avoid damaging critical components of your VCR. The guts of your BV VCR are actually pretty delicate, so be prepared to be very careful. The items you’ll need are pieces of white paper, a screwdriver and a bottle of isopropyl alcohol. In all likelihood, you should already have these items around your home.

How to Clean VCR Heads

Getting Under the Hood

The first step is to unplug the VCR, and remove the top cover, exposing the internal components. All VCRs are slightly different, but they contain the same basic parts. Even if you have a BETA VCR or some other format, the parts ought to be the same. The image below will show you the read/write heads you need to be aware of.

Cleaning VCR Heads with Alcohol

Now that you have the cover off and have visibility of the read/write head, you can begin the cleaning process. Cut your piece of white paper into strips about 1.5-2″ thick and about 4-5″ in length. Now, soak half of one of your strips with alcohol, making sure it’s wet. To clean the heads, place the wet piece of paper on the drum and rotate it counter clockwise several times. Lightly press your finger against the drum with the hand holding the paper while you spin it.

After a few rotations, take a look at the paper and you’ll probably notice some dirt or grime left on it. Keep repeating the process with new strips of paper until the paper no longer has any dirt on it. Keep in mind that VCR heads are very delicate, and you should use a very light touch when cleaning them, or risk damaging them even further.

Put your VCR Back Together

Once you’re finished, that’s all there is to it! Put the cover back on, plug the VCR back into the wall, and enjoy! Your VCR should now provide you with more clarity until they dirty up again. You’ll know it’s time to clean it again when you see streaks, audio cuts, or tracking errors. Do yourself and your VCR a favor and clean it manually, not using a head cleaner tape.

Having said all of that, your VCR and your tapes won’t last forever, even with the best maintenance possible. Consider transferring them to digital format at any one of DVD Your Memories’ four locations in Southern California.

We recently transferred over 150 video tapes for the upcoming “Be Brave” movie, which details the incredible journey of Daniel Northcott. We are excited to be a part of this amazing project. Check out the trailer for the upcoming release here: https://bebravemovie.com/

About the Film:

Bursting with unquenchable curiosity and a boundless love for life, Daniel Northcott was a one-of-a-kind filmmaker. Barely 20, he set out on a decade-long quest to travel the world, spreading his infectious enthusiasm across four continents and dozens of cultures. Through ruins and cities, war zones and sacred sites, he captured each precious moment on camera with an eye for colorful characters of every age and description.

In April of 2007, Dan’s journey led him to a greater adventure than he had ever imagined. Despite warnings of an ancient curse, he brought home a bone from a sacrificial Mayan burial cave in Yucatán, and just months later he was diagnosed with leukemia – cancer of the bone marrow.

When Daniel learned 8 years into his film project that he had only months to live he began a race to complete his unfinished film. Amazingly, he continued to document every detail of the roller-coaster ride that followed —from the doctor delivering the crushing news to every intense medical procedure, losing his hair, and intimate moments with friends and family.

With over a thousand hours of footage and no energy or time left he made a 40-minute sketch of the film he dreamed to make and left the footage in his will to his sister Erin Northcott. His last wish was to request she oversee the completion of his legacy, his film.

Be sure to check them out on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BeBraveMovie

Photobooks are becomming more and more popular as a way to tell a story with your photos, rather than just have them in an album. Photobooks are often described as similar to scrapbooks, the main difference being that the photobooks are actually printed, rather than having clippings and photos glued or tacked to the page itself.

The benefits of a photobook allows the creator to print a large number of books at a much cheaper cost than building them all by hand as you would with a scrapbook.

Photobooks have been very popular with weddings, graduations, and babies.

To create your very own photobook, you first must have all of your photos in a digital format. This means that for all of your loose photos, you must have them scanned into a computer so that you can maniplulate the image digitally to fit the book. DVD Your Memories specializes in photo scanning using the best quality flatbed scanners available today… and we scan them all by hand!

Now, once your photos are digitized, you’ll need to find the photobook service you’d like to use. There are now quite a few services, but I’ll go over a couple of the more popular photobook services.

Shutterfly
Shutterfly is an image publishing service headquartered in Redwood City, CA. The company was founded in 1999, and focuses on its primary product and service which is photobooks. In addition to photobooks, they also can produce other products including stationery, greeting cards and custom smartphone/tablet cases.

Start by uploading your photos into your own online gallery and use one of 270+ pre-existing template layouts with more than 100 themes, or completely design your own creation! Shutterfly is easy to use, and has great prices thanks to online coupons and promotions year round. As for photobooks, Shutterfly offers 26 different sizes ranging from 7×5 to 12×12.

Mixbook
Mixbook is a newer photobook service that offers greetings cards and calendars in addtion to their photobook line. One great thing about Mixbook is that it has an import utility that can import your photos from a variety of online sources such as Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa and more. This allows you to save a ton of time by not having to manually upload each and every photo individually.

How to Clean a VHS Tape, and Avoiding Damage in Future

What to Do if Your Tapes are Damaged

The most important thing, by far, is not to play the tapes. Playing damaged tapes often makes the damage worse, and in some cases even damages your VCR. Repair your tapes (or have a professional do it for you) before you let them anywhere near your VCR. Diagnose the type of damage on your tape, and then proceed with the following methods.

Water Damage

When a home floods, the water will inevitably run into some of the most important items in the home. For example, the family VHS tapes. Often, the water submerges the tapes for a long time, due to local evacuations and general difficulty of maneuvering around the now flooded home. The water damages the video tapes if it’s in contact with them for long enough. The good news is that you may be able to recover your tapes.

*Do not attempt to play a wet VHS tape! Doing so will more than likely damage both your tape and player beyond repair. Dry your tape out with the method outlined here before trying to play it.

If you know or suspect your VCR tapes have come into contact with water, it is crucial to retrieve them as soon as you safely can, and begin the drying process. The longer they stay underwater, more and more contaminants and deterioration can occur. If they’re in contact with water long enough, you might even begin to see fungal damage begin to occur.

If Your Tape is Still Wet

Once you retrieve your tapes, it’s best to quickly submerge them in a bucket of distilled water again. You need to get rid of any contaminants, and if the tapes are still wet, a quick soak in a bucket of distilled water isn’t going to hurt them. Sewage, chlorine, salt, and fungus all hurt the image and sound quality, so getting rid of them is advisable. However, if the tapes are already dried out, don’t soak them. Getting wet again will do more damage to your VHS tapes than any of the foreign contaminants could.

Drying Out Your Tape

You may be tempted to use a hair dryer, space heater, or radiator to dry out your tapes. Do not do that. Heat warps VHS tapes, and causes damage that really is irreversible. The appropriate method of drying them out is much slower then a hair dryer, but infinitely safer. The right way to dry the tapes out is to take the reels of tape out of the cassette and place them in a cool location out of sunlight that has a constant air flow. If you don’t know how to take apart your tape, check out our Tape Repair Guide. A large fan placed in the room will help with air circulation, and dehydrate the tape faster.

Mold Forming

If you don’t manage to get to your tapes quickly enough, mold is going to form on them. If this happens, do not play the tape. Even if you dry the tape, don’t play it. Mold will ruin your player as well as your tape. Most video transfer companies won’t digitize a moldy VHS tape. At DVD Your Memories, we instruct our technicians to never put a moldy tape in our VCRs. It is possible to reverse mold damage, though. More on that later.

Click here for more information on the causes and symptoms of video tape mold.

Heat Damage

Video tapes are actually fairly resilient when it comes to heat damage. You can even store them in an environment like a hot car or garage for a short period of time with no effect on the tape. But if you store the tapes in an unnaturally hot environment for an extended period of time, you are going to see visual and audial deterioration. But if the tape is exposed to extreme heat, like an open flame, you probably aren’t recovering it. As soon as the tape gets hot enough, the thin Mylar backing the tape warps and curls, and that damage can’t be reversed.

Honestly, the best practice is to just keep your tapes in a cool, dark place with low humidity. Heat and light make the tape decay much faster than cold and dark, and the moisture from humidity causes fungal damage to occur much more quickly.

Magnetic Damage

Magnetic tape damage is actually pretty common. VHS stores video and audio in the form of a magnetic strip. Your VCR reads these magnetic signals, and translates them to images and sound for your TV. While magnets write information to the tape, they also erase footage from tapes. When writing to a VHS tape, magnets leave tiny imprints on the surface that a VCR can translate into sound and audio. So it follows that a magnet can damage your VHS tape beyond repair by altering those tiny imprints. For a more technical explanation of how data on a VHS tape works, check out this article.

The short and long of it is that magnetic damage will damage your tape beyond repair. It literally erases the data off, or alters the data on your tape. Keep your tapes away from anything magnetic.

Physical Damage

At DVD Your Memories, we have a tape repair service. By far the most common type of damage we end up repairing is physical damage. We see everything from snapped tape, to broken shell casing, and everything in between. In these cases, generally the “guts” of the tape are all fine, they just need to be replaced in a new shell or re-spliced together. If you want to repair it yourself, here’s a guide. If you want us to repair it for you, we have locations in Los Angeles, Orange County, San Diego, and the South Bay.

Fungal Damage

We recommend using a professional service. DIY methods here are dangerous, and you’re more likely to infect your VCR with mold and inhale a bunch of mold spores than actually clean your tape. The safest action, by far, to salvage those memories is to pay a professional to do it for you. DVD Your Memories doesn’t repair fungal damage, but Image Recapture do a great job.

If you’re looking to repair your own tapes, the video below details all of the steps.

With fire season nearly in full swing, it’s a good time to remind everyone about keeping important family media items like video tapes, photographs, and film safe from potential danger. Fires, floods, hurricanes and tornadoes are very unforgiving and can wreak havoc on your home and belongings. The unfortunate thing is that in many cases, there is very little to no warning at all of when a disaster will strike, leaving affected people scrambling to safety with little more than the clothes off their backs.

Thankfully, with the right tools and know-how, you can at least ensure the longevity of your photos, slides, negatives, video tapes, audio tapes and film in the event of such a catastrophe… even if you can’t physically take your media while evacuating.

The best way to preserve these important family items is to first make sure that you have each piece of media digitized and loaded onto a hard drive, or a computer. For photos, slides and negatives, this means physically photo scanning[ your images to either a computer or an external hard drive or memory card. For audio, video and film, this means a video transfer and audio into a digital format that can be placed on a CD, DVD movie or your computer.

If you envision the project taking a long while to complete, we recommend starting off with the most important pieces of media, and work down from there. That way, you’ll at least have the most important stuff digitized in the event something were to happen. DVD Your Memories are local experts in media transfer and conversions, and will be glad to help anyone who needs some assistance in transferring older media over to a digital format.

Once your media has been digitized, the next step is to secure it using a cloud storage service. Cloud storage allows your media to be stored “in the cloud”, or on-line. With cloud storage, you can access your media at any time without having to have any of the original copies. So, in the event that all of your media perished in some kind of a disaster, at least not all would be lost, as you’d still have digital copies of all of your video, photos and films, safe and secure.

Now, you’re probably wondering what type of cloud service would be best for this type of storage. The answer really depends on how much you have had converted and what types of media you have.

Free Cloud Storage: https://www.mediafire.com

Free storage for up to 50gb, which is perfectly fine for small-scale projects.

Unlimited Cloud Storage: https://www.carbonite.com

Carbonite is your best bet for saving everything. Unlimited space costs a modest $60/year, and includes support for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

Dropbox is another great service that’s worth checking out. It’s free too!

Once you’ve signed up, follow the service instructions to get started uploading your files. Once your files are secure on their servers, your data is now as safe as it can be in today’s ever-changing world.

For an idea of how much media a disaster can affect, check out this infographic obtained from data related to Hurricane Sandy.

When researching different media transfer companies, you might hear some wild claims from other people on forums or word of mouth. Here are the top five misconceptions about media transfer companies like DVD Your Memories that I see around the net.

1. Costs too much
While some services cost more than others, they are all generally very affordable for the average family project. Coupled with Facebook promotions (make sure to like us!), coupons and gift card giveaway events, there are always chances to save even more money off your order. A few months ago, we even lowered our prices FURTHER and now provide free DVDs with most transfer orders.

2. Have to organize everything
While organizing your own media does have its benefits, it is certainly not required to transfer. For example, if you have a video tape transfer project, you can just bring in a big box of tapes, and we’ll take care of the rest. Some might be labeled, some might not be. Some of them might be full of footage, and some others might be blank. While transferring, our technicians log each and every tape we transfer and also provide a total running time. We can combine video tapes onto the same DVD, or keep each tape on its own DVD, the choice is yours. We can work with you in just about any situation, we just want to make sure that you can preserve your memories!

3. Turnaround time is too long
Since DVD Your Memories operates local stores with dedicated technicians and departments, we can provide much faster turnaround times than what you would find at most national companies, and considerably faster than if you were to do it yourself. In addition, we also offer same-day rush services for our customers with a limited project time-frame.

4. You can do all of the transfers yourself
While technically this is true, for most of us, it is not always a feasible option if you don’t have the right equipment. As an example, to purchase the equipment and software necessary to convert your 8mm film to DVD would far surpass the relatively small cost of getting your film transferred to DVD with a company like DVD Your Memories. In addition to lack of suitable equipment, many people face the challenge of achieving a quality “good enough” for a digital transfer. Achieving great quality on media transfers also involves additional costly items like time based corrector units and color correcting devices.

5. Old media still plays in my home theater
If your home theater includes older devices such as VCR, Betamax player, cassette deck, or a turn table, then you will still be able to listen to your older media the way it was originally intended. However, considering these machines contain moving parts which inevitable degrade with repeated use, sooner or later your player, or the media itself will succumb to degradation and be no longer usable. Stay ahead of the game and convert your media to a digital format NOW, before it’s too late and your tapes are unrecoverable.

Shipping your order to DVD Your Memories is now easier and more convenient than ever! We’ve teamed up with FedEx to provide an all in one solution to ship your media directly to our stores. To get started, visit our shipping page here: https://dvdyourmemories.com/shipping-your-memories/

The process is simple:

1) Enter in your personal information including your name, mailing address, email and phone number which will be used to generate a custom FedEx shipping label for your package.

2) Tell us about your order. While we will still give you a phone call the day we receive your order, this step will ensure that our technicians have a general idea of what your project expectations will be. The details you enter here will be used to generate a packing slip PDF that you can print, and ship along with your media.

3) Find the nearest FedEx drop off location, and send us your order with no up-front payment to ship!

4) We then get notification that your package is on its way to our facility, and once received, one of our local technicians will give you a phone call to verify your order, go over any details, and provide you with an estimate and expected turnaround time.

5) Once your order has been completed, we can either ship your completed order back to you (with the originals), or you can drop on by our office to pick it up at your convenience.

If you have any questions at all about shipping your media, please feel free to give us a call at 1-877-388-6093.