My daughter had a speaking part in the winter holiday program.  I was very excited.  I brought my tripod, my digital MP3 recorder, and arrived an hour early to get a front row seat.  My batteries were charged and I had a new video tape.  I was good for a full hour of taping.  I was ready... well for almost everything.

The PTA meeting was first, and I didn’t want to tape it and risk not getting the end of the program.  I was going to record the whole thing and put it on DVD, make some DivX AVI files, MP3 files and a CD, all to share with the other parents.  It was going to be great!  I love sharing.

Before rolling tape, I set up my Zoom H2 digital MP3 recorder on the stage.  I was planning on sync’ing the high quality audio with the video I was taking and not have to worry about crowd noise or clearing my throat or moving in my chair.

The PTA meeting was just about over and I pressed RECORD on my camera.  In the eye-piece I saw a small flashing error “Clean Tape Heads”.  ‘Sure,’ I thought to myself, ‘I’ll clean those heads when I get home.’  But, the error kept flashing for more than a minute.  Something was really wrong.  I decided to reset the camera by turning it off and on again.  That seemed to work.  The error was gone.  And just in time too, the program just started and I happily taped the 45 minute program from start to finish.

The music teacher was really looking forward to getting a copy.  She’s a first year teacher and this was her very first assembly.  Her parents couldn’t make it and she wanted to send home a video of it to share with them.  I emailed her to make sure I had the correct email address, connected my camera, fired up iMovie on my iMac, and was horrified when I saw nothing on the screen.

After troubleshooting and tinkering with my camera I think I figured out what the problem was.  When the tape loaded, there must have been a mechanical malfunction and the tape wasn’t actually in the correct position for the recording heads to write to it.  I can’t think of anything else it could have been.  At home when I removed the tape and reinserted it, I could record and play back my recording just fine.

So, when I got the persistent “Clean Tape Heads” error message, instead of powering off and powering back on, I should have removed the tape and reinserted it.

I felt physically ill when I realized I had done all that work for nothing.  But I keep telling myself that at least I have a superb audio recording of the program, which I plan on sharing with everyone in a future blog entry.