Organizing and labeling miniDV tapes.

[vid83]

I have 11 home videos on miniDV tapes. I have organized the tapes by date.
So far I temporary labled the tapes with "1", "2", . . ., "11". I'm thinking of naming them "0001", "0002", and so on.

How do you label your tapes? Should I add more info. to the tape name than just "0001", "0002", etc.?

I don't want to label any specific events as part of the tape name because there are many types of events on the same tape. Once I get my tapes labeled, I am going to creat a table in Microsoft Word with the tape name, time code, tape content, etc.

[dLee]

Because whatever you create in Word will not store easily with the tape, I use small PostIt's (sometimes more than one) with brief content description and time and stick them inside the tape case.

My tape labels are very general and I make them match the case insert label.

[Krispy Kritter]

The date often has more meaning than generic numbers. Especially for content you don't view often.

[vid83]

I can't use date because there are various dates on my tapes. For example, one of my tapes has dates ranging from April 2007 to September 2007 with various events.
I was going to use "0001", "0002", and so on but just thought I would check to see how other people label/name their tapes before naming mine.

Also, using Word will not be a problem for me because the only thing I have to do is look at my tape name and then look it up on the table. I will probably have a printed copy and a copy on my hard-drive.

[stantheman1976]

If I have a tape with multiple events on it I'll try to write as much as possible on the insert. I have some tapes with multiple baptisms from my church and I'll write "MBBC Baptisms" and put the dates. Usually if I film a sermon I'll put our church name, date, and sermon title. Then the tape itself I'll use the small label with name and date. For videos of my son I'll use a tape until it's full and put his name and the ages, like "Matthew Birth to 6 weeks" is the first. I try to make it fairly clear what's on each tape. My goal is that if something ever happened to me my family could look through the tapes and have a decent idea what's on them.

[edDV]

I have 100's of DV, D8, Hi8 and 8mm tapes. The only way I can keep them straight is with an Excel database.

The fields I have for each clip are

Tape ID #
Tape manufacturer (e.g. Sony, TDK ...)
Time Code (clip start)
Clip description
Clip date
Sort code 1 (e.g. travel, TV dub, project, etc.)
Sort code 2 (e.g. archive, erase, dub, blank, etc.)
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