Can I recover DV footage that was recorded with a mis-aligned tape head?

Question

I recorded quite a bit of dv footage for a short film I'm working on. Only later did I find out that the tape head on my camcorder (Sony TRV900) was out of alignment. The footage is blocky and there is no audio, but the physical tape isn't damaged. I'm wondering if there is any sort of tape transfer service that might be able to read the data and transfer it properly to another tape. Is the footage all there and just recorded "off-center" or is it garbage? Thanks

Answer 1

Could be dirt on the tape or dirt on the play heads.

Run a tape cleaner through the cam then try to playback again, if there was dirt on the rec head or on the tape then you'll have had it, if  the dirt was on the play head you might be okay.

It could be a damaged control track, in which case taking an analogue outputrather than a dv output might be a way around it.

TRV could be 10 years old, maybe the heads have just had it!

Answer 2

Head alignment problems usually show only when you try and play the tape back on a different camcorder or deck.  If that's your problem then using the original camcorder is your best option for recovering anything, so long as you don't realign the heads.  If you can't read it with that, it may not be an alignment problem.