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Dubbing Question: Playback speed on VHS is too fast!
Hey guys, not really a FCP question persay, but please help anyways :D.
I’m doing some transcribing work for a production company. The basic workflow is that they dub BetaSP tapes to VHS with burnt in timecode, send to me and I transcribe. I have access to a professional SVHS deck (with all the switches and jog control knob etc..). Occasionally I’ll get tapes that simply doesn’t playback properly on this deck. It ‘playsback’ as if somebody was holding down the fast fordward button on the Beta deck while dubbing. So the video has that ‘fast forward’ look to it: enlarged, stretched, static streaks, and also plays back extremely fast, chipmunk audio.
The thing is, I played it back on a different VHS deck, a typical consumer deck and it played back at normal speed. But it still had one problem: the image seemed to be enlarged by like ~20%, such that the burnt in timecode is barely in the action safe. And also, on the other tapes the timecode has a black bar behind it, on these malfunctioning tapes there’s no black bar behind the burnt in timecode.
Any idea what’s going on? Could it be a SP/EP/LP issue as the professional deck I work on can only playback SP?
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5 Replies
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You’ve got it correct. A professional VHS deck will (generally) not play back EP or LP VHS. (I make an exception for the one model made once whenever that might play back that most have never heard of or used, yet still might exist.)
What you describe is typical of a slow speed tape being played back in a deck that doesn’t recognize a slow speed.
Can you request that they always send you SP tapes, since it seems that none of the other issues matter if you have an SP tape? My guess is that they use different machines to record in the slow speeds that are set up differently than the machines that they use to record SP. That would explain the difference in the timecode bar and it’s location.
That last part is just a guess, though.
debe
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hey debe, you were right!! more or less lol. i called and spoke with the guy doing the dubbing. they have multiple setups for dubbing and one particular deck doesn’t have a black stripe behind the timecode. but here’s the bad news:
he checked all the settings on the Beta deck and the VHS deck and everything was A.OK, the tape should be recording in SP mode. he also did extensive testing on the recording and checking the tape on multiple decks and everything was fine. so we think we found the general ‘source’ of the bad tapes, but still stumped on what’s actually causing it.
unfortunately my professional SVHS deck has no option to play EP/LP tapes :(.
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Hmmm. That is strange. Hopefully it was just an anomaly!
debe
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defineitly not an anomaly. i’ve had around 5-6 tapes that were untranscribable because of that setup :S
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Try playing the problem tapes in a home VHS deck that DOES have the slow-speed playback.
If that works, you can:
A. Transcribe while using that other VHS decck,
B. Dub from that deck to another tape being recorded at SP speed, then use the new SP dub in your pro player.
Home VHS decks can be bought new for $35 or used in pawn shops for $10 or so.
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