DV Tape problem – wiped or lost footage

[Everest Mokaeff]

There is a special type of cleaning cassette you need to use. No rocket science – just load it and play for 15 sec. Read instruction on tape carefully before proceeding. There is a 50/50 chance to rescue all the footage. Success depends on whose fault it is. If it’s cassette you’re in trouble.
No one can give you a guarantee that nothing like that would ever happen to you if only you used this or that brand of MiniDV cassette. They all prone to malfunction due to the very nature of the medium. You mentioned Italy. I guess you had to get thru customs. You’d be surprised what X-ray exposure could do to tape. There are plenty of very affordable and reliable tapeless consumer video cameras to use. may be it’s time to take one of them?

Sony PMW-EX3, Canon Mark II 5D, FCS3 in Moscow
http://www.mokaeff.com

[Kevin Reiner]

I feel for you. I lost an entire trip to Germany because of a light leak in the camera (pre-digital age – I’m old.) Then I lost footage of the first 4 months of my son’s life because I used the wrong power adapter on my camera. Both losses were heartbreaking.

Maybe try a data recovery service. I did a quick search and found https://datarecoverysystems.com/

I in no way endorse them, it was just from a quick search, so I would check into anything before trying it. Just a thought though. Hope you find a way to salvage it.

-Kevin

Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
32GB Memory
Dual-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card
Dell Display (23″ flat panel)
ATI Radeon HD 5770
AJA Kona LSi SD/HD capture card
Rourke 16 TB
Flanders 2460

SOFTWARE
Mac OS X 10.6.5
FCP 7
After Effects CS5
Boris Continuum
Sapphire Plug Ins
All Trapcode Plugs
Zaxwerks Invig

[Dennis Leppell]

My guess….bad tracking from a misaligned head. Our old canon xl2’s were prone to this. After some time, the tapes would only play back smoothly in the xl2 itself, but choppy and pixelated in a deck….eventually it would get to where that wouldn’t even work, and the cameras had to go in for service (cleaning/aligning).

My recommendation would be to find the best deck you can get your hands on, and see if you can adjust the tracking to recover your footage, or possibly even find another HC9 and try to play back in that.

[Mark Suszko]

I think the good news (if any) is that the signal is on the original tapes. You’re looking at clogged or damaged playback heads and a trackign error problem.

The best advice I can give you is to take the tapes to a pro editor that has Sony DVCPro or Sony DVCAM decks. Either of these broadcast quality decks can play back consumer DV tapes with an adaptor, and might be able to recover the signal, the Panasonic one used to be touted to have the widest playback and record heads, so this may have the best chance of daeling with your tracking problem. have the post house lay the tapes off to something else for you, a hard drive or at least some DVD-R’s.

[Dennis Leppell]

If I’m not mistaken, the HC9 is an HDV camera, so you’ll need to find someone with an HDV deck.

[Rafael Amador]

[Michelle Orpe] ” the viewfinder was only showing blue when I played, when I fast forwarded it would show the footage, but when I stopped it was only showing a blue screen”
Yeap.
Buy and run a “Cleaning Cassette”.
rafael

http://www.nagavideo.com

[Michelle Orpe]

Thank you all so much for your advice, I am going to try all the above and fingers crossed

Mx

Michelle Orpe
http://www.michelleorpe.com

[Michelle Orpe]

OK, so I took the advice and bought a cleaning head, I have played it for 10 seconds and the camera seems to be working, I have recorded and playedback and all fine. I put the original Italian tapes in and they are still only playing until I fast forward, when I fastforward all the footage is there but when I press play it only plays blue, this happens on both tapes. So at least the footage is there but I cannot capture it into FCP and it won’t work on other camcorders.

Any ideas, so many people haven’t of this before

Mich

Michelle Orpe
http://www.michelleorpe.com

[Kevin Reiner]

This is a long shot.

I had a tape where the control track was damaged. I could hear the audio but couldn’t see the footage unless played in reverse. So I used a professional deck to play in reverse and then digitized. Brought it into FCP and reversed it back to normal. I had to then record the audio and try to sync the entire tape. The image quality was horrible but watchable.

Overall, I am guessing that you are having a control track issue. This could be because of a defect in the tape or the camera. I would recommend finding someone in your area who has a professional deck and see if they can view it. Ask if they can adjust tracking. They may check it for you for free on hopes of billing you for a transfer. If that doesn’t work, then go the data recovery route.

Mac Pro 2 x 3 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon
32GB Memory
Dual-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card
Dell Display (23″ flat panel)
ATI Radeon HD 5770
AJA Kona LSi SD/HD capture card
Rourke 16 TB
Flanders 2460

SOFTWARE
Mac OS X 10.6.5
FCP 7
After Effects CS5
Boris Continuum
Sapphire Plug Ins
All Trapcode Plugs
Zaxwerks Invig

[Philip White]

Hi,
I’ve just filmed some footage this past weekend and had the exact same problem. The footage is on the MiniDV tape because I can see it on the PC in Premiere Pro when fast forwarding the tape, yet its only blue in playback both on the PC and camcorder itself (it doesn’t show up on the LCD of the camera in fast forward unfortunately but I HAVE seen it! lol)

I can’t capture mine either and have no idea what to do. I’m guessing from reading everyone’s posts it’s a tracking thing.

Did you manage to recover your Italy footage? And if so how did you go about it?

Thanks in advance,

Phil