DVCam vs MiniDV. Couple questions.

[Debe]

Now that you’ve shaken my memory up on that whole fiasco….

I took the answer I was given and that was enough for me at the time. So then, what are the other options that could explain what happened?

The DVCam stock was Sony, the miniDV was also Sony. Perhaps the DVCam tape left something behind that the miniDV didn’t like, and the miniDV essentially “cleaned off” the heads while recording? The dropouts happened randomly, but it was the length of the remainder of the shoot. The environmental conditions did not change, the camera wasn’t powered down. There were no other differences I could account for except for the change in tape stock.

According to the client, who was so mortified he took the camera and DVCam stock home and shot a bunch of footage to make sure it wasn’t the camera, the very next DVCam tape he put in the thing exhibited none of the errors.

Any ideas?

debe

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

Head-clogs are certainly an issue with all magnetic devices.
Bad “batch” tapes can be as well.

But I’ll bet that if the client took another bunch of DV SP tapes and ran them, the problems would not have popped up again either.

But that’s just a speculation.
Each set of heads are unique.

You had a bad experience.
Hope it doesn’t happen again.

[Ben Oliver]

it’s always good, (and i know that its near impossible, if your in the middle of a shoot) to check your tapes while shooting. shoot a few mins, rewind, then use the editsearch to get you back to were you should be.

i do it often, cause, well, im an american, which means im paranoid by default. sometimes you just get bad tapes.

biggest horror story every. my roommate had my canonxl1 over a weekend. his dying aunt came to thanksgiving. knowing he had to interview, he ran to the nearst store he could to get a tape.

that happened to be.

radioshack.

all they had left was the

radioshack brand.

he shot her entire life story, and well. the tape was junk. you can t hear anything, and you can only see the bottom frame. he had no time, cause she had to go back to the hospital.

that sucks, so, yeah, always check a little before you shoot.

[Robert Garry]

My biggest issue with clients shooting Mini DV is that man of them do not listen to my advice when it comes to tape speed. I have had countless instances where they shot in LP or EP mode instead of SP mode. I use a DSR 1800 for capture and the deck does not recognize the speed of the recorded tape. The only way I was ablle to solve it was to redub or use the original camera for input.

DId you perhaps shoot LP or EP mode? You will see tears, dropouts and basically just overall destruction when you play it back on pro level decks.

GL

Bob

[Debe]

I’ve asked about this of a few other “offline colleagues”.

One wonders if the tape is “all the same”, perhaps it’s the location on the giant roll of tape before it’s cut? Perhaps the outside of the roll is for miniDV, and the inside of the roll is for DVCam. Or perhaps miniDV doesn’t have to pass quite as strict QC as DVcam, or something. He’s also had negative experiences using miniDV in place of DVCam in a pinch.

I remember vividly a bad batch of BetaSP when I was a staffer. The entire case had a crease. It was sent back to Sony and an investigation resulted in finding out that batch was the “end cut”, or the last bit of the roll used. It’s more likely to get creased during production. According to the Sony rep, it’s not supposed to make it into the “high end chain”, but somehow, it had passed through several vendors and ended up in our stock.

It certainly could be that it was one rogue bad tape.

Who knows.

debe

[Daryl K davis]

I have miniDV tapes come all the time shot in DVCAM mode – for years. The only problem that I ever saw was when the tape came from a particular camera that needed to be cleaned if a head was clogged. Never heard of ‘stretched’ tape before.

[Kevin Monahan]

If you do capture MiniDV and you don’t want audio drift problems I can make 2 suggestions.

Don’t shoot with a Canon XL1
Don’t capture anything to FireWire drives, particularly a 75 minute capture!
Use your spare internal SATA drive (Your media drive) instead.

Drop outs should not be a problem.

Kevin Monahan
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