Here’s a baffler…

[David Roth weiss]

Thanks everyone for trying to solve this mystery. The spirit of cooperation you have all shown has been great and I appreciate every idea and all input.

After recapturing, the tapes are proven to be faulty for unknown reasons and I am closing the case once an for all, chalking this up to “asycronous tapes without logical explanation.”

That is all…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[John Heagy]

Not sure if your cameras support this but GenLock is the answer to syncing two or more cameras. You could even use one camera to sync another, or a sync generator feeding both. You might try feeding both cameras a video signal to the input of the camera and see if there’s a “genlock to input video” setting.

John Heagy

[Colin Mcquillan]

[Rennie] “I was able to figure out which was the bad camera because it’s tapes wouldn’t work in the decks either but as long as I captured from it, it worked. I never understood what was really going on though.
“

sounds like the heads are out of alignment on that one camera. I’ve seen it happen to one or two of our ENG cameras (DSR-300a’s) a couple times. The camera that shot the video will playback fine, but not an any other cameras or decks.

Colin McQuillan
Vancouver BC

[Jon Smitherton]

I am very surprised that no-one on this forum has ever come across this.

Strangely enough even identical DV cameras sync will drift after 2 mins or so unless you can lock the cameras to external timecode.

You could try fitting-to-fill one cam to the other from identifiable sync points – I do this with music vids – abeit a short duration – and works fine.

You can sync multiple XL2’s via free run and a remote:
https://dvinfo.net/canonxl2/articles/article11.php
handy to know.

The real timesaver is hire a MX50 or a Firewire vision mixer to switch the cams to a deck, and run tapes as iso on the cams, in case the vision mix is dodgy.

Apparently Capture Magic Pro can record 2 DV streams at the same time, so would be no sync issues.
https://www.bigmugsoftware.com/capture/

Good Luck,
Jon