HVX-200 Dropouts on dolly shots

[Bill Marcellus]

I didn’t mention but we are shooting 24pN.

This is a puzzling issue and has now occurred with two different P2 cards several months apart. Initially I had thought that this was an isolated issue confined to one slightly defective card. Having now experienced the same issue with a different card I thought that perhaps others had dealt with this.

Thanks to all for your input.

Bill

[Jim Mcmahon]

Soooooo…

I know that this is a VERY late response to this, but I believe what you were experiencing was static buildup from the dolly.

We experienced this a few years ago when shooting on the Canon XL1s on a Fischer 11 dolly with standard square wheels and steel track. For some reason, we kept getting hits on the video, but not when it wasn’t on the dolly.

We solved the problem by plugging in the dolly and leaving the “pump recharge” switch in the OFF position. What this did was ground the dolly using the same ground as was being used on the monitor. (Both were plugged into the same socket, but in hindsight I don’t think that was necessary.)

We got the shot with no further problems, and the issue with static build-up went away after we left that studio location. I’ve never experienced anything like it since, but that was our solution and it worked (although we lost about 2 hours trying to figure it out. Ugh!).

Cheers,

Jim