Re: Dirty camera head cause video to breakup on minidv tape. Help

[Peter Ralph]

Are you sure the problem occurred while recording? It’s not a playback problem?

Peter Ralph

https://www.shootingbynumbers.com

[Kenneth Gibson]

Thanks for responding so quickly. Yes. This occured on a Friday night. I cleaned the head on Sunday morning after the indicator came up in the viewfinder, & had no problems since. Towards the end of my shoot the picture started to breakup intermittently & got worst as it progressed. Tried playing it in other cameras & vcr’s but still there. HELPPPPP. The very part that messed up is what my bride is requesting.
Any sugestions would be appreciated.
Ken.

[Grinner Hester]

there is nothing you can do if the drop outs were recorded. Just clean your heads before the shoot next time. To ensure it lives on the tape, play it back from a deck or other DV source. If it is indeed there, you can only cut the drop outs out.

[Michael Murray]

I had this problem once. Here’s what I did. I captured the audio (the best I could) and then went back to the beginning of where the problem started and captured the video in slow motion ( I have a PD 150 withthat capability), the digital blocking and “pink screen” were gone, with the exception of a few artifacts that I could live with. Then in Final Cut Pro, I used the speed control to 200% (I think that the % that brings it back to normal speed. Then synced the audio back. Even better if you don’t need the Audio and can set it to music.

Hope this works for you.

Michael Murray
Summer Wind Productions

[Mark Suszko]

If you can’t play back on another deck, it implies that the drop-out was recorded that way, and you can’t get back missing frames. The slo-mo play trick may help, but really the only answer is that this happens sometimes, and you should have invested in a strap-on exterior back-up hard drive recorder like the citidisk or firestore or something similar… or in a second backup camera, shooting from another angle. If you can’t afford back-up gear or insurance against this sort of thing, you are not seriously in business, you’re dabbling. 99 times out of a hundred, you can get away with that. The hundredth time, you are screwed, and perhaps may lose the business because of it if you get sued. I got out of the business because I didn’t want to make that commitment myself.

[Kenneth Gibson]

Thanks guys for your response. Will try recording & slow mo. etc.

[John Pucci]

Just ran into a similar problem. It happened on three tapes for a recital. One day shoot unfortunately. But it wasn’t from dirty heads. I wound and rewound the tapes beforehand with a DV deck that was giving me trouble (ejecting and shutting down). I am not sure if that scratched the tapes, but that in fact is exactly what happened. The first 12-20 minutes of each of three tapes were scratched at an angle across the surface. I manually turned the tapes and saw it. Cut right across the tape surface in random spots for the first 12-20 minutes.

I doubt that the tapes came that way, although I haven’t completely ruled that out.

John