Unable to capture DV

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

Sounds like a poorly recorded tape.
Possibly a miss-threading when the tape was loaded into the original camcorder.
Possibly a partially-clogged head in the original camcorder.
Possibly just a defective original tape (I’ve never had it happen in DV, but many times in BetaCam, so who knows?).
I would not blame the fact that the tape was shot DV instead of DVCAM, but again, its hard to tell from out here in the COW pasture.

The solution is normally what you’ve already tried: a complete re-dub.
So I guess you’re now at the “creative workaround” stage.

You might try to re-dub until you come to a “bad section”, back up the playback tape a bit and “overlap” at a new starting-point.
Continue until you get the best dub of all the scenes you need.
Then capture the best sections of the new dub.

[Andy Hutchinson]

The original tape has 13 minutes of recording on it. There are at least 20+ areas of loss audio that range from 1-3 seconds. It starts almost immediately on the tape and continues through out. There were no problems on previous or following tapes. I just couldn’t understand why dubbing through the firewire cable and creating new TC didn’t get rid of the issue with the DSR-20 stopping the capture process. I think I mentioned that it stopped with the logging or just capturing on the fly.

Maybe I will take it in and have it professionally cleaned.

Andy Hutchinson
Video Magic
Winter Park, Fl

OS-10.3.7, FCP4.5, SP 2.05, Dual 2.5 G5, 2 gigs RAM; Sys HD 200G : WD 200G 7200rpm with 8 Meg buffer; 2 WD 250G 7200 rpm with 8 Meg buffer FW enclosure; Lacie FW800 card; Maxtor 120G FW for storage, 1 WD,

[Thaxter Clavemarlton]

[Andy Hutchinson] “The original tape has 13 minutes of recording on it. There are at least 20+ areas of loss audio that range from 1-3 seconds. It starts almost immediately on the tape and continues through out. There were no problems on previous or following tapes.”

This really sounds like what I said in my earlier post:

The tape may have miss-threaded when it was loaded into the camcorder.
If the tape-path was a bit “off” during the recording, the head-tracks (tracking) may be marginal.
The error-correction on the playback can compensate for a lot of it, but once the tracks get too far “out of the correction window” you’ll get drop-outs.

Here’s a possible (time-consuming) workaround:
1. Start making a FW copy to a NEW tape
AND let the NEW record tape CONTINUE to RECORD, don’t stop it.

2. When you come to a drop-out on the (“bad”) PLAY tape: pause, back-up (reverse-search) the “bad” tape for a couple of seconds, pause, and play again (even as the NEW tape continues to record)

3. Possibly, on THIS play pass, if the drop-out may occur in a DIFFERENT area, so you’ll be able to salvage a more of (and/or a different area of) the clip.

4. After doing this for the entire tape, you’ll likely need to “piece-together” (from the NEW tape) the best parts of the “reclaimed” clips.

FWIW, if all of the tapes before and after this “bad” one are OK (and the “bad” one has problems all-the-way-through) I doubt that this is a “cleaning” issue.
Again, I suspect either a defective tape (less likely) or a miss-threading (more likely).