When I woke up this morning it was cold--45 degrees. That's cold for Miami! At 9:00 A.M. I was at a local park to video tape some stilt walkers at 10 A.M. The camera (XL1s) was on the tripod loaded with fresh tape (Sony) and fully charged battery. Once the stilt walkers arrived, I began video taping. Interesting stuff, very surreal.

Once they finished, I broken every down and stashed everything in the trunk of my car (white to reflect sun and heat). When I arrived home, I popped the tape into the DSR-30 DVCAM deck to watch. At the first frame it appeared to be skipping frames, the image began to pixelate in various quadrants of the screen, and areas of high contrast, pulsed regularly about every second. Needless to say, I was beside myself!

I took the tape out of the DSR-30 and put back into the camera. Using the VCR feature, I played the video and watched it on the viewfinder. No problems! It was clear, smooth, no pixelation, and no pulsing!

Next, I put it back in the DSR-30, pushed "play" and the nightmare started once more. I took out a headcleaning tape and ran through according to the directions. Took out the cleaning tape, inserted the video tape and no change. In an act of desperation, I pushed "stop" then "fast forward" to the end of the tape. Once there, I completely rewound the tape. When I pressed "play" it played perfectly, without a hitch. No problems!

As grateful as I am that everything is okay now. I'm at a loss as to what the problem was. Has anyone here had a similar problem before? Any ideas as to what happened?

Thanks!

That's really bizarre. I mean, what' really strange is that it played OK after you fast forwarded and rewound the tape. Before I got to that part, I was thinking it might be a head alignment issue--if the heads are out of alignment, the device that did the recording will play back the tape, but another deck will not. However, that doesn't seem to be the thing here. What I would do is get another new tape and record something for several minutes and make sure it plays OK in the camera and deck. It could have been something weird in the cassette that caused the tape to not be tight enough or to track properly or something like that. In fact, if you have other recent tapes recorded by that camcorder, it might be a good idea to check them out for playback, just to be certain. If you can't duplicate the problem, then maybe it had something to do with the tape itself and not the deck or camera.

Bill, I had shot some video on Thursday and everything was fine. Today, I put that same video tape in the deck and it played without any problems.

Someone else had suggested that it was probably condensation on the tape, causing the tape to stick together. That being the case it wasn't being fed across the heads smoothing. I think that may have been the issue, since the fast forward and rewind seems to have cleared up the problem.

Thanks for your input!