Ok have 3 Mini DV tapes from a Sony FX-1 (1080i). On the last tape I noticed quite a few of these little glitches occurring.

Is there something that I'm doing wrong to get these or is this something that just happens.

Here is an example...right at the 6 second mark.

YouTube - artifact (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFBhJjtIAXc)

That's a dropout, clean the heads.


CS

good to clean the heads as suggested...

also of good habit is to pre run your tape at least 10 seconds before you record the good stuff... just put your hand over the lens and hit record... count to 10 and stop the recording... this keeps the tape lead in away from your good footage..

Try capturing again. How does this playback in the camera? A dropout would more likely cause the error correction to freeze the image for a while on playback in the camera. Are they all the same brand of tape. Don't mix brands as this causes lots of problems.

Ron Evans

That would be my suggestion as well. Try capturing again. Sometimes you will find that these glitches are transient.

Some people think drop outs are less common by using HD tapes instead of DV tapes.

I for one record a good minute of footage at the beginning of the tape prior to recording anything of importance.

If using multiple cameras, I will also point them to the same location, hopefully featuring something that is white. This can be very handy when it comes to colour correcting the footage so that both cameras and balanced in post-production.

Andrew

My fx 7 is giving a lot of drop outs now, some recorded some transient on playack,head cleaners no use to it ,it has not done a lot of mileage in the car talk world either.