I was trying to capture straight from my 3 week old Optura 40 to my notebook and Vegas would hang 3 seconds into capture. I tried 3 firewire cards to no avail. Then I started to suspect something else. When I got back to my studio, I tried swapping cables and then capturing to my main PC - it captured for 60 seconds before hanging on both my firewire controllers.

I then put the tape in my JVC edit deck and whole tape captured without a problem except I noticed a few white dropouts plus-minus 10 seconds from around 7 or so scene changes.

Is this camera defective or something else going on? This is my first adventure in consumer cam land, so don't know if this is normal or problematic.

That does sound odd.

Did you try fully fast forwarding / rewinding the tape before capture?

I wish I could have a notice read by everybody that buys a new DV camcorder, to run a head cleaning cassette *before* you ever put the first tape through it.

Try cleaning the heads. Five seconds with a cleaning cassette.

It sounds like you have a problem with the camera.


I am running straight into an Adaptec firewire card, Compaq Wxxxx workstation with SCSI drives using Adobe Premeire Pro.

Ran the same camera through a Dell Dimension 1.8 ghz machine through an ATI all in one wonder card's firewire inputs on regular ATA drives and again no problems no drop offs.

I'm confused - what's the logic is running a cleaning cassette before running the first tape? I have never done that with a camera before, although I have only owned pro dv cameras. My new DVX100a has no dropouts whatsoever - it does have self-cleaning mechanism.

Is this for low-end cams or all cams? And why would that have anything to do with lockups during capture. There are no dropouts on the tape at the beginning - they don't come into the tape until theirs a scene change. And then only a one brief flash of a couple of white specs - no audio glitch though.

I'm not convinced dirty heads is this issue.