Yesterday I was showing the father in law how to focus and zoom and pan simultaneously with all 4 hands required for the job and I though 'I'll record his work for him and play it back so we can learn where he went wrong etc...

To my horror when I cam to play back the tape it just 'bluescreened' and registered no position on the tape i.e.
-- -- -- -- sort of thing. There had been no degridation of the image prior to this and in record mode it happily tells you it's recording away with an image on the viewfinder to boot. I have noticed however in record mode it also reset the time to -- -- -- when in pause mode. I have read the manual and it suggests a tape head cleaner which I shall be purchasing tomorrow but my fear is that with no prior warning to this loss of playback it may be something more serious.

Has anybody experienced this? And if not would they concur with the manual's proposed resolution?

Thanks guys

On a completely different note - has anybody succeded in capturing the four channels of audio available in 12-bit mode on the xl1 to premiere via firewire - and if so does it do it automatically or is some ingenius wizardry required? Thanks again.

Howard

Greetings

I can't be much help in this area, but this has happened to before. I just put the cleaner tape in there and it has never happened again.

One thing that may have had nothing to do with it is I used to use different brand tapes all the time. Well now I know that is not the best idea. Stick with one name brand if you are not already. If the problem dose not go away with the head cleaner tape I am curious to know the solution myself.

Marcus

Yes, you can capture all 4 channels over firewire. No, you can not do it in one pass. You will have to capture twice, once for the first stereo channel and once for the second. The trick is finding software that will capture the second channel via firewire. I currently know of two that work via firewire:

Cinestream
Scenalyzer Live

If you are using a program that requires AVI files, I would recommend Scenalyzer. It will capture either stereo track which you can import into your editing program - Plus it only costs $33!

CORRECTION! YOU CAN capture all four channels over firewire in one pass, but you have to have the proper capture card/drivers. Many drivers do NOT support capture all four channels in one pass. Shame on them!

Among the few that do support 4-channel capture is the DV.now family from Dazzle/FAST. It supports selectable 2 or 4 channel capture via its FAST.Forward utility, or the Capture feature in Premiere 6.0. The audio is captured to individual .WAV files, and it is upsampled to individual 16-bit/48 kHz (if that is your project setting), a convenience for subsequent audio editing/sweetening.

Another is Matrox Media Tools, the batch capture program that comes with Matrox RT2x00 products. You can select 2 or 4 channel audio capture and it will capture 4 channels in one pass. I think it also upsamples to 16-bit/48 kHz since if I remember correctly, all other options are disabled.

I was under the impression that the programs that captured all four tracks in one pass would capture the second audio track to a wav file via the sound card instead of over the firewire cable. I stand corrected.

The blue screen you describe sounds very much like a dropout I experienced with one of my Panasonic tapes. I had reused this tape about 6 times. Eventually, the VPD deposited recording media will flake off of the substrate. While cleaning is a good step to try to remove any flaked material from your heads, the tape will never be fixed....toss it!!