A couple of weekends ago I was shooting a wedding and every once in a while I would get a red circle with an x in it on the upper left hand of the LCD screen on my DVC-80. At first I thought maybe it was condensation because of the humidity outside and AC inside, but according to the manual it wasn't. The footage played back fine, so the onlyl other thing I could figure out was because the reception was dark on the inside, but had a lot of windows with really strong sunlight, I was getting a warning when the video levels were blasting from the sun. I can't find this icon in the manual. Any ideas?

Thanks,

David

That sounds like it might be warning you of something on the heads. Try cleaning them and see if it goes away.

I'll take a look at that. I did shoot all day this last Sunday and didn't see that error once. That is what I am confused about.

Thanks

I got that error couple of weekends ago and it was also a very humid day. I believe it has to do with the heads because upon immediate playback of my tape, I was getting tremendous drop outs. I ran the cleaner tape through and then it was fine... I checked back later on and I was still getting slight drop out, (but no red X) so I ran the cleaner again and it "seemed" to have performed okay for the rest of the day. I'm thinking of taking the cam in for service. I have approx 70hrs on the heads.

its the notification icon for dirty heads
Its standard across all Pana Cams

Thanks,
I'll maybe run a cleaner through it, although I ran it for a full day without any problems. I need to start taking the cleaner with me on shoots.

Thanks again

This puzzles me then: Upon playback after seeing the dirty heads warning, the picture was pixelated with tremendous horizontal tearing. But the image played back fine after cleaning the heads. So how was the cam able to record error-free but not playback error-free wth dirty heads?

During the time that I was getting the error, I did a quick review of the video shot and didn't see any problems. Because I didn't know that it was a dirty head warning, I use the camera a week later and didn't get one warning shooting 2 full DV tapes.

it IS the dirty head warning.. :)

im runnign 4 Pana cams and each manual for each cam explain the meaning of that icon (i had the same issue until i RTFM)

another issue COULD be a misaligned tape transport, which can happen (ive had my machine lock up on me when im swithcn tapes real quick hitting record and not waiting for the transport to catch up.. )

Well,
I will take a closer look at the manual. I'm sure I RTFM, but under the trouble shooting area I did not see that icon anywhere. Thank anyway for taking the time to let me know what it means.

hehehe i didnt mean rtfm to you mate, Im jsut a numbnuts and dont read things until i make a mistake.. i think pana skipped that part in the dvxmanual too..

No problem. I still haven't had a chance to look at the footage yet. In fact I'm a little worried that it's hosed. Oh well. Thanks again.