Hm.. with all this discussion re. the dvcam vs normal minidv tape. My PD100 has a tendancy (hehe) to record in DVCam on normal MiniDV tape (ie. i only get 40 min out of a 60 min tape). But is this advisable if you shoot on the cheaper Sony tapes? Are the manifacturing process accurate enough to allow this?

Regards,
Henrik Bengtsson
DocuWild

Personally, I would use DVCAM tape for a PD100A. I think Fuji makes it.

In all likelyhood this camera has used Sony tapes. It would be unwise to switch to Fuji and risk gunking up the heads and the tape path.

i wrote about that earlier somewhere in that forum, but..
a couple of years ago i edited 'pet clinic' type documental soap. It was shot entirely with pd100 onto DV tapes. We had minor dropout problems with approx 90 tapes shot. I think, when using cheap tapes in DVCAM, you have less risk of dropouts than cheap tapes in DV. But that risk is quite small anyway.

regards, Margus

this is a strange thing that happened to me while shooting.

I was using a sony pdf-150 provided by my university, it wasn't in the best of conditions, and i was shooting, and realised after i only got 40 mins to the tape, delved into the menu and found some strange settings.

When later it came to editing, i was getting break up and sound drops as well capturing straight from the tape.

was not fun.

Anyone shed some light on this? obviously this sounds like the camera was setup for dvcam, i dunno.

kermie

kermie,
was that recording OK when playing back with camera?
did you use the same camera for feeding into computer?
i'm not familiar with editors, but don't believe that it was because of using DVCAM. Maybe because of head glogging or worn heads. (just guessing)

regards, Margus