Hi guys,

A friend asked me if I'd mind capturing some of his old miniDV footage for him with my XL2. I managed to capture 99% of the footage without any problems, but I'm having some issues with one of his short films. As I'm capturing it, it plays back in slow-motion and the audio's garbled. The finished capture also plays back at about half speed, the audio is missing entirely and the video is heavily artifacted, although footage from some other projects on the same tape is fine. He gave me a backup tape and same deal. It's the finished edit of the short film which has as some point been recorded back to tape from his edit suite, so not the raw footage. I was wondering if the issue had something to do with long play and short play, because most of his footage was shot using long play.

Any ideas? Thanks.

The LP issue is mainly one of tracking the narrow track spacing of LP. A tape recorded at LP on one machine may have difficulty playing back on another machine, or even in the same machine at some future time.

If he was able to capture the original tape into his NLE ok for editing, the LP speed of the original shoot would not present an issue in and of itself.

If the tapes he gave you were recorded at LP speed, the most probably solution is to try get the machine used to record the tapes. If that is not possible, try some other players to see if you can find one that can track the tape.

You indicated that the tape was recorded over previous recordings. That could be problematic as well, especially if the old recording was at a different tape speed and if the erase of the previously recordde material was not complete.

But playback at slow-motion sounds a bit odd. Did the tape play OK when originally recorded or did he not test it after the dump back to tape?

Lastly, there are bad batches of tape released occasionaly, Sony had one a year or two ago that caused a stir.

Sometimes you may find a tape that has enough read errors that it can not be captured via firewire, but can provide usable analog output (thanks to internal error correction) that can be captured.

Thanks, Don. I'll see if I can find out what he shot and captured it on originally in case that can shed some light on the situation. If not, I'll try the analog route :)

One more over looked thing here is if the tape was recorded in DVCAM which is recorded at a higher speed then it could have the effect that you described. Canon DV camcorders will not playback DVCAM recordings, you will need a Sony camcorder for this.