Ok, so I do a lot of part-time/contract work for a community college, including some ENG style shooting and editing.

Today I took home a Sony DSR1500A deck to capture from a full size DVCam tape shot on a DSR250 (both deck and cam belong to the college).

As soon as the tape starts to play in the deck, it's just nasty. the right edge of the frame is pixellated almost constantly, and there's a lot. . .I don't know. . .delay, lag, etc., like it's dropping frames right and left. I put another tape in the deck, a plain old panasonic miniDV tape, and was able to capture off that (albeit, it was a voiceover track, so no video, only sound), and it came out flawless.

Any chance it's some setting in the deck that's making the DVCam tape mess up? It's set for DVCam on the video output, if that means anything (I'm not familiar with decks)

Are you guys gonna tell me it's a head alignment issue with the camera, and that the tape has to be captured out of the camera that shot it?

Is the tape totally screwed?

JOsh,
Does it look like saw toothed dropouts on one side? Like someone took a comb, and cut out irregular bits of the image on one side?

Tape heads were dirty when the tape was shot. That would be my first guess. IF thats the case, then yeah... FUBAR.

Here's what I would try in this order.

It COULD be a dirty deck head too... so run a cleaner through the deck first, check the tape playback again.

Try and play it back in the camera, to see if its a deck/cam head allignment issue.

IF it plays back like crapola in the cam... definately FUBAR.

Ok, on one last hope--

Another editor pointed out that it was saying "DV SP" when we played the tape, so perhaps I mistakenly shot in DV mode instead of DVCam. I was thinking maybe if the deck is set to DVCam it would play the tape correctly? Maybe? I can't find that setting now, in the menu system, however. DSR1500A.

Ok, so, apparently, the situation is that the tape'll play fine. . .but only in the particular camera that recorded it.

So I'm going to transfer the whole thing to another tape, using the DSR250 it was shot in, and the DSR1500A deck.

I just did this, the whole thing two 2 and a half hours, 'cause that's how much raw footage was on the tape.

I wanted to make sure the new tape was okay, and it wasn't. I set something wrong during the dub, and now all the audio's overmodulated. used the audio one and two pots on the deck to set the levels coming off the cam to -12, where they were peaking on the cam, and upon playback, all the peaks were at 0 or over. How did this happen?

can someone help me set up the dub correctly? I have bars at the head of the original tape, but no tone. Speaking of which, am I suppose to adjust anything on the deck for the bars?