Wondering if anyone here can help diagnose this sporadic issue,
two event recordings have been ruined because of it, at
one event...the 1st tape I shot was perfect the 2nd was
bad. The other event, the recording was bad all the
way through..... but a week before I shot two other
events and there were no problems. A vertical strip (1/4 inch wide) of pixellation appears on the right hand side of the video.

Figured its better to show folks, so the link below send you to a clip I made of one of the bad recordings. it is a quicktime file.

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~yoyodl/xl1videoproblem.html

Any help would be appreciated.
Johann

Wondering if anyone here can help diagnose this sporadic issue,
two event recordings have been ruined because of it, at
one event...the 1st tape I shot was perfect the 2nd was
bad. The other event, the recording was bad all the
way through..... but a week before I shot two other
events and there were no problems. A vertical strip (1/4 inch wide) of pixellation appears on the right hand side of the video.

Figured its better to show folks, so the link below send you to a clip I made of one of the bad recordings. it is a quicktime file.

http://www.home.earthlink.net/~yoyodl/xl1videoproblem.html

Any help would be appreciated.
Johann


Johann,

Have you run a cleaning tape thru the camera? Does sound like the heads are dirty. After cleaning, don't put a dirty tape back in.

Mike

No I have not tried that, however, not sure its the play heads that are causing the problem...I've played those two tapes on another camera and the problem is still there. makes me think there is an issue with the recording mechanism...will a cleaner help with that?

Thanks for any additional info.

No I have not tried that, however, not sure its the play heads that are causing the problem...I've played those two tapes on another camera and the problem is still there. makes me think there is an issue with the recording mechanism...will a cleaner help with that?

Thanks for any additional info.

Yup,

Like the computer axiom, "garbage in, garbage out!" If the two tapes were recorded on your camera and it was dirty, it will not play on any device. Dirty heads do not just not play tapes incorrectly, they don't record them correctly either.

I can pretty well tell from your last post, that you are not familar with cleaning tapes, so get one and run it about 10 seconds to start, then try it again. If the problem persists, run it again. I had an XL1s that did that same thing and had to run the tape several times to cure it. Just another note, what brand of tapes are you using? One of my XL1s's did not like JVC tapes at all, but it loved Sony. Go figure!

Oh, and the cleaning tapes are a one time use item, by that I mean, when you get to the end of it don't rewind----throw it away. The are not too expensive and they have lots of cleanings on them.

Mike

Thank you, that piece of info is much appreciated.
I'll go ahead and do that.

I've been using TDK tapes exclusively.

I guess what was throwing me off was that the problem was not happening all the time, out of 6 tapes that I have recorded (4 different events) on this camera, the problem tapes occurred separate from each other for 2 different events with one good taped event in between them.

I'll post back with observations post head cleaning.

best wishes.

This is also a possible symptom of a bad tape - especially if other tapes recorded at the same shooting sessions are OK,

Thanks Don. that's possible, it seems really strange though that I would get at least 1 bad tape in each batch of tapes I buy, the two bad tapes were bought separately, and in fact I just noticed another tape I shot last week where in, the issue occurs near the end of the tape now....a whole 45 minutes were recorded with no problem, but the last 15 minutes had the issue, the 2nd tape I shot that evening the remaining 30 minutes of the 1.5 hour show, was issue free, the recording was clean.

So it appears for now that the head issue may be the culprit, after the suggestions on this forum I ran head cleaner on the camera and got the result I describe above, I'll try running the cleaner again for a couple more times and see if future recordings will be issue free from that point.

Thanks for your thoughts, I sure hope that its not my bad luck that I get to have a bad tape with every ten tapes I buy from Costco. :-)