Tape freezes while capturing

[Greg Clark]

I just finished an event where I had trouble capturing the raw tape footage to my XP computer. The tape stopped and started while capturing to the computer. Obviously sound and picture was distorted. To make it worse I was using two cameras and wanted to use multi camera with Premiere Pro CS3. Sadly you don't notice the glitch while it is recording.
Any prerecording solutions or computer capture solutions?

[Chris Soucy]

Little bit uncertain about your description of "tape stopped and started".

Do you mean the tape physically stopped moving OR it was moving but no usable data was retrieved?

If it's the former, I'm stumped unless you have the background app from Hell running somewhere, tho' even that can't really be fingered as the culprit, as NOTHING can physically stop the camera but the ingesting software or you (or a power cut if running off mains power).

If it's the latter it's called a good 'ol fashioned dropout.

Possible solutions to the second option are:

1. Run a cleaning tape through the camera and try re - capturing just the bad section.

You're best chance of getting this to work is to FF the tape to just AFTER the problem occured. Remove it and run the cleaning tape. Re- insert the data tape and PLAY it BACKWARDS** to before you had the problem. Run the cleaning tape again. Reinsert the data tape and and capture from that point on to where the glitch finished.

**You will need the remote for this trick.

You may want to try this a few times.

2. Try another camera, maybe even the one it was shot on if this was not the case first time round.

3. If this was a multi cam shoot, use footage from the other camera to "plug the hole" if possible.

If it is/ was actually a dropout, there's really not a whole heap you can do before, during or after except keep the tape path clean by regular use of cleaning tapes, keep the camera serviced if it gets that many run hours and make sure you don't mix tape types.

Sorry I can't be of much more help.


CS