XH-A1 Drop Outs affect DN-60

[Greg Clark]

I have been having problems with unreliable tape drop outs during taping. I thought adding a DN-60 Compact Flash recorder would continue to record when the the tape drop outs occur. When the tape drop out occurs it causes the DN-60 to stop and then resume again with a new file. This makes it impossible to do any multi cam work because I don't have a continuous file from the DN-60. Any suggestions?

[Chris Soucy]

Er, my first suggestion was to stop running tape, period.

Then I started thinking (happens occasionally) how the heck does anything know it's got a dropout on a write?

Gotta be something else going on, there is no way I can see a tape based system being able to detect a dropout during a write unless it has immediate playback of the tape written, which no helical scan tape system I've known can or does do.

Think you may have a problem with the camera itself, I cannot see how this is a tape dropout problem.

Something gone intermittent in the works causing "blips" that appear as dropouts on the tape but are actually camera cardiac arrests.

My 2 cents worth, interested in what "the team thinks".


CS

PS: The parallel R/W head, 1/2", vacuum column tape handling units on computer mainframes of the 50's, to 80's DID have "read after write" (and boy, what a mess they made when they lost the plot!), but no modern helical scan head system that I'm aware of has the ability to move tape fast enough to perform such a function with the data rates in question.

Gotta be a camera blip.