Help!!!

I just shot my sisters wedding on a canon XL-1. I rented the camera from a professional rental house out of state. This rental house rents only to tv production people. I was up and shooting within an hour of renting the camera, and I carelessly didnt have a chance to check all of the settings on the camera. After about 15 minutes of shooting I realized the camera was set on the LP mode. I didnt want to switch it to the sp mode in the middle of the tape, I figured it might cause problems. Once I got to the second tape I switch it over. After reviewing all of the footage on a different camera (a littles sony camera), I realized that the first tape is screwed up. All of the footage is pixelating about every 15 seconds (or whenever there is camera movement). The display reads that it is reading the tape in LP mode. HELP! I have an hour of priceless footage that is garbage, I know the images on the tape are fine, it is just because the playback is confused. Could this be caused by playing back from a different camera, and do any of you kind souls here have a suggestion for fixing this?

[Edward Troxel]

The BEST suggestion is to rent the same XL-1 again and copy it from that camera to your camera. Alternately, you may try to find someone else in your area with an XL-1 or deck and see if it will play in any of their devices. If it will, simply copy it to your camera.

[Ken Tanaka]

I second Edward's suggestions, Mike. Hopefully, the LP footage wasn't trashed due to a gummy drum and you'll be able to recover it with another XL1.

I feel your pain. A couple of years ago I had a similar experience with footage from a JVC camera that I inadvertently shot on LP. I was only able to recover about 50% of that footage.

Were you and your sister close? ;-)

I really appreciate all of the help I am getting here... I am not sure what a gummy drum is. I am assuming that the footage is okay because the place I rented from is a professional house, and the last person that used it had it set on LP. I am sure he/she would've figured it out like me as well if there was a problem and switched it over. I was kind of avoiding renting another camera because of the expense out here in LA, but that might be my only choice.

Thanks for all of your help on here, and keep the advice coming.

[Ken Tanaka]

By "gummy drum" I meant that the record/playback heads may have been gummed up by the use of different tape brands. This is a common problem. In brief, the lubricants used by various tape manufacturers don't get along well when deposited together on the cam's heads. This often causes banding, drop-outs, etc. on the tape. It's a sure bet that a rental camera has seen many brands of tape. It's also likely that the rental house will be the last to learn that the camera has this problem since many renters may just shoot and rewind rather than play back their footage on the camera.

I don't mean to throw another demon your way. Just pointing out another possible culprit.

banding, drop-outs...
This is definitely not the symptom. It is more of a pixelation compression thing. Kind of like whenever your fast forward it pixelates. This is why my hunch is that it has something to do with the LP/SP mode.

[Barry Goyette]

I've experienced this a few times before, and I don't think there is anything wrong with the tape...In my case it seemed to be a difference in how the sony and canon handle the LP mode...if you put the tape back in a canon deck, it will probably work fine...you could rent a gl1 and dup it over to your sony camera at SP. I have also had some luck just rewinding the tape in my sony deck and trying again a few times...magically it started playing normally.

[Adam Lawrence]

Ive read on some posts before saying that other DV cameras especially
sony's have fualts in playing back DV tapes from Canons.

Alsom, evidently there is no difference in image quality between LP/SP mode.
Though Ive had previous experience in images loss in LP mode (so ive thought). yet technically there is none.

[Ken Tanaka]

Yes. DV is DV. That is, the 1's and 0's get laid onto the tape the same way regardless of LP or SP. But minute variations in tape speed and head alignments can make the slower tape speed (LP) incompatible across camera brands and indeed, across cameras/decks in the same brand.