Z5 frame drop issues and terrible prime support

[Don Bloom]

Robb, since you used those types of tape in another camera without problems then I'd have to assume it's not the tapes although as we all know every once in a while there is a problem caused by the tape but it doesn't sound like it in this case.
I have a PD170 that I took in early this year and had the tracking readjusted and still had pixelation with it so I replaced the head which even though it only had 1500 hours of recording time was the next step. Still had a problem so the camera went into another reliable shop (the first one was a shop that came recommended to me but one I had never used before) and inside of 2 hours the problem was fixed. It was the tracking. He adjusted it, ran a test tape and showed me the result as well as putting the camera on the scope and it had been flawless since. Yeah it cost me and I went back to the first shop and had a discussion with the owner about the money I spent with him and how his shop didn't stand up to their end of the deal but regardless, the camera has run flawlessly since the "2nd" fix.
It almost sounds like the heads need something like I had done. Readjust the heads. Maybe????

[Robb Bradstock]

Thanks for your input. I am waiting for the camera to come back from Prime Support . So I'll see what's happening with the camera then. They assure me there is nothing wrong with it after extensive testing.....

[Adam Gold]

Originally Posted by Alan Angel

Just to clarify something, my drop outs were not capture drops, they were on the tape.

Also I don't accept that when you pay four grand for a camera made by Sony that you should expect drop outs. I owned a Canon for five years and never had a single drop out and that had six times as many hours on the drum.

If Sony make dodgy cameras then like I said, this will be my last, I need to have faith in my gear and I do not accept drop outs as par the course.

If a few dropouts every 20 hours are unacceptable, then you absolutely should switch back to another brand, if they in fact were dropout-free in HDV. Please let us know your results. I think we'd all be interested to see an apples-to-apples comparison.

[Adam Gold]

Originally Posted by Robb Bradstock

Thanks for your input. I am waiting for the camera to come back from Prime Support . So I'll see what's happening with the camera then. They assure me there is nothing wrong with it after extensive testing.....

If what you said is true, that your dropouts keep happening in different places on the tape each time you play it back, then it is likely, no, certain, that there is, in fact, nothing wrong with your cam and the support guys are correct. It is recording the signal on tape perfectly and the dropout is happening somewhere else in the chain. This has been pointed out several times to you by several different posters.

[Rob Morse]

Simple solution: use the MRC1 and have tapes for backup. I haven't even looked at any of my tapes in a year. As Adam mentioned in an earlier post, "it's all about being prepared". Having the MRC1 and tape is an insurance policy against failure in the field.

[Tom Hardwick]

Originally Posted by Robb Bradstock

or it is that HDV just isn't suited to tape. As mentioned I am clearly no technical expert and came to this forum for advice and support and appreciate what has been said so far. Thanks

Good point you raise there Robb, HDV was sprung on us in 2004 with the introduction of the FX1, and it was an eye-opening engineering feat of backwards compatibility. Here was a hi-def format that gave us 1440 x 1080 pixels recorded onto a 9 year old tape designed for 720 x 576. Not only that, but we were able to record this hi-def for an hour. Yet more: We were able to uses exactly the same tape and tape deck, it's mechanical and electrical engineering remaining completely unchanged. More: we could shoot and replay in DV, at SP & LP.

OK, the slight downer was the compressed audio, but even so, HDV was a triumph of engineering and marketing. Yes, it was only ever going to be a stop-gap format, and a format designed to ease us into the hi-def domain. Everyone and his dog were waiting for the cost of flash memory to come down to realistic levels - and even now tape enthusiasts are still rightly saying that their gb:$ costs are about 1/15th those of even cheap SDHC cards (We'll conveniently forget SxS and P2 here).

So please accept the greater dropout potential of HDV, along with its more damaging MPEG2 side-effects. HDV does seem to be almost something for nothing, which explained Sony's next move - the morphing of the Z5 into the NX5.

tom.

[Mark Goodsell]

I can record HDV to a Canon HV20 using regular tapes with no drop-outs, but with those same tapes, get a high number of drop-outs in the Z5. Switching to Panasonic PQ tapes, the problem is greatly reduced. I still get a few drop-outs from time to time.