Re: Serious Mini-DV Question



Steve King wrote:

I've never used LP. I do not videotape events, where continuous coverage over long time periods is necessary; therefore, I've never felt the need to confront the overwhelming body of opinion that the LP spec makes camera to camera (deck to deck) compatibility a very iffy proposition. IIRC even Sony warns against this compatibility issue. Taking such a risk would be, in my opinion, unprofessional and a disservice to my clients, not to mention an unwise business decision that could affect future business and my reputation. In addition, because of the narrower track width in LP the possibility of drop-out seems more likely to me, which reinforces my decision to never use it.

I recently encountered my first drop-out with MiniDV --- that's after more than five years of production use. The drop-out first revealed itself as an audio glitch; at first video seemed fine. We noticed the anomaly, while reviewing production tapes. At first, there appeared to be no problem with the video track. However, after importing the video, we found seven frames corrupted with varying degrees of digital artifacts --- blockiness. It was repeatable on several successive imports. Drop outs are rare in MiniDV (IME) but they do occur.

As others have said, you have been lucky with your experience of compatibility among cameras. I think that depending on luck is a bad business model. If I had to videotape programs that exceed the available tape length, I think I would bite the bullet and add addtional cameras to facilitate tape change.

Your position of insisting that because you have had good luck in the past, it is Sony's service incompetence that is preventing you from having that good luck now seems foolish to me. What you are experiencing is simply what Sony and most everyone else has warned you about.

The audio is recorded as digital information right in the same track as the video. If the video plays back fine, even at LP speed, I just want to know what happened to the audio. Digital audio is very robust in its error correction and masking. Should be some redundant bits somewhere in there, or some CIRC scheme to recover lost data.

I wonder if a Firestore would be cheaper than sending the camera in for all these tape drive adjustments.

I shot a tape of my daughter's gymnastics event at SP, and the camera worked fine. But the first time I got it back from the Sony repair, it did have sound dropouts even at SP. I made them align it so it would play my friend's LP tapes, and now it performs much better. Main problem remaining is dropouts with 80 minute tapes at LP speed. But even the Civic Center's Canon XL-1 had these dropouts at LP.

Let me tell you another reason sound is so important this time - the Civic Center's sound system was so bad at this year's graduations, we could not understand a WORD any of the speakers said. Echo after echo, until everything was a big mish-mosh. We ended up placing one camera (mine) right near one stage speaker, to get the max dose of direct sound from it, just to record some intelligible sound. The next day, we brought our trusty Minidisc recorder and put it on the podium a foot away from the speakers' mouths. Great results that way. And these little Hi MD recorders will go for 7 hours at HI-SP speed. With no dropouts. Gorgeous little recorders. A new MZ-M200 is coming out next month, which will transfer the sound files to computer at USB 2.0 speeds. Manual gain control on the fly.

Gary Eickmeier (Lucky)
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