Thanks for your reply, Steve. I believe the issue lies with the tape itself- somehow must have gotten damaged, and this is what it sounds like other people found with their tapes that have similar issues. I cannot play it back on the camcorder at normal speed, although I can play other tapes on the camcorder, so I know it's not the camcorder. I can view the tape while in fast forward or rewind by using the camcorder, and it shows up in the preview capture using the Vegas software when the camcorder is connected, but nothing appears when I play it at normal speed. When I try to capture the video with the Vegas software, it says "no frames captured." It sounds like the only solution people have found with this kind of damaged tape is capturing the video at a slower speed and then speeding up the frames when making the movie. I'm hoping to find out how to slow down the capture with Vegas...

I dont' think you can do it using the machine control of the software. If yoiu turn off control of the camcorder and do a live capture while playing the camera in slow motion, that MIGHT work.

Dave T2

Will the tape play in your cam when you use the Slow mode?

I don't know if VidCap will see a video signal from your cam in Slow mode but that could be one option.

You could also try Windows Movie Maker, I've seen posts where people have had luck with WMM with VidCap didn't work.

You've definitely have an interesting problem. I wish you luck.

Thanks for your replies! I tried playing the tape in slow mode with the camera, and it's just a blue screen. The best I've been able to do so far is capture the tape while playing it in fast forward, and then using Vegas to stretch the events out. It makes it kind of look like it's playing at normal speed, but the downsides are that the video is very distorted (lots of lines and blank area), and of course no audio. I was kind of surprised to find that I could capture the tape while playing it in fast forward. I did experiment with Windows Movie Maker and had similar results.

If anyone still has any pointers as far as how to slow down the rate of capture, I would welcome them. I think it would provide less distortion.

Otherwise I guess I will be playing back all my tapes from now on before filming too far into an event!

You should consider a move away from DV tape. It just didn't have the sticking power and reliability needed for important work. I gave up on tape about a year after i got my DV camcorder and always carried around a small laptop with a firewire adapter and captured directly to hard drive. Yeah, it did limit mobility a bit, but i rarely needed mobility for anything other than fun family shots. Anything important was always done on a tripod anyway.

There are several pocket sized hard drive recorders available for DV over firewire. You can probably find some excellent ones at bargain basement used prices now. These would retain the mobility if that's important to you. For that matter, it might be time to look at an AVCHD camera that records on SD cards.

As far as changing the speed of DV capture, it's very unlikely that anything less than extremely expensive test lab equipment could do so. DV transfer is designed to be real-time and all equipment that mere mortals can afford is built on this design. However, one thing i've done that i've had some success with was to capture the same bad section of tape several times (dozens maybe), starting at slightly different locations each time. After a sufficient number of captures i had often gotten at least one good copy of each frame. A lot of syncing, trimming, and multi-cam style rearranging could get a pretty workable copy.

Since other tapes play fine, it's probably not a dirty head issue but running a cleaning tape cycle or two couldn't hurt.

A long shot..... fast forward tape (not in playback mode) to end of tape then fast rewind a couple times. I doubt it's a tension issue but ff/fr may help.

Hi all, thanks for your responses. Just wanted to let you know that I heard back from Sony Support who offered this:

"Footage captures the same as it was shot on the camcorder so there is no way to change the frame rate during capture. You may capture the footage then render it out from Vegas as a different frame rate afterward."