I can understand that, but it is footage that I shot on my own, that's what's strange. I have used the same events in another project, so I don't understand it.

Sounds like you need to send the footage to Sony with a "Whaaattsssup"

I have this problem with my camera, vx2000. But only when I take footage from a commercial tape or dvd.
For our church sometimes, they have permission to show a clip during the service but my need to edit out some language or scene. So I take it into either VV or Premier, edit it and put it back on to tape for the service.
The two ways I get around the "Copy Inhibit" is to either just pass through my camera to a vcr or (and this is a pain but works "MOST" of the time) I take my time line and instead of printing to tape (which by the way, never works in VV. Way to many drop outs) I create a temp .avi file that is the time line up to half the commercial clip. Then another avi or the rest. Start a new project. and drop those two temp avi files into it and that usually works.
The key is to cut the clip in half. If you create a temp avi with the whole clip, it keeps the protection. As far as I can tell
Hope this helps or at least makes sense.
Mark

Isn't the detection for Macrovision? And doesn't that lie in the sync signal? Or is there some new sort of protection built into the Firewire protocol?

Macrovision seems to be encoded in the top couple of scan lines of the image. For kicks, i tried cropping a Macrovision encoded video clip to eliminate the top 3 pixels, and the copy protection wasn't there in the rendered file.

Thanks for all your help. I was trying to print to tape from the timeline. I did get it to work finally after rerendering it, and going into Vidcap and did a print to tape from there.

Chienworks, how did you check for copy protection?

How did i notice it was there? When i capture from a VHS tape, there is a black border around the image because it doesn't completely fill the frame. Looking closely at clips from Macrovision encoded tapes i can see what looks like static in a thin horizontal line in the upper left corner of the frame. I originally cropped it out because it was annoying. However, when printing back to tape through a Sony DVMC-DA2, i noticed that the cropped version did NOT light up the "Copy protection" indicator LED whereas the uncropped version did make it light up. The difference on the television was very noticable too with the cropped version being clear, bright, and stable. The uncropped version showed the typical brightness variation and jitters that Macrovision often causes.

Got it. Thats good to know, thanks.

JDK:
Your comment about printing to tape ('never works in VV') surprises me. VV30 prints to tape just fine on my system. I've experienced some problems printing to tape from the timeline, but, I'm guessing that those were the results of not allowing enough storage space for VV to store its temporary rendered files.

The one thing that I can always count on from VV is its rock-solid print to tape once a file is fully rendered. I'm running from WinXP on a 900 mhz 128MB RAM machine. What sort of setup are you using?

BTW, I'm guessing you have to render everything first (or at least pre-render) to get acceptable playback from the timeline, right? Just curious.

Caruso