1. Sony PD170.
2. Good point . Generally, I don't do a lot of rewinding during videotaping, other than to check once or twice to make sure everything is recording as it should. Next time I rewind and restart I'll make a mental note to see if that's the point where frames are dropping.
thanks.

3. Just realized it also happens when I use my Sony Handycam.

The cause of the problem is that when you power down the camera the tape is unthreaded from the heads. Next time when you power the camera up the tape can end up positioned a few frames past the last recording resulting in a portion of blank tape between the two clips.
Now silly VidCap doesn't handle that very well and reports dropped frames.
Bu there's a much bigger problem. If you start the capture on that blank section of tape using any Sony VCR or camera capable of 32K audio then the device sends 32K audio initially and VidCap locks the audio stream to 32K. Result is the entire audio stream is captured at 32K.
I've had a trouble ticket with Sony over this for months, still they don't even seem to comprehend that this is an issue. I wonder just how many captures are being compromised by this problem, after all who thinks to check the sample rate of there captured video!

Worse still, I recall many posts with users asking 'why does my audio sound so bad during capture'. Replies typically were "don't worry, VidCap's audio isn't too good, it'll be fine when you put it on the T/L".
WRONG ANSWER!
The audio you're hearing during capture sounds crappy because VidCap is resampling the incoming audio from 48K to 32K but your sound card thinks it's getting 48K audio, what you're hearing are sample rate errors. Once dropped onto the T/L of a 16/48K project the audio sounds OK because Vegas then correctly resamples the 32K audio to 48K to feed the sound card.
Unless you bothered to check the clips properties you'd never know what was going on of course. But it gets worse, not only have you lost a bit off the top end of your audio but during playback CPU power is being wasted reampling the audio, this no doubt impacts the achievable frame rate and adds a little to render times.
Bob.

As I said in the dropped frame FAQ I wrote for VASST, the only number of acceptable dropped frames is zero. Anything other than that indicates a problem. When capturing from DV tape you should never have a single dropped frame, much less dozens. Something bad is happening and needs to be fixed.

Capturing from analog tape, or through some sort of analog connection is a different animal, and dropped frames at edit points are not uncommon.

"The cause of the problem is that when you power down the camera the tape is unthreaded from the heads. Next time when you power the camera up the tape can end up positioned a few frames past the last recording resulting in a portion of blank tape between the two clips."

This is atypical of every DV camera that I've used: VX2000, PD-150 and PD-170. I stop and start my camera frequently, and the timecode is unbroken. If I remove and reinsert a tape, the camera backs up a bit to find the last frame and the timecode is unbroken.

I don't know about vidcap - I use Scenalyzer and it doesn't care a bit about breaks in the timecode. So if your scenario were happening, I wouldn't notice.

Come to think of it, I've never heard of anyone getting dropped frames from timecode breaks.

As John said - anything greater than zero (dropped frames) is indicative of a problem in your capture path.

Actually I think I wrongly described the scenario. The problem occurs if you leave the tape in the camera and change batteries. We mostly see it only on DVCAM cameras, with MiniDV cameras users tend to swap batteries at a tape change but with guys shooting sports footage all day with 3 hour tapes it's a pretty common occurance.
Bob.

Pretty interesting info:

Bob - I will be sure to shoot in DVCAM format whenever audio is a critical part of the video (mostly throw audio out and sub with music track) because the sampling frequencies of audio and video are synchronized and sampled at 48kHz. Not so with DV format, where the two sampling frequencies are independent (pretty well quoting from the manual here). It's good to have another reason to shoot in DVCAM format because the 2/3 less recording time of mini DV cassettes makes it tempting not to.
We have had threads here on the pros and cons of shooting in DVCAM format and this was one I was not even aware of until quite recently.

John: I agree that anything more than zero is too much, but is there any solution to dropped frames occuring between clips after shutting off and restarting camera??

If not, then it seems the best I can do is continue to shoot in DVCAM format so that at least the audio is not messed up, and be glad that the dropped frames are not affecting the video portion.

ohn: I agree that anything more than zero is too much, but is there any solution to dropped frames occuring between clips after shutting off and restarting camera??

Well, as both "n19093" and I mentioned, we use Scenalyzer. It doesn't care about interruptions in timecode, and the author actually enhances his code when people report problems. By contrast, I don't think Sony has touched the capture code in years, and there are lots of known problems. When they decided to add HDV capture, they didn't even know how to get inside the existing code to add this capability, so they created a completely separate application. Doesn't bode well for getting fixes to the SD capture.

So, my answer is this: Download Scenalyzer. It is free to try, although the demo version will put a watermark on your video. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that it will solve your problem. Here's the link:

Scenalyzer