Frame Corruption Capturing HDV Footage

Mauriceh9 wrote on 11/5/2008, 12:40 PM

I have a Sony HDR FX7E camcorder from which I am capturing HDV clips into
Pro 8.0c using the automatic scene detection option. I have been having a
problem of one frame in a clip becoming corrupted in some way during the
capture process. The corruption manifests itself as a green bar across the
frame thumbnail in the timeline. The problem only appears to occur to the
first or last frame in the captured clip. Viewing the frame in the preview
window it appears either with the green bar or as a composite of two frames
split horizontally and having part of one frame at the top and another, the
next in the sequence, at the bottom. Sometimes what appears at the top and
bottom of the split frame is reversed.

I have had this problem for some time, but usually only with a couple of
frames in a tape. But this time I've got many corrupted frames in one tape.
I discovered the problem when trying to convert between video formats
because the corrupted frame caused the conversion plug-in to crash. To get
over the problem I had just been deleting the corrupt frame from the clip
and then overwriting the original file. But this is not practical with the
number of corruptions in this particular tape. The clips are being captured
from the video as m2t format files, I'd bet money that this is part of
problem. I haven't tried capturing in standard definition.

Anyone else had this problem, or can offer any suggestions?

Comments

farss wrote on 11/5/2008, 2:59 PM

1) Try cleaning the heads in your camera.
2) Use better quality tape.
3) Use a decent VCR to capture your tapes.
4) Always shoot with 'handles'. Allow a few seconds of footage at the head and tail of the shot. The old school way of rolling camera, calling "Speed" etc might seem quaint today but still serves a purpose.
5) Watch out for the Fast Record option in some HDV cameras. That seems to cause some issues.

I have a tape from a camera that was shaken so violently it looks like the tape jumped out of the guides at least once. Using my M15U VCR the HDV captures just fine although the footage is quite useless there's no green or red frames.

Bob.

Mauriceh9 wrote on 11/6/2008, 3:34 AM

Thanks for your suggestions Farss.

Since my original post I've looked back at other footage that I've captured only to find that the problem is much more widespread than I'd thought. Perhaps this is a problem with the tapes I've been using which are Std Sony. But I've always assumed that being digital there wouldn't be a problem. The most likely problem with tapes I would have thought would be dropouts, but these could occur anywhere in in a clip, whereas the corrupted frames I'm encountering always occur on the last or first frame in the clip. Perhaps it's a problem with the Camera rather than the tapes or Vegas. As the camera is only a year old and I've only shot about 30 tapes I would doubt if it is a problem with dirty heads.

farss wrote on 11/6/2008, 4:01 AM

I suspect your specific problem relates more to the nature of HDV than anything. I never capture HDV with scene detection, that's probably why I don't see this problem.
Because HDV uses mpeg-2 with a long GOP capturing a clip at anything other than the start of a GOP would seem to have the potential to create a problem with the first and last frames of a clip.

Bob.