Help! Audio dropout - tape? camera? vegas?

XOG wrote on 10/19/2003, 7:24 PM
Hoping someone can help, this one's got me stumped.

1. I've got regular audio dropouts. They're exactly one frame long.

2. I captured the same tape segment, three times. Put all three on the tiimeline to compare.

3. I most instances, I get matching dropouts on all three tracks, in the same spots. But in some cases, dropout on only one or two of the three.

4. When I capture into Vegas on another computer, I still get the problem.

Capture methodology:

I captured one clip. Rewound the tape and captured a second time. For the third capture, I ejected the tape, put in another tape, pushed play, ejected the tape, then put the first tape back in and captured a third time (thinking that constant head placement on the original tape might have been the problem).

A couple of other interesting anomolyies -

1. When I tried capturing from other tapes, some exhibited the dropout problem, others didn't.

2. When I listen to the tape playing back from my camcorder, there's no audio dropout.

3. In conjunction with some (but not all) of the audio dropouts, I can see a slight 'twitching' of the video, on the Vegas caputre screen.

Gotta say, I'm a little stumped on this one. Maybe playback heads about to go?

Looking forward to being enlighted by ya'll

Cheers,

XOG

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 10/19/2003, 8:13 PM
Look at the original timecode on the tape, is it interrupted? If the dropout is consistent at the same point, then it's camera. If it's inconsistent, then there may be a problem with playback, or with something accessing a resource on your computer. Perhaps hard drive and Nic are sharing a resource for instance, and the NIC is accessing the resource during capture. You might try ENDITALL which is free at zdnet.com, before capturing.
Did you try cleaning your tape heads?
jetdv wrote on 10/20/2003, 8:24 AM
Are you capturing with the same camera that recorded the tape?
XOG wrote on 10/20/2003, 12:42 PM
Yep. Same camera. Strange. Any ideas for me?

XOG