Playing tape from one camera in another

cheroxy wrote on 3/21/2004, 8:19 PM
I did a three camera recording of a local play. One on my sony trv22, another on a JVC and finally one on a canon GL1. I brought all three tapes (Sony MiniDV) home to my system and imported them into vegas using my sony trv22. Obviously, the tape recorded on my own camera fine. The JVC worked great but had a purple haze to it. (don't know if that always does that or not.) The tape from the canon was skipping audio and lots of bad noise like artifacts on the import. I got the canon from the owner and it imported perfectly.

Therefore, it doesn't matter since I got all the video in fine, except for the color on the jvc. I will try to import that tomorrow on their own camera to see if that fixes the color issue.

Does anybody have any experience with anything like this. I know its weird, but I'm very nuerotic and questions like this play over and over again in my mind at night like a bad loop. Any insights would be appreciated.
thanks,
Carson

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 3/21/2004, 9:25 PM
I have heard that there are sometimes problems with interchangeability between different brands of camcorders, but I have not experienced it myself.

Were any of these tapes recorded in the LP mode rather than the higher-quality SP? Apparently this almost always causes problems when you attempt to play back on different equipment.
cyanide149 wrote on 3/22/2004, 3:41 AM
I have a little JVC cam- sounds like you didn't white balance properly.
PeterWright wrote on 3/22/2004, 4:40 AM
Just to reinforce what John said, I'm currently capturing about 12 hours of footage recorded by a client in LP mode on I don't know which camera - yet - and when I tried capturing from my Sony D1000 MiniDV deck, there were audio dropouts every few seconds. As I don't know whether I'll be able to trace the original camera, I tried capturing from my "back up" camera - a 1CCD Panasonic DS28, and the audio dropouts, whilst not totally absent, are very rare.

The irony is that I bought the Sony Deck because i was getting audio and video glitches when playing back from the same camera - life has a habit of turning around on you. (My 3CCD MiniDV camera is pre-firewire) I think my current captures may be suffiicient for this project, but if not, I will also have to try and trace the original camera (it was hired or borrowed ...)
johnmeyer wrote on 3/22/2004, 9:01 AM
It just occurred to me that you might be able to change the audio problem by using Scenalyzer to capture. It has several options to change how the audio and video are synced. This might have some effect on the problem. Of course, if the camera just plain isn't reading the data correctly, then this won't help. If you have Scenalyzer, and you can't get the original camera to do the capture, it would obviously be worth a try.
JackW wrote on 3/22/2004, 11:06 AM
According to the technician who maintains our equipment, one of the most common causes of what you describe is recording/playback head misalignment. The tape plays back correctly from the camera in which it was recorded because the misalignment matches -- i.e., the heads line up correctly with what they have recorded. But if the tape is played on a properly aligned camera or deck the heads no longer line up and you experience drop out or, worse case, nothing at all.

We had a client who taped an event and then took the camera in for cleaning and overhaul. The heads were realigned while it was in the shop. The tape from the event would not play back in his camera after it came back from the shop, and none of our equipment would play it either.
cheroxy wrote on 3/22/2004, 3:09 PM
that sounds reasonable. The GL is a few years old and has been banged around.
thanks everybody for you info.
Carson