I've noticed a siginificant deterioration in quality on my Panasonic mini DV camera. I'm getting widespread mosaic interference in the playback image, the noise is almost unusable and there appears to be a high frame drop out rate.
I suspect that the solution is to clean the heads using a purchased cleaner but I'm surprised that they've deteriorated so quickly and so badly. Anybody know what the right remedy would be or have any other suggestions?
Oddly enough, I spent some time over the break cataloging my DV tapes and noticed that on some tapes there was some mosaic breakage on the far right hand side of the image accompanied by audio distortion.
I have nearly twenty tapes and three of them are showing this symptom but only near the beginning of the tape (first few seconds). All three tapes are Sony Premium DVM60, all the others are TDK and Panasonic.
When I recorded new stuff (from the PC) onto the tape the resulting image and audio was fine.
Adam
I had worrying 'blockies' (ie data errors which the error-correcting algorithm can't fix) and head cleaning warnings on about the 3rd tape I used in a new Sony TRV-900. Since that one head clean I have used 30 tapes (mixture of Sony & JVC) without any recurrence of the problem, so I would tend not to worry about it! Do you record in SP or LP? I've seen recommendations that LP tapes are only played back using the machine on which they were recorded to avoid the 'blockies'; again though, I've not found this to be a problem.
Alan++
The blocky interference is quite bad and up until now I'd been using Long Play as it mentioned that the picture quality is the same. Obviously the downfall is that it's more susceptable to dropout and errors.
Even short play is particularly jerky which i assume to mean that there's lots of errors. I use cheap Panasonic tapes (about £5) so I'm planning to take your recommendation and buy a cleaner. I've used about 10 tapes and have used the camera extensively as an edit machine connected to a Mac.
Thanks guys for your suggestion. I'll respond to tell you if this does solve the problem
Monty
I've managed to record LP (even on Panasonic 83 minute tapes giving 186 minutes duration) on one DV300 and play back on another and on my DX100 with no problem. Take the warning as just that, a warning only.
But do get hold of a head cleaning cassette and follow the instructions. Don't do it often, the process actually grinds the heads down, keep it for use when you know you've got a problem. I've cleaned my DX100 once in 2.5 years (oh, all right, I suppose it must have got cleaned when Panasonic rebuilt it after a major crash), and the DV300 once in 9 months. It's not usually a big problem.
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alan@mugswellvillage.freeserve.co.uk. Delete village for a spam-free diet.
Alan - how do you get 186 mins with an 83 min tape with LP mode? - that's more than 2x but I thought LP was 1.5x for both MiniDV and Digital8 formats?
Monty - yes do, as AlanR suggests, get yourself a head cleaning tape. Jessops may sell them (£19.99-ish?) but you can get one mail order from APR, Taunton -http:/www.aprvideo.co.uk or 'phone 07000 102030 - for £14.99 +VAT/delivery. They sell JVC, Maxell & Panasonic 60 min tapes for £4.25 ea and Sony for £4.50, so minimise your delivery charge by buying some of these too! The cleaning tapes are abrasive, as AlanR says, so use for the minimum time, but I've found one 10 second clean works fine.
Alan++
Whoops, simple maths error. I got 2 hours 6 minutes, that 126 minutes, not 186. the bullshit alert should have gone off sooner. Sorry chaps.
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alan@mugswellvillage.freeserve.co.uk. Delete village for a spam-free diet.
I just bought a dry cleaner tape from Fairdeal in Aldgate for £2.50 (Panasonic brand) on special.
I tried it but was disappointed as the interference was still there on a tape I shot at Christmas. I then remembered that the recording quality would have also deteriorated and so urged myself to shoot some test footage and check on some much more dated stock and the results are crystal clear.
By the way, they have 60 min mini DV Panasonic tapes at £3.75 each when 10 is purchased. I didn't buy any because at that time I wasn't totally convinced that it was not this brand which was at fault.
Anyone recommend some hi-grade mini DV tape? I bought a Panasonic professional grade for final cut at only about £8. Do you get any increase in picture quality or is the image just more robust?
You rightly remembered that the recording is probably faulty, and no amount of head cleaning will correct that. I've had it happen to me.
Buying better (more expensive) tapes will not make ANY difference to image quality. The video is compressed and exists as numbers. If the numbers are read from the tape, the original image is reconstructed (apart from the losses due to compression) and no tape effects happen at all. BUT, better tapes may last longer (i.e. not wear out so soon) or not wear out your machine so soon, and so on. There are some differences in the tape compounds that affect tape life, mostly the lubricant (and it was that fact that caused the early problems of incompatibility between Sony and everyone else, now fixed). It's the extra durability of the Pro tapes that make them more expensive, if you're earning your living this way, then a few extra pounds for tape will save that one catastrophe when you've got a duff recording of a one-off event that could have netted you millions.
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alan@mugswellvillage.freeserve.co.uk. Delete village for a spam-free diet.
Sony sell 3 mini DV tapes, the bog standard Premium, the Excellence and the chipped Excellence. Strangely enough the cheapest tape comes in the best box; the Premium case snaps shut with a ckick to exclude dust 'n muck a lot better than the Excellence.
Sony state that the Excellence tape is "ideal for LP" and although we all know that the signal recorded and played back is no different, the slow speed of LP will show up tape surface irregularities as dropouts.
And although there's no evidence to suggest that Sony do this, I'd think that their best tape, their most accurately slit tape, their least shedding tape would end up in the Excellence housings.
tom.
One burning question which perhaps belongs under a different thread, what benefit does a chipped tape offer?
Does it keep account of the timecodes of scenes or anything and can it help when using Premiere? They seem more expensive but so much data is recorded onto the tape in a linear way that it would appear to be redundant
Most of us manage perfectly well without them. They can record the timecodes of "good" shots, tape titles, locations of stills, that sort of stuff. I've never even considered myself disadvantaged not having any of that.
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alan@mugswellvillage.freeserve.co.uk. Delete village for a spam-free diet.
Bit of a warning ...
From my own experince avoid using LP on DV cameras unless you're happy to have occasional artifacts.
I've used brand new panasonic cameras with new panasonic tapes that have beed polluted with artifact jaggies.LP is usually the culprit. They tend to start off mild and then a minute or two in get to be unwatchable.
this is definitely a subtle problem as different decks can play the corrupt tapes back better.i.e. some decks will delay the amount of artifacts and delay the time before it becomes unwatchable.
I've also found reusing old tapes in SP mode increases the likelihood of artifacts.
I've also found over the years that nearly all miniDV and DVC PRO format tapes have a few errors on the tape somewhere. These errors are scattered over the whole 60 minutes and usually so trivial that you don't notice them unless you step frame through the error.
if you ask the suppliers they always respond that you shouldn't use tapes by other companies or else the playback deck was at fault. Most people cann't argue with this because they have only one camera and the problem doesn't happen straight
away.
My conclusion is I 'm afraid this is just an inherent problem with the amount of digital data being put on a very thin tape medium. There is bound to be a tiny amount of error.
(Is there approx 25 gigs of data on a 60 minute LP tape ?? )
Just a tip, you should always try to avoid the first 10-20 seconds of ANY tape as this can have handling marks from when the tape is loaded (even though it is a machine doing the loading) also although dv is recorded as numbers there is no error recovery and so data can get lost.
Mike
Mike,
pretty good advice from my experience. I've now noticed mosaics on all the Sony tapes I have (not all were purchased at the same time/shop). The problem is always during the first minute of tape. No such problems with TDK or Panasonic.
I ran a head cleaner through once and this did improve the image slightly - the remaining broken footage I recovered using a trick learnt from this BB
Great resource, this Forum.
Adam