very strange tape can't be captured

T

tvbad

Member
this is quite odd.

new sony premium tape, shot on a dvx100a.
it's the same brand and style of tape i always shoot on. never have any problems.
i shot on f5 setting, 24p (not 24pa).
it's the same way i always shoot.

usually i playback and capture my footage from a trv900 to save wear and tear on the dvx100a.

the first thing that seemed strange about this particular tape was that it played back choppy on the trv900.

but it played back fine on the 100a.

so i tried to capture it from the 100a into fcp 5.0.4 and after 3 seconds i get the following error message:

"capture encountered a problem reading the data on our source tape. this could be due to a problem with the tape. capture has been aborted and your clip has been saved."

i tried several different capture settings, thinking perhaps i'd inadvertently switched to f6 and had shot 24pa. But those settings yielded the same aborted capture message.

Then I had what I thought was a great solution. I did a firewire dub from the 100a to the trv900 and then tried to capture the new tape recorded in the trv, but got the same message. Is it a problem with the tape? Some corrupt data that is transferable?

What should I do? Any solutions?

Time is of the essence, as the lead actress leaves the country for good in 3 days and if I need to re-shoot this, I must do it now.

Thanks!
 
If a re-shoot is still possible and it isn't really compilated, I'd do it just to be sure.

Have you inspected the tape, that there are no physical glitches on it? Even if it's a brand new tape, you should check that it hasn't got any physical tape errors. Usually when I encountered these problems in my Avid editing days, it was due to bad tape and corrupted data that caused the error messages. You should check that the TRV900 doesn't eat tapes.

Have you tried to forward the tape for few seconds and then tried to digitize from another part? If it captures from there, there is a possibility that you can rewind the tape and digitize the beginning.

It seems the digital stream has some problem, so can you do a good quality analog capture, from component, or at least S-video signal? Sometimes capturing analog is the only way when time is essential and solutions to these problems are not found.

I don't know the FCP just yet, but is there some small adjustment in it, that inhibits the digital transfer? Have you tried other tapes? Is there a possibility that FCP doesn't recognize some odd frame / field settings?
 
did you try to capture the tape with ¨non controlable device instead of firewire ntsc¨
open your capture window and go to capture settings and put the first one at non controlable device and it play on the camera and capture now after.
 
macs said:
did you try to capture the tape with ¨non controlable device instead of firewire ntsc¨
open your capture window and go to capture settings and put the first one at non controlable device and it play on the camera and capture now after.
Click to expand...

that is the first thing I would try!

and then get your DVX heads cleaned. sometimes when heads start to go, they make tapes that wiill only play in that deck/camera..
 
Thanks for the responses.

no timecode issues. tried turning off device control. no apparent damage to tape. I noticed that in the three second clips that FCP would allow me to capture, there was no audio on them. The tracks would be there, but the signal was just an intermittent digital distorted twang. I know there was good audio levels when I recorded the media originally.

I tried capturing in imovie, and that kept quitting every time. Toast successfully captured it, but required conversion to get it to quicktime dv. Then I found a shareware dv capturing program off version tracker called Image DV, and was able to use that to capture the whole tape in full res quicktime. Still no audio came through on that.

Any ideas? What kind of corruption would transfer from one tape to another? I am playing the tape back from the camera it was shot in… are there any decks out there that do an amazing job decoding problematic tapes? Maybe a professional Panasonic deck?

Thanks.
 
Non-controlable Device won't work if the tape is bad. FCP's warning is not a TC break warning, it's a BAD IMAGE/AUDIO DATA ON TAPE warning. I think you have a bad tape.
 
gunleik said:
... not to DV...

Gunleik
Click to expand...

Yes, QuickTime Pro's player will capture DV tape to DV files. But it's not very reliable, you'll end up with the obligatory dropped frames.
 
BenB said:
Non-controlable Device won't work if the tape is bad. FCP's warning is not a TC break warning, it's a BAD IMAGE/AUDIO DATA ON TAPE warning. I think you have a bad tape.
Click to expand...


actually I've gotten past this exact error, by doing this before.
 
But wait. He dubbed the tape from the DVX to the TRV900. I assume that that tape plays just fine in the camera, too. That should eliminate "bad tape" issues.

Are you sure it isn't an audio issue? Like mistakenly recording in 32K rather than 48K, and FCP having problems with that?
 
I've never seen FCP not accept a capture due to audio formats being off. The only problem I've ever seen with that is audio drifting out of sync with it's video.

If it plays back fine on the DVX, capture to FCP should be possible. Just be sure all the camera's settings are correct and all of FCP's are correct.
 
it seems like a bad tape... there's some little drop out squares in the footage i was able to capture (albiet w/o audio). how does the corrupt/damaged tape manages to transfer the same corrupt/damaged signal to the freshly dubbed tape?
 
How does a damaged tape transfer the damaged data to a fresh tape? Let me ask you this, if the damaged data is on the original, how do you transfer good data that doesn't exist? The question answers itself.
 
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