my HV20 keeps skipping forward in time

C

c.g._eads

Veteran
just went out for a test shoot. came back and reviewed the tape. For the first 15 minutes the footage will randomly freeze for a second, and then jump forward a good second or two in time. At first I thought it was dropping out, but dropouts are what? One frame? This happened for a full second or two at a time. And it was happening very frequently, sometimes only five seconds after the previous "dropout".

Once I got into the tape, it didn't happen nearly as frequently. But it still happened way too much.

Is this the tape that I'm using (I bought some sony mini-dvs from Best Buy) or something else that other HV20 users are experiencing?

Thanks,
Chris
 
When you say reviewed is it after you capture or did you use your camcorder to watch it.
 
That's serious HDV dropout you are seeing.

A dropout in HDV kills a full half second. And normally when your head clogs, you get multiple dropouts. In DV you see this as a series of glitches, but with HDV they all combine into one long huge dropout.

Your camera's heads are dirty, time to use a cleaning tape.

- Mikko
 
c.g._eads said:
but dropouts are what? One frame? This happened for a full second or two at a time.
Click to expand...
Welcome to HDV dropouts.

A dropout on DV would be, yes, maybe one frame. But with HDV you have to keep in mind that it doesn't deal with just one frame, it deals with an entire group of 15 frames. A dropout on the tape means that an entire group gets corrupted, and on Sony/Canon HDV that means that the entire group of frames just disappears. So one tiny dropout (that, on DV, might have caused a few flecks of corruption scattered across a single frame) causes HDV to abort a half-second of footage.
 
c.g. - sounds like your camera is new. Some of us (myself included) were lucky enough to get new cameras with dirty heads from Canon. How special is that? Good news is, some of the gunk falls away on it's own and you'll get fewer drop outs over time. However, you should have a head cleaning tape handy (I use the Panasonic "dry type"). Run a couple more tapes through the camera and if it is still dropping out, run the head cleaning tape for 10 seconds at a time, as needed. That should do the trick.
 
New decks can sometimes appear to have "dirty heads" beacuse the newer parts in the tape mechanism are essentially sharper and therefore physcially wear more of the tape surface onto the heads.
A few passes with a canign tape and a few tape runs in and the deck/camera will be "worn in" and will run much smoother.

- Mikko
 
Barry_Green said:
Welcome to HDV dropouts.

A dropout on DV would be, yes, maybe one frame. But with HDV you have to keep in mind that it doesn't deal with just one frame, it deals with an entire group of 15 frames. A dropout on the tape means that an entire group gets corrupted, and on Sony/Canon HDV that means that the entire group of frames just disappears. So one tiny dropout (that, on DV, might have caused a few flecks of corruption scattered across a single frame) causes HDV to abort a half-second of footage.
Click to expand...

Wow, and here I thought we were moving forward. Technology takes a huge step forward, then presents us with a huge step back! Thanks a lot technology. Nice to know you refuse to solve all our problems.
 
That's exactly what started happening to my HV 20 after 1 day usage. Skipping forward here and there. Now weeks later I get the message "must eject tape". I tried cleaning tape, but to no avail, keeps beeping at me sometimes by just putting the tape in. I've exhausted all options, I realize that the unit must be faulty.
 
lordifilms said:
That's exactly what started happening to my HV 20 after 1 day usage. Skipping forward here and there. Now weeks later I get the message "must eject tape". I tried cleaning tape, but to no avail, keeps beeping at me sometimes by just putting the tape in. I've exhausted all options, I realize that the unit must be faulty.
Click to expand...

Canon had this problem 3-4 years ago with elura 40. It was a major problem and created lots of negative publicity and angry customers. They fixed this problem with new elura models such as 70, 80, 85, 90. I think "don't mix tape brands" warning came out with this problem. I have an elura 90 and didn't have a single problem with it (I used only TDK tapes). I now also have an hv20 and working fine so far (still using TDK tapes). I hope "remove cassette error" is not back with the HV20.

Here is what I am talking about

http://www.camcorderinfo.com/bbs/showthread.php?t=19001&page=1&pp=15

102,824 views for that thread.
 
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