Dirty Heads?

D

DVX100Shooter

Veteran
I was filming some models at a photo shoot yesterday and after filming about 6 girls, one of them asked to see the footage of themselves. As I backed the tape up a little bit all I saw was a blue screen! I continued to back it up some more and still got the blue screen. Then I got worried and just rewound the tape a bit more and when it played, the footage had horrible digital breakup. Some of the girls had these horizontal bars going through the footage. At one point I DID see the red circle with the X in it which I knew was a dirty heads issue. I saw that flashing after the fact though. The strange thing is that it was looking messed up on my camera however I played the tape in my deck when I got home and the footage is fine!

I cleaned the heads and went on with my shoot. I was using brand new Panasonic PRO tapes and I use the same brand and type of tape for everything I shoot.
 
That sounds like a playback head clog. Eventually I would suggest that you send it in for a good wet cleaning on the heads and mechanism. But you already did what I would recommend. Let us know if there are any more occurrences.

Best regards,

Andrew Hoffman
Senior Operations Manager
Specialized Communications Corp.
20940 Twin Springs Dr.
Smithsburg, MD 21783-1510 USA
800-359-1858
Fax: 301-790-0173
andrewh@spec-comm.com
www.spec-comm.com

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Ok I have another question that may be the cause of my previous problem. I have been using several different tape brands in my DECK only! I have been doing some dubbing for a client, consolidating 7 tapes down to 3. I was using my DVX as a record deck recording to the same kind and brand of tape I shoot with, Panasonic PRO63PQ tapes.

Normally when I shoot something I usually use up the entire tape but there are a few times when that doesnt happen and I have a lot of unused tape left over. I put a tape in my deck to cue it up then put that tape back in my camera to shoot on. Later that day on my shoot, I ran into the "DIRTY HEADS" problem which I cleaned the heads and went on about my shoot.

Now do I need to put that Head cleaning tape in my deck (SONY GVD 1000) and clean those heads as well? Or possibly get a different head cleaning tape and use that in the deck? Whatever is building up on my Deck heads, I don't want to transfer that to my camera's heads.
 
If you use SONY tape in the SONY deck primarily, I would buy a dedicated SONY cleaning tape, likewise if your using Panasonic tape mostly in your SONY deck. Either way, I would get a dedicated cleaning tape for the mixed tape deck. But get the brand that is used as the majority.

Best regards,

Andrew Hoffman
Specialized Communications Corp.
1-800-359-1858
 
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