Dropout questions
- Thread starter claxius
- Start date
scannon
Well-known member
ovjamaica said:
Video tape is made up of fine magnetic particles bonded to a mylar (or other space-age plastic) backing. The magnetic particles hold the digital data or analog signal (HI 8, VHS, etc) info. These particles can have gaps due to poor manufacture or poor handling. They can also come lose during or after recording. When this happens part of the recorded data or info is missing on playback. In digital is often appears as random white/grey square pixels in a portion of your video monitor. In analog it appears as a white stripe across the video.
If a drop out occurs you can "usually" trim the clip to eliminate the one or few frames affected. Not always, and so buy good quality tape and keeping your camera maintained is very important.
If you are shooting HD or HDV then recording tape dropouts are very, very serious as the technology uses a recoding process known as GOP (Group of Pictures) in which the camera processes 5-15 frames of video (depending on camera and type) together. In the Sony HDV models a tape dropout cause the loss of all 15 frames or 1/2 second of video totally gonzo.
That is very serious. The use of portable hard drives for recording data is growing and will undoubtedly become almost mandatory with HD, HDV cameras for insurance. The new Panny HDV 200 has their P2 card technology to record to tape and to these hard drives. No tape particles to come lose or wear.
Firestore and others make small 40gb and 80gb recorders that connect with a firewire and capture digital video for direct recording to your computer for editing. This keeps the tape as a back-up for the disk or reverse, the hard drive disk is a back up for the tape.
These are not cheap but great insurance.
S Cannon
Last edited: