newbie w/huge problem... why does my footage look like this....

[va_dre]

Hello - I am a newbie from Northern Virginia. I currently have a Canon XH A1. As of now most of the footage i shot/edit is with local artist. Over the past two months my footage has been coming out looking horrible at times, only in small increments.

I was filming a local artist in a club with not the best lighting and every time the strobe light went off i get these specs that registered when capturing footage.

The only error I could think it could be from re-using a tape (only because last minute job and stores were closed last night)

Or I should have not rewound my head cleaner and re-used it.

Can you all please help shed some light.

Thanks in advance.

www.abb-video.com/help.mov


dre

 

[unTripp]

dre... I'm no expert, but the first problem looks like a tape problem, but an odd one. It doesn't look like hdv artifacts that I've seen before, but I'm sure that I haven't seen them all.

The strobe flash problem seems like a different problem. It looks like the HDV compression logic is having problem dealing with the instantaneous luminance change caused by the strobe. In one instance I looked at, the first frame after a strobe has a large area of blocks, but the next frame has a smaller area of blocks. Not convinced that's a tape problem, but I've been wrong before.

You might want to get a high quality new tape and tape something similar to what you've done in this project that has a strobe present and see if you can recreate the problem. If it does happen again, I'd discount the tape as being the culprit. You might want to reset all the setting to factory default and try again. If that doesn't fix it, it might need factory repair.

There are many components inside your A1 required to get the HDV picture. You should probably go through a process of elimination to figure out what the problem isn't.

 

[Barry_Green]

I haven't seen that either, but I'd say unTripp's probably right. The first issue looks like a bad tape clog, but the rest of it seems tied to the strobing.

 

[91ststudios]

I've had this happen on a Panasonic DVC-30.
We kept reusing tapes and then it started artificating everytime you played the tape or shot something. We got a head cleaner tape for it and that seemed to fix it. But, this also depends on what tape you are using.

On my XHA1, I use Sony Premium HD Tapes and have never ever had a problem. But, like I said we used cheap tapes on that panasonic and if you write them more than once they mess things up really quickly. Try a head cleaner and see if that fixes it. It fixed ours but since it hasn't happened on my XHA1, I can guarantee that is the problem.

 

[va_dre]

thanks for your replies.. i want to safely assume that its a tape problem...

please not that this was not shot in HD... I went to BB today and got a new head cleaner and ran it.. i am going to do some test shots today.. and happy new year to all.... and thanks again..