What causes very short sudden loss of pic & so

[bifter]

Going over footage I shot of a violinist performing, there is a 'glitch' where there is a 1/2 second of fuzzy picture and coincident metallic white noise on the audio. :-/

I wasn't touching the camera, which was using it's transformer as power supply. A short shotgun mic was connected, and a line from a DAT machine. I was using Panasonic professional miniDV tapes.

Thankfully I was running a second camera and the DAT, so I can work round the glitch, which causes Final Cut Pro to stop capturing with a message to the effect that there was possibly a problem with the tape.

The camera is only 2 months old, with less than 150hrs of usage.

Any ideas what might have happened? I'm rather worried as I'm shooting an important project now, but I've only seen it occur once. Cheers.

 

[scharky]

Re: What causes very short sudden loss of pic &amp

Re: What causes very short sudden loss of pic &amp

You have experienced a tape drop out. Having 150hrs on a camera and having only had one drop out really isn't that bad. Unfortunatly there isn't much you can do about it, just one of the problems of haveing a tape based recording format. you might have your heads cleaned professionally, but other than that your just going to have to live with it. One way to make sure that you don't lose footage is to use a program like DV rack, or a HD based recording system to capture a backup of all your footage.

 

[bifter]

Re: What causes very short sudden loss of pic &

Re: What causes very short sudden loss of pic &

Thanks for the prompt reply scharky.

Beyond a professional head clean and the cleaning advice in these forums , how do I avoid these in the future? I have only ever used Panasonic professional tapes, and to keep the camera clean to avoid crap getting inside.

If I hadn't had a second camera going this would have screwed up a really important moment for the film.