Continual Dropouts?

[aivar]

Hello, what a great forum, this is my first post.

I received a refurbished HV30 last night (from Tiger Direct here in the U.S.A.). It looks in mint condition. I put in a new Sony premium DV tape and shot over 3 minutes of test footage in my kitchen, it was absolutely gorgeous! Today I thought I'd try it under daylight conditions in a local park. My first shot, I got a warning about needing to clean the heads. I kept shooting and it went away but came back once shortly after. I shot about 4.5 minutes altogether. Came back to the office hours later and read all about head cleaning (and dropouts) on your forum. It sounded like I should just try a head cleaning. However when I played back today's outdoor footage it was nothing but continual dropouts. I would see a few frames of video then a freeze for almost a second, quite regularly, over and over, continually throughout the 4.5 minutes. I tried another shot of 24 seconds here in the office, same problem. With the next shot, everything is fine again.

(In the 24 second shot once upon playback the time code went 00:02->03:05->04:23->07:02->08:20->10:08->13:08->14:26->16:02->17:08->18:26->20:26->22:20->24:08. Other times these frame numbers can be slightly different. This is all at 24p.)

I understand the issue of dropouts and how long GOP compression makes them much worse than DV. However in all the threads I didn't read anything about experiencing a continuous dropout mode like I'm seeing, so I decided to start a thread.

I'm reluctant to try taping over the tape because if I sent it back under warranty I think it'd be nice to have proof of it misbehaving.

[Janke]

You probably have a "clogged head", not a normal dropout.

Buy a cleaning tape, use it for 10-20 seconds, no more, try recording again. If that doesn't help, send the camera back, indeed with your test tape.

I once had a one-head clog, getting horizontal stripes on a DV (not HDV) scene, Fuji tape, but that cleared itself without cleaning - a rewind was enough. (FWIW, I use Sony tapes, have ony had one short dropout on them, in 30 or so tapes..)

[aivar]

That sounds like a reasonable explanation. It's interesting that the few frames that it was able to record every so often were fine, with no noise or distortion.

Actually the problem did go away by itself, I should have made that more clear.

It's not a very auspicious beginning for me to get 5 minutes of good video then 5 minutes that are essentially just a sequence of still frames. However it is refurbished so it's probably not like it failed after the first 5 minutes. Anyway there are reports here of even new cameras getting shipped with dirty heads.

At least I got some indication something was wrong with the heads need cleaning message. However it only showed up for a couple of the shots, it would have been better if it kept displaying in this situation, if the camera could detect it.

Thanks for your reply! I'll clean the heads and see what happens in the next 90 (minus 3) days.

[iThinkergoiMac]

Considering the heads were so dirty the camera told you they needed to be cleaned I'm not at all surprised you got continual dropouts.