Canon XL1 Nightmare

[Richard Brown]

Hello all,

I have a uniquely terrible problem which has arrived at my facility. 
About 50 Mini DV tapes representing 3 years of preproduction, and 3 
months of shooting, of a Canon XL1 shot feature film production.

Now, the problems...

1) Massive audio dropouts, up to a full tape at a time. The "spikes" of 
audio which are audible are on the order of milliseconds, not long 
enough to hear a single word.

2) Mosaic video dropouts, visually looking to be keyed to motion, 
either of camera or of talent. This can be merely a sprinkling of non 
regular groups of pixels or huge amounts of mosaic noise, again, keyed 
apparently to any form of motion. It defies the "dirty head" issue as 
on the same tape, there may be a section which is fine, with bad in 
front and behind it.

3) The problem increases continuously over time from the beginning of 
the shoot to the end of the shoot. The latter tapes seem wholly 
unusable, with the earliest tapes showing fewer problems, but not 
without problems.  Still, dirty heads make more sense in that the last 
tapes are essentially full time bad. The video NEVER goes out, simply 
the mosaic distortion mounts.

This is the second time I've encountered nightmarishly bad video/audio 
from the XL1, the first time being a network show which ran by in the 
middle of the night for us to check out a bad XL1 tape (they couldn't 
read it, and neither could I, but the actual XL1 which shot the tape 
played the same tape back fine.)

Some of the early footage utilizing the on-camera mic shows good video 
and audio (NOT ALL, I've seen plenty of bad on-camera mic as well), but 
I hear from the director there was an outboard mixer with a pro shotgun 
mic for many of the scenes which fall apart... Thus I wonder about 
XL1's with Hi-Z / Low-Z mismatches as well on how, in this situation, 
they misbehave.  Suggesting there was no impedance mismatch, work tapes 
in VHS were struck at the time of shooting from the XL1 outputs 
featuring good video and audio.

Also, the film was lit with HMI.

So my questions:

Anyone had these problems and fixed them? From the network issue, I 
understand XL1's can get finicky, only able to play back their own 
tapes (and vice-versa) when in odd calibration. Is there a work-around? 
"Digital tracking?" -- which is to say both XL1's and Sony PD150's are 
nothing but a mess of tiny analog trim pots under their covers.

Will audio impedance problems destroy video and audio as recorded but 
output normally through the video and audio outs on the XL1?

Will HMI ballasts and their frequencies destroy XL1 shooting?

Compounding our problem, the pro shooter with the XL1 in question just 
sent it for full maintenance, thus ending possibility of running the 
tapes through the shooting camera, UNLESS Canon allows the camera to 
stay in its state of  mis-calibration, assuming it would otherwise deny 
playback of existing tapes.

Stuck between a huge rock and an expansive, EXPENSIVE hard place... 
S.O.S.!


Richard Brown