Canon XL1-nightmare-followup-MacDV Digest #2197

[Ted Langdell]

Hi, again, Richard,

A couple of things that popped into mind after sending my first response.

IF the deck is at one of the Canon factory service centers, a call could get
them to STOP the repair, IF they've not touched it.

If it DID go to a factory service center, AND the guy's not an XL-1 owner's
club member, the repair may take longer than the scheduled 5-days for
owner's club members, so you might be in luck getting the UNrepaired camera
to work with.

If the director or producer wants to risk sending a tape to Canon, insured
to the hilt and sent overnight...(perhaps one with the easiest to re-shoot
scenes?) the factory center in NJ or SoCal might be able to figure out
what's up.  

A guy named Jerry is/was a/the lead tech at the NJ center. Used to be in
SoCal when I had to send two XL-1's in for other problems, and was very
helpful, knowledgable.

I'd also ask whether the factory folks have encountered this problem, and if
so, what the cause is, and what the after-the-fact solutions are, and how to
prevent it in the first place, if it is preventable.

Some additional thoughts:

The problems you describe below are typical of the problem at its worst.  \

The possible good news is that there IS something there. It's apparently
beyond the threshold of the digital error recovery to handle.  I'm hoping
that it's like an analog signal... easier to record than to play back if out
of alignment.

The last major problem I have had like you've describe happened at a wedding
reception.  The first tapes at the church and tracking the limo to the
reception were fine.  Changed tapes and shot the early stuff at the
reception and at one point checked and had trouble... the blocky right hand
edge of picture problem I mentioned earlier.

Changing to another tape didn't help, nor did a few tries with the Sony
cleaning tape.  Unwrapping and inserting another new tape DID solve the
problem, and I was able to go on and get the rest of the reception including
the "important" toasts, tosses, dances, etc. with no visual or audio
problems.

The "problem" tape was transferrable to the iMac for editing, but I couldn't
get rid of the edge problem.  I think I used the TRV-7 and considered myself
lucky.

I have had tapes/situations where as you say, one section is fine... then
there's a problem section, then no problems again.  One thing that may have
contributed is that I probably took the tape out and put it back in before
shooting the "bad" section. There may be a relationship.

I suspect that sometimes, the mechanical parts that control the angle of the
tape as it wraps around the head drum can be affected by something out of
kilter about a tape or tape cassette, and that affects interchangability.

I've had to tweak the height of the entrance or exit guides on a couple of
Hi-8 camcorders I've owned to get some tapes to playback.  I may have tried
it with the TRV-7, but can't remember.

You might try to find a technician who can play back one or more of the
problem tapes, and adjust the tape path on a guinea-pig camcorder or deck to
see if that makes a difference.  With a manual for the deck, an alignment
tape and scope, etc., the alignment can be put back to standard.

Try the factory route with a guinea-pig tape first, to see whether the
factory folks can learn something and get it working.  If so, I guess it's a
couple of days of 24-hour transferring to duplicate tapes via the original
camera?

Did the producer have any kind of insurance to help with recovering from
this kind of problem?  Did the shooter?

I'm hopeful that you can find a solution, either via one of the above ideas,
or through a deck or camcorder that will play back the tapes well enough to
dub.

Maybe we ought to start budgeting for a longer firewire cable and a backup
deck (DSR-11 on 12 volt batteries?) when shooting features?

Ted.


> From: "Macintosh Digital Video List" <MacDV at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
> Date: Tue, 27 May 2003 21:45:16 -0700
> To: "Macintosh Digital Video List" <MacDV at lists.themacintoshguy.com>
> Subject: MacDV Digest #2197
> 
> 
> 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.