A Cautionary Tale To All Videographers
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Here’s a little story, and an important life lesson, for anyone that uses a video camera to capture memories. Please learn from my mistake so you don’t have to go through what I did.
When I’m doing a job or favour for someone, I tend to take it pretty seriously. So when two friends of mine were getting married, and they asked me to videotape it with my Canon GL2, I went about the business of getting it ready and making sure it was working properly. I dropped $600 on a fluid head video tripod and busted out some brand new miniDV tapes. The night before the wedding at the rehearsal I tested my setup with an old miniDV tape to make sure everything was solid. It was. The next day I got set up for the wedding, opened up a brand new Maxell miniDV tape, and started shooting the event. I put the camera in LP mode to get 90 minutes in case the ceremony ran over 60 minutes. After the ceremony (which was about 45 minutes) I continued by shooting the reception line, some shots outside the church, then some video of the wedding photos at a local park. I switched tapes for the reception and captured another 45 minutes or so.
The next weekend I sat down to edit it - I was eager because I had some ideas I wanted to try with the video. It had been a while since I had a “serious” video project, so I was eager to use some of the new techniques and tools I now had at my disposal. Philip sent me over the Digital Juice Wedding Editors Toolkit, and once I finally grasped how it worked I was very excited about using it.
Figure 1: A screenshot from the video
Once the video was transferred from my camera, I opened it up and started watching to see how it turned out - and my heart fell out of my chest and rolled around on the floor twitching once I saw what was on the tape. Here’s what over 75% of the video from the first tape looks like. You don’t have to look all that closely at the screenshot above to see the problem - blocks of the picture are missing, or moved to the left or right. It comes and goes every few seconds, but there are large portions of the video where the distortion happens in constant waves, making it almost unwatchable. I had a full 90 minutes of video like this. The latter 45 minutes was stuff I’d edit the hell out of anyway, but the ceremony in the first 45 minutes would be almost unedited.
My brain was churning. What was the problem? Media or source? Is my $3000 camera defective at playback, or was the tape bad? The FireWire cable? The FireWire port? Either way I’d be upset, but cameras can be replaced - wedding video footage cannot. I looked at the footage captured from the second tape, and it seemed to be fine. That didn’t bode well. Sure enough, when I borrowed another miniDV camera and did a test capture from the first tape, the results were the same. I tried changing settings, the FireWire cable I was using, even the computer itself in case the FireWire port on the laptop was bad. Everything led me back to the same result: the brand new tape I used to capture the video on was defective.
I was stunned - it never occurred to me that a miniDV tape would be defective in that way. Media can be bad - I’ve had blank CDs and DVDs that would refuse to burn, but a miniDV tape? The answer, and the lesson I learned, is obvious: miniDV tapes can be defective, just like any other blank media, and if you want to be sure what you’re capturing is coming out properly, you need to test the media. Hard to do with CDs and DVDs, but easy enough to to with miniDV tapes. The next time I shoot an event, you can be sure I’m going to take some test shots with the tape, rewind it, and watch for problems.
The couple in question was very gracious about the problem because they knew it wasn’t my fault, but I still feel like I failed them - all this marvelous technology, and the whole thing was undone by a $2 miniDV tape. Test your tapes before using them, and avoid seeing yourself in the same situation.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys mobile devices, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Alberta, Canada.
[tags]jason dunn,digital media thoughts,canon gl2,faulty media,minidv tape[/tags]
3 Comments
Anthony
May 26th, 2008
at 3:28pm
I ran into a similar problem but it seemed to be due to switching from Maxell to Fujifilm, both being ME. I have a Canon Optura 40 and had been using Maxell DVM60SE with good results for a couple years then switched to Fujifilm DVM60 because it was cheaper. After copying down to my PC, I noticed the same problems you reported. Interestingly though, playing the tape in SLOW would eliminate the problem and I could copy down to my PC in SLOW with no problems. However, now I’ve got an AVI file which runs in SLOW with no apparent audio. Is there any way to speed it up back to normal? By the way, I guess one should stick to one tape type.
TK_M
May 29th, 2008
at 2:22pm
Looks a bit like tape slap noise, but I didn’t think miniDV suffered from this?
Could be shedded oxide? It’s not well known, but with DV you should always stick to the one brand of tape, since switch from one that uses a dry lubricant , to one that uses a wet lubricant can cause these sorts of problems (or vice versa of course).
It probably won’t make much difference, but in desperation it might be worth a shot - Have you tried optical image stabilisation software? Usually used to remove camera shake, but if it’s averaging frames, it might make a difference if the distortion doesn’t cover too many consecutative frames. If nothing else, playing with OIS might be a learning experience for something else.
I hope you manage to get it sorted one way or another, disasters happen to us all when filming from time to time, but this one must really hurt - Good luck.
Suzanne
October 5th, 2008
at 10:31pm
I have a similar story and to this day cannot figure out what happened.
I bought a new Panasonic PV GS500. It came with 3 JVC mini DV tapes and I purchased 4 more Sony mini DV tapes. I used one JVC tape for the rehearsal, and a second JVC tape for the bride as she was getting ready. I used the camera for both video and stills, switching back and forth. Then at the church, I taped the arrival of the limo, the walk down the aisle, etc. until the tape was full. I switched to a new tape and did the rest of the wedding and the reception. When I transferred everything to the computer for editing, the 2nd JVC tape was blank! (this was the brides house, the arrival at church, walk down the aisle)
I have ruled out every stupid mistake I could have made as follows:
I didnt lose a tape, because I have all 7 accounted for, 3 JVC’s and 4 Sony’s.
I didn’t accidentally use a tape twice and tape over it because I would have had to rewind it first, and I know I didn’t do that.
I didn’t forget to press the record button, because I was starting and stopping the recording many times on that tape.
I later tested this blank tape for about 15 seconds and it worked fine!
What in the world happened to my full tape? Why was it blank? Everything worked normally as I was taping. The very first JVC tape I used at the rehearsal was fine. All the tapes used after that one were fine as well.
I cannot figure this one out. Any ideas? It made me crazy.