quad cam

[pdjohnson]

We spent the morning testing the cameras and making a copy of the original tape. The copy of the tape did exactly the same thing with the green/purple screen in quad cam. I put the footage in again from the camera to the Solitaire and the same thing. So, (1)feeding the original footage in from the camera to the solitaire and (2) making a copy of the original and putting it back into the solitaire, didn't work.

We recreated with all three cameras (as best we could-complete with wireless mic) and taped 5 minutes. No problems, all went in fine and no green/purple screen in quad cam.. Hmmmm sounds like a bad tape - even though it was brand new. Any other ideas?

Thanks to everyone who responded and is trying to work us through this problem. As I said before, I have the project completed, did a manual insert of the footage and all worked fine, but would have worked better with 3 views in quad cam instead of 2.

[PaulBusta]

You did all that so I'd put my money on a bad tape. There's just something, no telling what, you editor just doesn't like about that tape. Next time record about 5 min. on each tape in the camcorder it will be used in before the job to see what QC will do with it, just to be safe. Could be a good pratice to get get into before each job. That's what I do even for non QC jobs.

It would be interesting to see what a (TBC) time base corrector would do.

[CKNewman]

I'm wondering about the audio from the wireless mic somehow doing something that doesn't show up until it's in Quadcam. You originally stated that the footage worked fine if it wasn't in Quadcam so I'm not sure its a bad tape.

Was the camera situated in a spot close to a strong electromagnetic field, like a loudspeaker?

You could try a couple of experiments with just 5 minutes of footage. First, try importing and using the footage again with the volume very low. Second, make a copy of a few minutes of the original problem footage (if it's still in the scene bin from the first time you tried to use it) and in the audio mix screen bring the volume down to zero - then try to use it in Quadcam.

I wonder if Tim's NOP procedure would help?

[pdjohnson]

The camera with the wireless mic was near a speaker (Like 6 foot from the speaker) I tried running 10 minutes of it through NOP with no change.

[PaulBusta]

I had a camcorder to close to a speaker one time, about 3 ft and man it was big time "drop out city". No telling if it was from EM or sound pressure viberation but the whole tape was unusuable. Live and learn.

[BobNaughton]

If you had some spare time you might try deleting your original download, and then reloading that tape back into your solitaire, but just record in the first 30 minutes as scene 1. Then record the 2nd half of the tape as scene 2. If one scene will play ok, but the other one wont, your problem would be in that section of the tape. You could then keep halving that section 30, 15, 7.5 etc till you find the bad section. It could be the audio too loud or a corrupted frame, anything.

If both halves of 30 minutes wont play right it leaves more of a mystery. Are you sure the tape that will not play is the exact same as the two that will?

[pdjohnson]

All three tapes came from the same box and were trimmed to exact lengths. I did reload random portions of the bad tape to see if it was just part of it, but all parts of that same tape were not workable in quad cam. I even reloaded portions of all three tapes into a different project. Same problem.

[BobNaughton]

Well, you have done all the things that make sense to do. Unless the problem re-occurs all you can do is consider it a one time glitch of unknown origin. Whether the tape was defective in the process of manufacture or got corrupted by being next to the speaker or some other reason may never be known. At least you can take comfort in the fact that you were able to save the day by using your ingenuity to do a work around to the problem.

If it were just a defective tape, your making a copy of it should have corrected it. I would be more inclined to favor Craig,s position that somehow the speaker added some magnetic interference that became imbedded into the tape that making a copy of it just made a copy of the problem. Again its odd that the problem only shows up in Quadcam and not affecting the video in general.

[BobFoster]

As a test for future similar problems, you might feed the tape from the camera thru a TBC using S-video and separate audio cables to see if that corrects the problem. A short segment is all that would be needed to make the test. A full frame TBC would give a better correction than just running it thru another camera. From what I have read from this thread the video looks fine except when it used with quadcam.

[pdjohnson]

The video is fine except when going into quad cam. I have good audio and the footage is good also. Thanks for your input.