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  1. Member
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    This is my second video camera that has lasted approximately 5 years and broke.


    I first had a Panasonic NV GS250. The image on the screen suddenly turned green. Uneconomical to repair. If I remember correctly, I was able to copy the MiniDV tapes and made DVD’s. I kept the cassettes. I still have the camera, but cannot find the charger.


    My second one was a Canon Legria HV40. At some stage, we wanted to look at some of these oldish DVDs. To my amazement and the DVDs appearing relatively well, the DVDs basically all stopped or started jumping at VOB 4 or 5.


    I took some of the old cassettes (luckily mostly not useful) and the Canon immediately snapped the cassettes (as the old car cassettes did). It did not do it with the newest cassettes.

    Shortly thereafter, my wife went overseas for a meeting, I charged the Canon, put a new MiniDV TDK cassette in. Arriving in Germany- camera is dead. She tried to charge overseas, I tried at home, no luck.
    Verdict: uneconomical to repair.


    The options that I was thinking of, were:

    1. Trying to get power to the old Panasonic and try to fast forward and rewind the cassettes
    2. Borrow a Canon or other video camera and try to do the same


    Any other thoughts?

    Any thoughts on what video camera to buy?


    Having seen my predicament with my broken cameras, I surfed the internet and got some ideas:


    (The camera will be for home and holiday use)
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  2. Member DB83's Avatar
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    You could always try to rip those dvds and re-burn them on to decent media. That may well be the issue.

    Or

    How about, firstly, get a new charger for than Panny

    http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR0.TRC0.H0.Xpanasonic+nv+g...at=0&_from=R40
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  3. Member
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    Would you then fast forward and rewind the cassettes before starting Or what else could the cause be?
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  4. Member 2Bdecided's Avatar
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    For old miniDV tapes, grab any old working DV camcorder off eBay. They're cheap. Hopefully you didn't use LP mode. If you did, it's a better bet to get your old machine working because LP tapes recorded on one machine sometimes don't play very well on another.

    Assuming you also have some HDV tapes that need transferring, you need an HDV camcorder. They're not so cheap or plentiful. You could buy it, transfer the tapes, then sell it.


    It's unfortunate that your Cannon snapped the old DV tapes. Maybe it was faulty, maybe the tapes had degraded, maybe some part of the tape has stuck, maybe the tape just got threaded incorrectly in a freak accident. As pinch rollers age or get dirty, they sometimes stick to some kinds of tape more than others. I've only seem that issue with audio tapes though, not miniDV/HDV (over the course of about 300 hours use).


    Generally, I wouldn't play old DV tapes on a "new" HDV camcorder. The picture from HDV freezes whenever there are tracking problems or drop outs, and you don't want to risk damaging the transport, heads, etc. I don't know what to make of the old story of different tape lubricants and not mixing different types of (?old?) DV tapes in the one camcorder, but from personal experience there's probably some truth in it. Hence I wouldn't risk whatever the issue is infecting a "new" HDV camcorder (which you want to keep using) by running old DV tapes through it.


    I'd certainly fast forward and re-wind the tape if there seemed to be problems.


    You can read about my experience with the Panasonic hc-x920 (IMO the best consumer camcorder at that price point) in another thread: great camcorder (much better than the HV20/HV30/HV40 you're replacing) but terminally buggy and unreliable in my unfortunate experience!

    Hope this helps.

    Cheers,
    David.
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  5. Member
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    Thanks for all the responses.

    For old miniDV tapes, grab any old working DV camcorder off eBay. They're cheap. Hopefully you didn't use LP mode.
    No, I did not use LP mode!

    If I read 2Bdecided's comments correctly, I will need 2 cameras for the job. The Panasonic is a DV recorder, so the best will be to copy the DV cassettes with either the Panasonic (will see if I can get a suitable charger) or another DV video camera.

    As the Canon is a HDV, I will need a HDV camera to try to do the job.

    For these two formats, what would be the best capture software?
    I am very familiar with Virtualdub for DV, but I am not sure about HDV. I have Pinnacle 17 for editing, but one needs the best software, I suppose, to capture HDV.

    You could always try to rip those dvds and re-burn them on to decent media. That may well be the issue.
    That is definitely an option, but I would like to get the original on a hard disc, if it is possible.

    You can read about my experience with the Panasonic hc-x920
    Will do so.
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  6. Member zoobie's Avatar
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    Re: Tapes, I leave/store them unrewound. The next use they get, I rewind to the start. This keeps them loose.
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  7. Member 2Bdecided's Avatar
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    Originally Posted by zoobie View Post
    Re: Tapes, I leave/store them unrewound. The next use they get, I rewind to the start. This keeps them loose.
    Ditto, without really thinking about it that's what I've always done.


    Originally Posted by avz10 View Post
    Thanks for all the responses.If I read 2Bdecided's comments correctly, I will need 2 cameras for the job. The Panasonic is a DV recorder, so the best will be to copy the DV cassettes with either the Panasonic (will see if I can get a suitable charger) or another DV video camera.

    As the Canon is a HDV, I will need a HDV camera to try to do the job.
    You can do them both on an HDV camcorder. If I was going to continue using it as an HDV camera, and/or I had doubts about my old tapes (different brands, quite old) there's no way I'd run my old DV tapes through an HDV camera. If I wasn't going to use it after the transfer job, and/or all my old tapes weren't that old are were exactly the same brand and type as my HDV tapes, then I'd transfer the HDV ones first and then the DV ones all on the same HDV camera.


    Many people use WinDV for DV and HDVsplit for HDV (I do) - but they both have their idiosyncrasies, and some people seem to struggle to get HDVsplit working. Anything that works and makes a straight digital copy is fine. Capturing programs do not (MUST NOT) do anything clever. It's just a data transfer task, where the idea is to change nothing and lose nothing. DV to DV-AVI (.avi), HDV to MPEG-2 transport stream (.m2t or .m2ts), in both cases without any re-encoding.

    Check there are 0 dropped frames at the end of capturing. Both WinDV and HDVsplit report dropped frames - WinDV keeping total count, HDVsplit listing them by each file created (at the end of the tape, if there are too many files to see on screen at once, scroll back through the list to check not have errors reported).

    Many capturing programs get a bit confused by short (or long) bits of blank tape. If you recorded scene-to-scene with no gaps at all and consistent timecode (the picture never goes, the counter keeps counting from 0:00.00 to 1:02.25 throughout the tape) then you'll be fine. If not, check nothing goes wrong at the gaps in the resulting capture. You may get dropped frames reported at the blank bit of tape - you may or may not be missing something in the capture. Depends on the both the capture software and the camcorder how well this goes!

    Beware of losing DV audio. With certain audio types, it's easy to get a silent capture or a capture that goes silent at a scene change. Play the capture back to check it works. In Windows7 at least, Windows Media Player is fine for playing back DV and HDV. It wasn't in Windows XP. It will choke on any errors, whereas most players will play through them.

    This program will analyse your DV captures for errors:
    http://www.avpreserve.com/dvanalyzer/
    Useful, if you are paranoid. The occasional isolated error may be invisible. It is easily possible to capture with zero errors. Tapes which don't track properly, and have visible drop outs, will have hundreds of errors.

    You may want to auto-split the captures into scenes. winDV and HDVsplit can be set to do this as you are capturing. scenalyzer (not scenalyzer live) can take a full tape DV-AVI capture and split it into files per scene afterwards. HDVsplit can do the same for HDV. If there are tape errors / drop-outs, this auto splitting can go mad and creates false splits (sometimes splitting one scene into hundreds of files), so be careful.

    Both DV and HDV captures are about 11GB per 1 hour tape. (13GB for DV type 2 which is slightly more compatible, and stores the audio twice in the file). Anything smaller, and you're not going it properly (or the tape wasn't full ).


    I am not trying to scare you. This is a generally straightforward process. I'm just listing everything I can think of that can go wrong to avoid nasty surprises. I'm sure you're going to do one tape, and check the result is fine, before doing the rest.

    Apart from manual splitting or very simple editing/concatenation (which I rarely if ever need to do) I don't really have a use for VirtualDUB in this process.


    Hope this helps.

    Cheers,
    David.
    Last edited by 2Bdecided; 7th Jul 2014 at 05:24.
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