miniDV defects, looking for advice

[shun]

My camcorder records on minDV tapes. For a while it has produced videos that contain artifacts such as beeps in the audio and occasionally horizontal bars in the video. One editing problem is that when opening the avi file in VirtualDub, it sometimes fails and report "audio samples xxxxxxxx-yyyyyyyy could not be read in the source. The file may be corrupted". Telling VirtualDub to conceal the error does not always work.

Has anyone had similar experiences with such symptoms? I'm not sure if this is a problem with my tapes of my camera. I might give up on the equipment and move on to some HD camcorder format like HDV or AVCHD. Can VirtualDub work with either format? I'm concerned that HDV still uses miniDV tapes.

[JimboS]

Sounds like your heads are dirty...
Run a tape head cleaner through your cam..
Follow the instructions...

[shun]

Good idea, I'll try to get a cleaner, thanks.

[shun]

Has anyone had experience with a tape cleaner? Read some bad things about them.

[dun4cheap]

Before you try a head cleaner, you can take a new tape and put it in the camcorder and fastforward the tape to the end to see if that does the trick. It has worked in the past for me, but so has the tape cleaner.

[thecoalman]

I use mine, the deal is to not overuse it. Apprently its abrasive and will ruin the head if used excessively. Not sure what excessive is but I use mine about every ten hours. I shot some footage once and the entire hour was like yours, live and learn. Better to ruin head than not have any video at all IMO.