audio dropouts while playing?

[harmsway1976]

a friend of mine sent me a bunch of concert tapes on minidv and i borrowed a panasonic camera to record them onto dvd. the problem is in numerous places on different tapes the audio will cut out for a second. i'm not sure if it's his tapes or the camera i'm using. are these dv cams really sensitive while playing that the audio can screw up? i'm trasferring through ilink cable if it means anything. the picture doesn't distort or change at all and the camera i'm using is fairly new, so any ideas on what could be going on?

[guns1inger]

Could be dirty heads - the tapes are magnetic and not that different to vhs in that respect.

Could also be a connection issue at either the camera or card end of the ilink cable.

Or it could be an issue with the original recording - have you tried these on another camera ? Does the audio drop out during playback to your TV ?

[harmsway1976]

don't have another camera to try it on. i had to borrow that one to transfer what i was sent. about how many tapes can be played/recorded through a camera before it should be cleaned?

[guns1inger]

Tape cleaner vendors would say every time - but generally it is around 9 hours of playback. You didn't answer the other question - do you get the drop out just playing back through the TV ?

[harmsway1976]

it's in the vidoes i have saved also. here's the whole deal. i got 16 minidv tapes from a friend of mine. about half are full, others only have 20-30 minutes of stuff on them. i found somoene reliable who had a camera i could use, but i could only get it for 2 days, so i had to record all this stuff onto dvd at night after work in a hurry to get the camera back. so i didn't have much time to check and see if anything else could be wrong. the camera is not very old and is in perfect shape. could a dirty head in teh camera make the audio dropout without affecting teh video?