When people say vertical jitter, what do they mean?

[justinluck]

As some of you may have read, I have vertical jumping, rolling, jitter, vibrations on many of my old tapes. But the problem is I don't know if I'm using the correct words to describe my problem. I am wondering if my problem is common or if I have a severe case that is uncorrectable. So I'll try my best to describe what I am seeing with these tapes. And maybe you guys can tell me if you've seen this type of problem as well.

When I say vertical jumping, I mean the entire screen jumps up and down. When it jumps up, a black bar is visible on the bottom of the screen, and underneath the black bar is a top portion of the picture. So it's as if the picture is looping back around from the top to the bottom.

This vertical jumping seems to get worse whenever the person holding the camera starts video taping. So the vertical jumping will go away, but then if it switches scenes (person stopped recording, but then starts to record 5 mins later, the jumping comes back).

Along with the vertical jumping, I notice a lot of vertical vibrating where the entire screen jumps up and down very minutely, but at a very rapid pace. I suppose this is a less severe case of the vertical jumping?

So is this definitely a tracking problem? Why does the jumping usually only occur at the beginning of a new scene? Sometimes it only lasts a few seconds, but other times the jumping continues for the entire duration of the scene.

Any ideas? Thanks!

[lordsmurf]

That's not jitter. That's a tracking error.

[justinluck]

So what is jitter?