Systemic Problems with Audio Playback/Audio Capture on Multiple Camcorders

[mcollins]

I had a friends wedding recently videotaped on 2 digital camcorders. Upon receipt of the tapes, I found that two of them (filmed from one camcorder) had no video capture problems, but the audio was corrupt: when I played it back on my digital camcorder, the audio was going in and out. I tried capturing it, and the same audio problems existed. i even tried going to my local library to use their multimedia machine, and capture it through their DV recorder, and upon playback, the corruption continued.

Keep reading, it gets weirder...

So I assumed that either a) bad camcorder or bad tape. A few months later, I attended another friend's wedding, and she sent me the tapes from that wedding (since I volunteered to edit their video). AGAIN, the problems occurred, however, this was a completely different camcorder and completely different tape.

Finally, I tried a third camcorder over the weekend to play back the corrupt tapes. Their was a tape already in their of their child at a birthday party. It played back fine, but then I skipped forward to the next filming session, and the corruption was happening again. In fact, when I went back to the child's birthday party, it was now corrupt!

So, three different camcorders (I can provide specs, buy my spidey sense thinks it is not the camcorders, which are all different, rather new, and in perfect condition). Is it the tapes? They are Maxell, Panasonic and TDK, again, 3 different tapes.

Question: is there any way to recover the audio?

Question: how do I trust digital camcorders if this is a problem on 3 different ones with all different type sof media tapes?

Question: maybe it is just me, every time I touch a camcorder, the tape gets corrupt. I could be the King Midas of Digital media, (the bad part of the story, not the good part).

[SingSing]

1. Did you received the tapes and play them on your OWN camcorder ?

2. Did the video have problem in the computer or on TV playback ?

[mcollins]

1) For the first instance, I received the tapes and tried to capture/playback on my own, as well as the source camera. For the 2nd instance, I received the tapes (from a different camera than instance #1) and tried playing back on my own as well as a digital tape playback device at a library. For instance #3, I watched the tape on the source camera (which it was fine), ejected the tape to play a possibly corrupted tape, reinserted the original tape and it was bad.

Note that in all cases, the tapes were different. These are 3 completely separate times, spaced out over the span of a year.

2) The problems usually occurred with the camera playback, although I noticed the same thing when I tried to capture on my PC. I never tired to playback through TV.

Thanks for helping with this. Right now, I am trying to recover 2 weddings and a child's youth with the 3 instances above.