MiniDV camcorder glitchy video and audio + camcorder clonk sound (examples)

[Arch22]

Hi everyone.

I'm in the process of getting my family MiniDV videos into a more usable and future proof format.

After buying all the needed adapters, I've run into a problem with the camcorder itself. It can play the tapes, but with glitches in the video and audio, which range from minor to major. The glitches are in a specific interval, so my guess is that a rotating part must be broken/damaged, or, hopefully just dirty.

I hope someone here can help diagnose the problem. MiniDV camcorders seem non-existent in my country, and the few on sale are almost the price of a used car. I don't want to send my tapes into a digitization service.

The recording is done with dvRescue, and when recording, the timeline shows green lines. As far as I understand, those green lines indicate an error. They happens together with the physical camera clonk.

If I were to point anything out, it's that there's no consistency in how bad the glitching is. For the video, it can vary from practically glitch free to unwatchable. The audio does seem to have constant glitching throughout, no matter what.

I've included some examples below, 1) a snippet of the recorded video + audio over Firewire, 2) a sound recording of the physical camera.

1)
https://vimeo.com/875739174

2)
https://vimeo.com/875739724

Any help or ideas are hugely appreciated.

Thank you.

[dellsam34]

What adapters did you buy?

[Bwaak]

If you cannot fix it, buy another camcorder. You can ruin your tapes in this one.

[suelaine]

I am having the exact same issue! I don't know if it is the camcorder or the old tapes or a combination of both. What I found was the first play through worked better. I thought I could capture again on a different computer with different software but found serious (especially sound) degradation after playing another time, which implies to me the old degrading tapes are the biggest issue. I have a Panasonic GS PV500 which seemed to work fine after I dug it out of where I stowed it away for years, and this is great because it works through USB (not just firewire like most of them). After capturing about 40 to 50 minutes, on two tapes so far, it quits and when I attempt to take the tape out, the tape is found to be pulling out of the cassette. I had long forgotten this but when mini dvs were first marketed, they said you could tape "over and over" on them but even back in the day I was typically using these, I found that was not true and when I tried to archive edited video back onto the tapes, you could often hear breakthrough of the previous recordings on the new recording.

[suelaine]

Update to my reply: After having two tapes perform horribly (after not playing them for many years, around the early 2000s to 2006), the years they were recorded) I had success with the next tape I tried. I think at least in my case the tapes themselves have deteriorated badly even though they were boxed up, out of light, in their cases, and not exposed to extreme conditions such as hot or cold. I think putting these deteriorated tapes in the camcorder also makes the camcorder act finicky. I have a head cleaning tape and I ran that a few times and I think it helped as both sound and video captured from the 3rd tape were okay (with just an occasional blocky scene and buzz for sound). I will proceed with caution to go through some more of my tapes. Thankfully for me, most of them were edited and recorded to DVDs and my DVDs are all still fine, so I only have one or two more mini-dvs to try to capture to my PC for editing and saving somewhere more permanent. Then I am actually going to throw these mini-dvs out.

[dellsam34]

Apologies, responded to the wrong thread ----