XL1 No Audio on Playback Emergency
 

This is most likely a camcorder issues, but as is relates to audio I will post it here.

On a recent indoor studio shoot of casting auditions using my XL1 I discovered a couple days later when I tried to capture the tape that I have no audio. It also seems that along with this problem I have a little video noise which seems to be concentrated along the left edge of the picture.

This happed one other time when I was shooting outdoors in 95deg heat, and I assumed that the problem was related to temperature. During that event (with the same camera) I also had no audio and video noise (that time much more significantly) on the left side of the frame.

I am inclined to believe there may be some issue with the way the XL1 is loading tape. The dropout is continuous during the entire 40 minutes I have recorded on the problem tape. The camera was started and stopped during the two hour casting session, but the tape was never removed.

I taped additional two hour casting sessions on the following two days (about 40 minutes of footage on a new tape each day) and those tapes are perfect.

I was wondering if other have dealt with this and if there is any solution to recover any of the audio. I have played the tape back in two decks including the camera that originally recorded the bad audio. I also went to the end of the footage and recorded music into the camera using and Ipod and that that music recorded today on the bad tape is fine.

Any help at recovery or prevention would be greatly appreciated.

If you cant't hear audio on three different playback machines, there is no audio, nothing to recover.

Prevention: I would suggest having the camera serviced. You probably have a tape/head alignment problem that tends to show up under certain conditions. Dirt on the head or an alignment guide might also be to blame. Make sure you describe the problem in detail when sending in for service.