Lost audio using GL2?
 

Man, it's one thing or another with my GL2's all of a sudden. This camera is relatively new... about 60 hours on it. Cleaned the tape head before the shoot, just a coincidence. When viewing the tape back, two different tapes, random clips are missing audio. Anyone else experience this problem? One was of a best man toast. Fortunately, Uncle Charlie was also filming and was able to get audio from him... one of the rare instances the novice video person is a huge help.

I've seen similar issue on on a couple occasions over he past years, but only with certain specific tapes - my instances were probably a tape cassette that was out of spec.

Try playback on a diffrent machine, see if the audio comes back.

Is this issue when captured via firewire? Sometimes you can obtain usable playback from the analog outputs thanks to error correcting that is not applied to the digital output stream.

Well, when I was filming that toast I noticed I didn't have any soundbars bouncing back and forth. They weren't even there! That tells me the camera wasn't picking up audio at all. Can a tape flaw cause that?

Oh, just to clarify, the tape itself is missing the audio. I tried three different playback devices (three different cameras, different brands) with no luck. The only think I did differently on this particular shoot, in conjunction with the tape head cleaning, is FFWd and RRWd the blank tapes completely before use... as somebody suggested to me to avoid video loss (which happened on the shoot before this one... 200 weddings, and two big problems back to back! Not to mention I was stuck with two GL2's that would shut down on their own whenever they wanted. It only took about 8 trips back to the FSC before Canon replaced them because they couldn't fix the problem!).

What mics were you using?
Were you using any audio adapters like a Beachtek?

There was nothing attached to the camera other than the VL3 Canon video light. The audio source was the camera itself. All settings appeared normal during the shoot when I noticed it.