XHA1 capture dropouts...
 

Hey there. I recently did a multi camera shoot with two XHA1's involved, one mine, and one belonging to the second shooter.

I brought normal Sony Premiums (blue) for tape stock and he was surprised. He said when he's shooting HDV he always uses the special HDV tapes. I have always used the blue Sony Premiums, every tape I've run through my camera has been a Sony Premium and I've never had a single dropout. (we're talking at least 20-30 tapes here).

After the shoot, I collected his tapes and used my XHA1 to capture them, and sure enough on HIS tapes, there were dropouts. The tapes I shot with my XHA1 had no problems.

So I have a couple questions based on this. For people who were early adopters of the XHA1 (he had had his camera about 18 months longer than me) have you had problems with regular DV tapes when shooting HDV? Was there some kind of firmware or hardware upgrade in newer versions of the camera that fixed this? Or...was his camera just dirty or something. He's been using those expensive Canon HDV tapes, do they use went lubricant or powdered?

Am I just lucky that I haven't had any kind of dropouts with regular tapes?

Thanks!

JR

I've had my XH A1 for 9 months. I had dropout problems and have switched to the HDV tapes.
If it was a non-paying job and non-crtical I would probably use the cheaper tapes.
There are other threads about this in the forum.
I don't think it's the age. I think it's the luck of the draw.
Some cameras do and some don't. That's my theory anyway.

Knock on wood. I haven't noticed any dropouts using the standard Sony tapes: orange and then blue. Been using the XH A1 for about 2 years now.

My old Canon XI's tape mechanism gave up after about 3 years. But the ZR consumer cam I gave my girlfriend 6 years ago won't die. And she buys the cheapest tapes she can find from Karachi to Guadalajara, never ran a tape cleaner through it either. It lives in her purse along with all the lint, keys, cellphones, loose change etc.

I've heard through Canon sanctioned people that the tape mechanisms in the XH series are the same as the ones used for professional decks. But that's neither here nor there.

Only they don't make decks, professional OR consumer :)

Seriously though... I can't remotely imagine such a thing because the tape transports in Canon gear are nowhere near being responsive as they would in dedicated decks and from my experience 8 times out of 10 what seems to be a HDV dropout during capture simply seems as though for whatever reason, the data on the tape isn't being read correctly and all I have to do is end capture, go back 10 secs or so before the "pseudo dropout" occurred & recapture from that point on, adding a "B" (for reference) for instance, to the clip name & then do a match frame of those clips in the edit.

Yeah definitely take that with a grain of salt.

I'm using panasonic amq63's exclusively in a new a1. Out of the 25 tapes I've shot I've had dropouts on 14. I'm not happy but I was in the middle of a 15 day shoot and didn't have time to work the problem.
I've used the same type panasonic tapes for a few years with a GL2 with few dropouts.
As much as I dislike Sony, it's enough to make me want to do a test with a few tapes.

I use normal TDK tapes in two XHA1's, I've not encountered any drop outs when using a new tape. I've captured about 50 tapes so far and bought the cameras second hand. For some personal video I used old tapes however that was riddled with drop outs. I'm not going to pay the high prices for HDV tapes if cheap tapes give me no trouble. I'd rather buy a HDD solution before I pay for HDV tape. HDV was developed to function on the miniDV format, in my experience HDV is over priced and a market pitch.

Thanks for the various responses. I know there are threads in the tape section about this very debate, but I was curious about early versions of the XHA1 having trouble with normal DV tapes, and this is the greatest concentration of XHA1 owners I know of :)

JR