HDV Tapes XL H1 and Sony HVRM10u
 

I am having trouble playing back tapes on my deck.

JVC Pro HDV tapes - seem to play and record perfectly on the camera, but drop a ton of frames on the deck.

Sony HDV tapes - work fine on both.

Why?

Anyone else having this problem?

David, what frame rate were you shooting on the XL H1? 60i, 30F or 24F?

60i
 

I am only shooting 60i - Sony deck won't read anything else. I thought It may have been a problem with the first JVC tape as I had accidentally started in 24f looked through the view finder and said,"Oops" Changed to 60i then recorded color bars and started shooting again.

When I returned from the shoot could only play on camera not the deck. So, this morning I did a test, new JVC tape - all 60i - recorded 60 secs of color bars and had the same problems.

To check the camera - I loaded a new Sony HDV tape - same process - 60 secs of bars - played back fine.

Unfortunately, I have 20 JVC tapes - well 18 now that I won't likely use. And of course I'm traveling to a shoot tomorrow. Hopefully be able to find some Sony HDV while on the road - or I am stuck to 3 hours of tape. :)

Wondering if others are having the same problem.

Dave

Sony HDV tapes play back fine, but JVC Pro HD tapes do not, on the Sony M10 deck? If they're playing back fine from the H1, I'd say that the camera is your best playback option. I don't agree with the popular viewpoint that playing back tapes from the camera is a bad practice. It has a VCR mode, so go ahead and use it. Please let us know how it goes,

This sounds like a slight optimization issue between the tape manufacturers and the deck alignments. On my old Betacam stuff we would have this problem if we used Sony alignment tapes and then used Fuji stock. If we made a fuji alignment tape (one our tech made) then both stocks worked. There could be a very slight tension differences between the tapes and this shows up as errors on one deck but not the other. What is true is the deck the tape is recorded on plays back on itself. Since Canon and Sony both expect you to record 1080i then maybe they have a slightly different spec than JVC which concentrates on 720p HDV. This is why I miss the old tracking knob since most of these kinds of errors would be adjusted out with the old technology. You should probably check your Canon with some other tapes and decks to see if it is slightly out of alignment. Check both DV and HDV recordings.

If you call Canon tech, they will say it is a head alignment issue and ask you to send back the camera. We have 2 H1's and one will play back fine in the m10u and the other won't. If you take the tape that doesn't play and do a ffwd scan, I bet it will appear!

When I called about the problem, thay asked if it appears when ffwd'ing then they read right off their script and admitted they had a service bulletin on the problem. I now have 1 XLH1 and am waiting for the other to return to see if it works on the m10u.

I was using Panasonic tapes

-Bill