HELP - - - Is my tape ruined?
 

One of my videographers shot two gigs on miniDV. When I go to playback there are digital artifacts appearing on the right side of the frame. Little pixelated boxes. So I sent them back to him to see if he experience the same thing. Sure enough he did. Not sure yet if he was playing the tapes back in the same camcorder. Has anyone else had this problem and know of a solution? Perhaps renting a expensive deck or something?

J

If your other videographer can see them same thing there's not much you can do about it I'm afraid, had the same problem with a hdv tape some months ago, over 100 dropouts. Contacted several companies to see if anyone could help, all said that if it was cassette tape you could forget about it. Only if it was on a external harddrive or compact flash card they could retrieve data but not from tape.

Jason -
SD or HD? I'm guessing SD and a TRV900? This is a common symptom of head/tracking misalignment, and it's probably recorded that way. You can flip open the cover over the tape (there's a little latch mechanism before you flip the cover back). I suspect you'll find the edge of the tape is crinkled ever so slightly, and there's anything you can do about it.

SD on a Panasonic DVX-100A

Head alignment problems I've seen haven't showed up as pixellated portions of the frame, but I guess it could. That sounds more like a pinch roller out of whack. Or it could be head clog type stuff. It's in the tape for sure since same thing happened on both cameras. Nothing you can do about it that I know. One thing I'd do is get a new tape and check out the camera to see if it does it again. If so, send it in for repair. I suppose it could be a bad tape, but that would be very rare.