Digital glitch while digitizing onto external drive (24p footage)
 

Michael, I had another small question.

I am digitizing my 24p "standard" (not advanced) footage to Avid Adrenaline.

I am going firewire from a regular DV SR-VS30 JVC deck to the computer
and USB2 out to a maxter 200 gig external harddrive.

The footage seems to run fine on the monitor, but during a couple of spots, pretty random, we got a sudden, light digital noise.
It looks like a digital glitch, sort of like when you loose signal on your digital cable. Big white squares withing the image.

No sound, or image dropout, so it doesn't seem like a regular dropout.

Now, when we play it back from the external drive, the noise is much, much lighter, almost invisible.

Could this be the tape?, the system?,the configuration of the system, the deck's tape heads?

Any suggestion would be great.

Jose

jose, fwiw, dv footage is digital bits of 1 and 0, so there shouldn't be any gamma/exposure differences between what you see, regardless of where it is in the chain... it's the exact same footage everywhere.

the gamma/exposure problem might be one of gamma setting differences between monitors, but the actual blockiness is a lot more disturbing.

1- Are you capturing with [extra] compression or with the Avid codec?
(To save yourself effort, stick with DV and IEEE/firewire transfer.)

2- Dropouts:

Do they look like:
http://www.adamwilt.com/pix-defects.html

If you're getting dropouts, try capturing with a Sony DSR-1800 (it has tracking) or the camera that originally recorded the footage. If the dropouts are not that often, you can use Photoshop magic to paint them out.

Alternative: There are various causes to dropouts, and you could try fixing them. One is to clean the deck's heads (DON'T use q-tips; read instructions).