911: Vx2100
 

Well, finished a wedding, burnt the DVD, getting ready to wrap up everything and clean out the hard drive. Of course, first we have to run the final output to tape in case there is any future use (like building demo).

Guess what, the VX2100 will not do it. It will record a bit (like half second, or two seconds) and then skip, and then record some more, and then skip. Just to be sure it is not just the playback on the camera, I ran the tape back to PC via capture, and sure enough, it was skipping. Tried several times, with new tapes, etc.

Tried the same thing with other cameras, they ran fine.

Anybody encountered anything like that with VX2100? Perhaps PD170, PD150, or VX2000?

My 2100 has worked fine for exporting projects to tape. It sounds like an interruption in the firewire bitstream to the camera. Can you output firewire from one of your other cams directly to the 2100 and see if the 2100 will record it properly? (You'll need a different DV cable for this) If this works OK, and if the computer outputs fine to other DV cams, then I'd suspect a cable or connector issue between the computer and the 2100.

Thanks Alan.

I figured it got to be the card and/or wire also. I tried outputing to the same 2nd camera again and this time everything was fine again, except every one second or so there is a "click" (upon capturing it back to the PC), like a power dip or power spike.

I hope the PC power supply is not going out.

Darn.

Anybody has similar experience?

Are you sure that you don't have serious fragmentation problems on your hard drive? If you drop a lot of frames on export you may get an effect similar to the one you describe. I'd check the fragmentation level of your hard drive. I'm assuming that you are using 7200 RPM disks, that the video disk is on a separate IDE channel from the system disk, and that there aren't any slow devices on the same channel as your video drive that could be slowing down the transfer rate.

Thank Alan.

I tried a 3rd cheapo DV cam I have laying around, and this time it went smoothly.

So, it is the 2nd cam, plus the VX2100?

Well, right now, I don't really want to know, got projects to work on. As long as the VX2100 works fine shooting and sending DV to the PC, I will look into it later. The 2nd cam is going to take a long rest.