I bought a PAL GS400 in France four month ago.

When I try to send video via firewire from the PC to the camcorder, the resulting video is messed up (there are black missing blocks in large parts of the picture). I use Vegas 5.0 and it happens both when printing to tape or previewing in realtime. I tryied to export with scenalizer live, same result.

There is only one case where it works : if the exported video is a non edited clip imported directly from the GS400 by firewire. I thought that it was an incompatibility between Vegas DV Codec and the GS400, so I tried to export the video with the software panasonic dv codec. The video is still messed up.

May the GS400 firewire input be incompatible with any other dv codec than its own?

Any clue or experience appreciated...

Etienne,
Your camcorder uses the PAL video format. You must select PAL in your project properties and print to tape in PAL, not NTSC. The reason a non-edited clip works is because you haven't changed it to NTSC.

Guy,

I'm sure of having selected PAL projects. I even tried PAL 4/3 and PAL Widescreen settings. The video is 720x576@25fps.
I will try the camcorder on another PC with premiere installed.

Thank you for your help,

Etienne

Argh!

I finally found the problem which is independant from the cam, the codec and the soft...

My video editing directory is on my dedicated SATA disk plugged to the ASUS P4PE motherboard. The firewire port is also on the motherboard.
When I use the firewire and the sata disk simultaneously, I get something like dropped packets on the firewire. This causes dropped frames when capturing, and these weirg missing blocks when printing to tape.
Everything works fine when using my IDE system disk to store the video. This is why I thought recompression was in cause : I was recompressing on the bad disk...

I probably have motherboard or hdd issues, maybe a dedicated PCI Firewire card will solve this.

Anyway, the GS400 is amazing. I got the tape transport noise problem, fixed by the panasonic center (phew). The lens (including the stabilizer) is very impressive.

Etienne