Lost Video Footage On HD-DV Tape
 

I have a tape (Sony HD-DV using HDR-HC1) which I recently recorded our first baby shower on and I am unable to view its contents! What is weird is that when I hit play it displays a blue screen, but when I fast forward while playing you can see the video. Does anyone have any ideas of how to fix this? I have successfully recorded and played back more video after the baby shower video on the same tape.

Thanks,

Jay

Did you check your playback settings?

Thanks for the reply Miguel.

I haven't changed any settings. And it records and plays back fine on the same tape after the 'lost' footage.

Hmmmmm, did you try setting the downconvert to on? Is your TV HD? Press display and see what format it shows.

This happens when I am viewing the tape directly on the HC1. I have tried to capture the video using Sony Vegas as well and all I get is blue... I will try viewing it on my HD TV tonight just to see what happens.

I get a blue screen when trying to view on my HD TV as well. This is very disappointing.

I say clean your tape head.

^Yup, he's right, whenever you play a dirty tape or go into an extermely humid area (a shower) the head will get dirty and even the slightest of dirt would make the data unreadable. that's what happened after I recorded a DVCAM formatted test footage on a dirty tape (not too dirty though) on my rented Z1, when I tried to play back my clean tape, it didn't read any of the data. Used the cleaning cassete and it worked again.

Lost Video Footage on HD-DV Tape
 

Does anyone know if that "lost" footage is recoverable in any way? Also, if Jay could record clean footage after the baby shower, could the problem have been condensation and not a dirty head? Why were no error messages displayed? I have a friend with a similar problem on Z7U. Any details would help us. Thanks!

Change the playback mode to the other formats (either DV, DVCam, or HDV) and then try playing it. You can have DV and HDV on the same tape, but all you'll see in playback is blue if you have playback set to a format on which you did not record. It sounds like you may have accidentally changed the format either before or after you taped the footage.

Good luck.