PD-170 digital drop outs
 

Digital drop outs--I think that's what you call them (loss of pixels on a frame) I get about 2-3 every tape and I wonder if anyone has any advise. I got my camera six months ago and I only use Sony Excellence tapes.

Any words?

I probably haven't had that many over the life of both of my 150's and they aren't young anymore.

How may hours on the heads? The dropouts are all from the same batch of tape? Have you tried cleaning the heads with a Sony head cleaning tape? (5 seconds max run time)

Have you looked at trying to capture a "faulty" tape on another system? More CPU, faster bus, better firewire card, even a different firewire cable all come to mind as possible problem spots. If you recapture tape again on same system, does it drop at same spots?

I always assumed that the problem could be with the tape or the camera. I didn't realize that it could be the system you capture on. Good idea.

Michael, I capture in vegas using a 2.1 GHz machine. If I do not shut down every other program (especially email and INternet things) I will end up with dropped frames. FWIW.

I think we may be talking about different things. I know "dropped frames" when I see the playhead skipping frames or my program lets me know that this is happening and that's certainly happening. I'm talking about something very different that's almost like digital interference. If you freeze a frame or two you will see that many pixels are visibly missing and replaced with what looks like multicolored squares.
I have doubts that this is related to a hardware issue.

Actually it has to be hardware unless you assume the firmware in the camera is faulty.

Have you finished any additional tests?