Do I have a lemon or do others have problems with Mini DV Camcorders eating tapes??

[John P]

This is intended for mainly people who tend to use their camcorders to do a lot of video editing to their computers, but I would really appreciate input from anyone who owns a Mini DV camcorder. I have had my Canon ZR30MC for a little over a year now. It started "eating tapes (pulling the tape out of the cassette) a few months ago both in record and playback mode intermittently. The camera will beep beep beep at me and a message that says "Remove Cassette" appears. I brought it in to get repaired at the most reputable shop in Seattle, they charged me $249 for the repair. (Luckily my Amex Buyers Assurance plan footed the bill since it is past the manufacturers warranty). Well, guess what? I was playing back a tape to my computer and it ate another tape. I rewound the tape, put it back in, and it ate it again.

Anyway, now the camera is back in for more repairs.

I did a bit of research on the net and found an article talking about how Mini DV Camcorders aren't really designed to playback tapes for video editing (consant rewinding, stopping, rewinding, stopping, forwarding, playing, etc...) because of their sensitive/delicate/whatever components. I am not a professional editor or anything, just making music videos for the kids and stuff - so I don't think I really put that much wear on the camera. Has anyone else had bad experiences with this or have any opinions on the subject??

 

[John P]

One bump for the night crowd.

 

[bob332]

i have a sony pc5 and have had it for about 1 1/2 years. the only problem i have run into is it needing cleaned. i do use it for video editing also. what i do is, if i have enough room, grab the entire length of video and edit on the computer. then put back onto a "master" tape that only gets good stuff. then i reuse the old tape. hope this helps... in the long run, it might be cheaper to get a 120GB slave drive just to do this.

 

[John P]

bob332,
I do basically the same thing you do. I capture video to my 120GB slave drive and edit and make SVCD's from there. Most of the rewinding and fast forwarding is to capture stills to the MMC to use for my SVCD menu and CD background pictures.

 

[bob332]

i know this doesn't fix your camcorder, but can't you capture the still from the video you already have on the computer? your software should have a export feature that exports to bmp's or tiffs. hope this helps...

 

[John P]

bob332,
I'm sure it does somewhere, I haven't taken the time to figure it out yet though since I figure I'll get higher quality stills from the frame captures on the camera. Since I don't have the camera I guess I have time to play with the software now....

 

[MasterHoss]

Unfortunately for you, John P., it seems like you got a bad digital camcorder. How old is it? Maybe return to the store from which you bought it and exchange it?

 

[manko]

The Sony TRV900 is notorious for this too (it happened to me). The only solutions were to keep the heads clean, try to stick to one brand of tape (different brands use different formulas which can react in strange ways and gunk up the heads), and don't play/record all the way to end of the tape, always try to stop before going using the last 5 minutes.

Those tips pretty much solved the problem for me. It sounds like your camera may be worse off though, so I don't know how much these will help.

 

[bob332]

john p - i am assuming you are bringing in the dv via 1394 correct? the stills you get from the video that you brought in via 1394 should still be excellent, since it is still in dv format. you have to remember that mini dv is 720 x 480 and you can't make the still very large.