Digital 8 compatibility with Edius 5

[Howard Asbridge]

Thanks for the messages guys.

I have visitors this weekend and will be banned from the office, but am planning a serious look at this on Monday.

I will certainly load some clips on to another drive and see if I get the same problem; good idea.

I will also defrag the drive [hmm, now when did I last do that?]

Once a clip has corrupted, that's it. It never sorts itself out.

I would say that the effect like putting a 'basketweave' filter over the whole picture. Not a normal pixellation. The longest clip I have loaded so far is about 3 minutes.

My aim on Monday is to isolate the problem. Is it in the tape, the player, the firewire or the hardrive. Once I can narrow it down, that may help find a solution.

Thanks a lot for your help.

Regards

Howard

[Howard Asbridge]

Hi Everyone

I have now tested the Di8 material, using another drive and another firewire. The same clips still corrupt as they did on the original drive. I used OHCI instead of the NX, with the same result.

I tried a tape from a different source and that also corrupted.

All this suggests that the Di8 player may be at fault, but I now think that there may be another cause. All the clips causing problems, including the one from another source are of aircraft at airports. Ground radar can affect video and audio and the sound of the radar pinging can be heard on some clips.

On just one clip today, I momentarily saw the same kind of fault as the clip was being transferred. On playing it back, it was fine until the fault point was reached, then the whole clip corrupted. Switching the system off and on solves the problem, until the error point is reached. Editing out the error point before the clip has been corrupted stops it happening. [Not a viable solution!]

I have now tested a Di8 clip not shot at an airport and it is fine and I have made a S-VHS transfer of the problem clip and that's OK.

Could it be that the combination of Di8 and radar is doing this?

I tried to attach a jpeg of still shot showing the effect, but the forum wants a URL of the image and I don't have a clue how to do that.

Regards

Howard Asbridge

[tingsern]

Radar affecting Di8? How close were you to the transmitter in that case? If the microwave is powerful enough to corrupt Di8 tapes / cameras, I shudder to think what that same microwave is doing to your brain.

[DigitalDave]

Howard if you want to send me a/the (tape) then I will try it/dub it to DVCam and see what occurs.

[Howard Asbridge]

It's ground searching radar which reflects off the aircraft. On VHS it will disrupt the signal entirely, some DV cameras will have black flashes as the pulse goes by, most will get a blip on the audio. You don't have to be close, just pointing your camera at the aircraft. Not sure if it's a microwave, like a mobile phone though.

[Howard Asbridge]

David, that's very kind of you, but I will hold on for the moment, for two reasons; firstly, I am not allowed to send the tapes through the post [I had to go to Belgium to get them] and secondly I'm about to look at a DVD made with this afternoon's transfers via S-VHS. With a little bit of sharpening and some YUV adjustment I don't think they'll look too bad, even when re-sized to 16:9, especially as it's historic stuff. If they do, I'll be knocking on your door!

Regards

Howard

[tingsern]

I filmed in Changi Airport using my Canon XL2 previously ... I am sure there are ground searching radars there as well. I was filming SIA planes taking off from the runways ... and I never experienced such things at all. I was also filming from inside the control tower - with the ground radar vertically above me (about 5m above) ... and using my older Panasonic HVX202 - no problems at all.

[David Clarke]

Another option to see if this is an edius specific problem or something that affects everything would be to try and capture the suspect tapes through Windows movie maker and then look at the results in media player. This should just use MSDV codec so that canopus is never used. If you get the same problem I would suspect that there is nothing you can do except capture by svideo.
If it works in movie maker it may still corrupt in edius so it may not solve your problem anyway, but may help to see if its worth spending more time or if the tapes are basically corrupt.
If your current SVIDEO solution is good enough you may not want to spend more time on it anyway.

[Howard Asbridge]

Digital 8 compatibility with Edius 5

Hi Guys

Time for an update.

Radar: I've filmed airside for 15 years and not had a problem with radar affecting VX1000, DSR300, Z1 or Z5. But it does affect some consumer cameras quite badly - it seems to depend on the video format and the intensity/type of radar used.

S-VHS: I've transferred several clips via S-VHS and made a 16:9 DVD with them. I'm happy with the quality, which is much better than if they had been recorded in S-VHS in the first place, but of course they were digital. None of the clips has corrupted so far and they've all been edited, had filters applied, etc.

However, because I can't find the gizmo that let's me access Procoder 3 from Edius 5 and I don't like the built-in encoder, I made an avi file of the edit and then tried to use PC3 to encode it to mpeg. I got an error message as follows: 'Failed to parse the stream. Stream seems invalid'

At the time I was using PC3.05.60 and Edius 5.01. I have since upgraded to Edius 5.12 and I have not been able to replicate the message. What does it mean and is it something that could affect the ability of customers' DVD players to play the eventual DVD?

MS AVI: I followed David Clarke's suggestion of using Windows Moviemaker to get the clips in without using Canopus' codec and this worked OK. However, the radar effect was treated differently from the way it is in the Canopus avi files. The radar ping is more audible and it shows on the waveform, which it doesn't do on the same clip captured via Edius.

Conclusions: S-VHS hasn't failed yet and the quality is OK. I don't know how good the MS avi files are and there don't seem to be many settings to choose from. The different way it deals with the radar interference is also a worry. On balance, if the 'failure to parse' message isn't advance warning of a major problem when the master DVD goes for replication, I think I will go with S-VHS. Any further thoughts?

Regards
Howard Asbridge

[David Clarke]

If it was "failed to parse" before you started encoding I would not worry. There is obvioulys something the the footage that is causing problems and shows up in different ways in different programs. So "failed to parse" is just what it caused in that version of Procoder. Once it has been totally remade into MPEG I am sure any potential problem will have gone. As long as the MPEG loads to your DVD program happily I would expect everything to be ok.
If you have a DV clip in edius and export to a dv clip then what every was in the original makes it into the new clip as the file does not get remade. Once its remade I completely I would expect it to be "puker".
I would also say that recording the SVIDEO output does the same kind of thing - ie you are not copying the original with something dodgy in it but instead converting it to analogue (svideo) then converting that again to DV or HQ as its captured.

[Howard Asbridge]

Thanks David. The 'failed to parse' sounds like a one off glitch,as I haven't been able to repeat it. When it happened, I then made a DVD-R using Edius's straight to DVD facility and that has worked perfectly on three DVD players and a DVD drive. As you say, converting to analogue and then digitising that will hopefully weed out whatever caused the problem in the first place.

Regards

Howard Asbridge

[Jim N]

Hi Howard,

Just as an aside, please check that the video has been recorded in SP and not LP (standard playback speed Vs long play back speed). Some of the digicams have the capacity to record at a lower tape speed than specified for editing systems. In this instance you should be able to capture the analog (hopefully from the camera used to record the video set to the appropriate recoding speed) out via a capture card.

Jim

[Howard Asbridge]

Hi Jim

I've now loaded all the clips I need for the DVD and I checked the tapes as I did so and they wee all SP.

So far, I've had no problems with the clips since I've gone for outputting via S-VHS. Hopefully, that will continue. Many thanks to all those who helped with advice about the problem.

Regards

Howard