CCD-TRV98 with Canopus ADVC-55 dropping frames?
 

Hello! I've been lurking a while as I've been getting into transferring some friends' tapes, and realized that my setup was extremely low quality.

I've invested in a few things, and I've been having decent success with a VCR straight into a Canopus ADVC-55 with S-Video. But, now that I've moved onto to some 8mm tapes, I''m running into some issues.

I bought a CCD-TRV98. So far, the camcorder seems like it's working perfectly fine. It's in great condition. However, with some of the more deteriorated tapes, it's causing dropped frames in the recordings.

Here's what I've noticed:
- Whether the ADVC is externally powered (5V?) seems to make no difference.
- While the playback appears fine on the camcorder screen, after going through the ADVC, every so often a frame is lost and audio and video cut out on the computer (in Vidi).
- If the section is bad enough, the ADVC will briefly go red rather than green, so I think that this is an issue with the camcorder not outputting bad frames.
- In the last couple tries, I tried enabling/disabling TBC, Edit, and DNR on the camcorder, and there doesn't seem to be a difference. Of course, it's hard to tell because the issue is a bit erratic.

What should I look for, or try to do? As far as I understand it, the two issues are 1: the handycam will stop outputting a frame if it's too bad (depending on the settings), and 2: the ADVC won't fill in the gap caused, and then stop outputting DV for that frame.

Do I understand this correctly?

Thank you for any help you've got for me. I really appreciate it.

While I'm not totally sure what the actual problem is, I found a solution that works OKAY. I've simply used the passthrough on the VCR (it's one of the DVD recorder types), and that outputs a constant signal.

While I'm guessing that the real solution here is to get a decent TBC, I'm not really able to justify that cost yet for the super degraded video I'm transferring, so this is gonna have to work for now. If you've got any extra suggestions, that'd be super helpful. Thanks!

What software are you capturing DV with?

The issue is the same on all of them: dvgrab on linux (causes a program crash), Vidi on OS X (dropped frames), Quicktime X (stops recording), etc. I'm very sure it's not a software issue, as this does not other playback devices and formats formats (MiniDV through Firewire, VHS through ADVC, etc.).

Well give WinDV or ScenlizerLive a shot, it wouldn't hurt, But those are PC programs though.

Dropped frames can result from glitches in the input signal that a decent external TBC can resolve, and slow PC write performance, not common with newer computers, but could arise with nearly full drives, capturing to the system (typically c:) drive, and/or a lot of background programs running that eat clock cycles.