Head switching noise on Digital8 tapes?
 

Hello, I'm transferring PAL Digital8 tapes with Sony DCR-TRV210E and it's the same machine that recorded the tapes. Using M1 MacBook Air to which the camcorder is connected with the usual adapters, with iMovie I get QuickTime DV files that reside in the Original Media folder inside iMovie Library in Finder.

Below is attached a sample of the transfer in DV-AVI (converted using ffmpeg). I'm asking about the black line on top of the video that looks like head switching noise. Is it normal on Digital8 tapes or is there something wrong? I read somewhere that Digital8 video frame should be 100 % clean video content, is that true?

Early Digital8 models did have a glitch where the first few scanlines at the top are blank or may flicker, and the extreme left and right edges of the image may have a blue tint, especially in 16:9 widescreen mode.

This is unnoticeable on a TV with overscan or when using a media player program that crops off the edges (like Apple's "clean aperture" setting), but if you're looking at the complete, raw 720x480 (or 720x576 for PAL) DV video, you'll see it.

Just crop the top and the left side and resize to 1440x1080 after de-interlacing.

Thanks for the replies. These artifacts don't bother me, so no cropping needed. I was just curious, now I know what they are and I'm glad there's nothing wrong with the tapes or the camcorder.

Something to keep in mind...

In terms of the video after the DV transfer/"capture", masking (less often cropping) matters. It's not only about "not bothering" (you), but also the overall compression. It's a noisy mess than eats up bandwidth, either with larger lossless files, or lower quality compression (H.264, MPEG, etc).

NOTE: Cropping can easily screw up interlace, so be aware!