Importing DV footage with sound problems

Hello Ladies and Gents,

As always, I am working with FCPX to make the mostest out of all my old tapes...

I've got some old mini-DV tapes which I'm importing now, using a Sony HVR-M15AU for playback (into FCP 10.3.2).

The Sony DV Handicam (DCR TRV9E PAL) that I was using for a while, some 20 years ago, made recordings that had sound/signal disturbances, and these disturbances cause breaks in the import now so that some footage is being skipped. What ought to be one clip is for example becoming several clips with footage missing in between.

I took out that old DV camera today, and I can watch those tapes on the cam's LCD monitor without the sound/signal disturbances causing the image to be interrupted.

Can anyone suggest how I can best import these tapes without unwanted breaks and loss of footage?

All dropouts on DV and 8mm tapes will create problems for both FCPX and Quicktime alike. If you can run your camera thru a device with a good TBC and one which can apply internal sync, then those tapes will generally run as one clip (although you'll see portions that contain the dropouts). To continue as you're doing, let FCPX make as many clips as it needs for the full tape and then when finished you can select all of them and drop them in the timeline to export one continuous movie. Select all the clips in the browser at once and hit "E" to append them all into the timeline. They will all be in the right order.

Using Quicktime (or a variety of other apps) is generally better if you don't need to color correct or tweak the audio. This is for 2 reasons: 1. You can select HIGH Quality to save space by capturing as H.264 MOV file, or you can use MAXIMUM Quality which is at a higher bitrate ProRes version (generally overkill for DV or 8mm tapes).
The drawback with Quicktime, unlike FCPX, is that whenever your tape has a dropout or corruption, the recording stops and you have to rewind your tape and start a new recording - and that results in having to use FCPX anyway to stitch the separate recordings back together. An old 2 hour tape could have hundreds of those separate clips.

The bottom line is that this is the way those old tapes get. Good quality, more recent tapes will often capture seamlessly in either application, but dropouts are usually common with all magnetic media. We do several hundreds of these each year for clients but we use professional playback decks and TBC's that will re-insert new sync tracks. We have also changed from using the firewire connections to Intensity Pro 4K capture cards from BMD. The capture card doesn't help with dropouts but we receive good component signals and have better on the fly control of color, setup levels and hue (which is frequently out of wack as the tapes deteriorate). We also prefer the BMD app Media Express which is a very stable capture application. If you are not doing this for clients (and enough of it) your best bet is probably to stick with FCPX and deal with sticking clips together. The good point is that if there are a lot of dropouts on the tape (i.e. many separate clips generated) FCPX is pretty good at cutting that clip at the right spot before it begins the next one so usually when they are stitched together you don't need to trim each one.

Gosh, DGW, yet again you are most generous with your expertise, and I have the great pleasure of trying to comprehend it all.

These particular DV tapes are not causing dropouts because of age - they were also like this back when they were first made because something was wrong with the camera (with the audio, I supposed).

I am vaguely recalling that I had an improvised workaround back then: that I would just record music on one of the audio tracks of a few of the tapes, which then allowed unbroken import of the footage into iMovie.. . The camera had the feature of being able to record stuff from the computer via firewire, I'm now remembering. But I do not recall just how I did that.

But what your good reply first makes me think of, is that perhaps I can now play the old DV camera through the HVR-M15AU and make a new working tape? The HVR was a later and more feature-laden recording unit as well as playback unit.

If that works, then I'll get every frame of the tapes copied (with the intermittent sound disturbances which are of less importance), and that would be a great delight to this amateur perfectionist.

A few days ago I first tried what you suggested re. multiple imports with all the extra clips caused by signal disturbance, but the dropouts are mostly in the same places with the same frames dropped, so patching it all together does not give a full copy of the original - - - and is beyond even my tolerance for time-consuming video dilly-dallying.

I am looking forward to reading your post again tomorrow morning, and working out a way to get everything off these few problematic tapes.

… time-consuming, tinkerers option could be:
• generate a 'nil' video of, say, 60min (1h of black, no audio )
• select all clips from one tape and that nil-clip and create a Multicam => FCPX will automatically arrange the clips with any 'pauses' in the MC
• adding this MC to your project, you can add before/after sampled 'freeze frames' for gaps in video and 'ambience' for gaps in audio.

Painstaking.

What this method for sure does NOT do, is rescuing any 'broken' content, only solution is Dan's mentioned TC-generator. Question is: are the gaps that big? Do they contain any 'real, valuable' content?
Old material looks old, IS old, is allowed to look old, behaving old. Had just converted a shoebox full of 20y old tapes to a 0.8TB Lib for future processing… the quality of miniDV was soooo bad :lol: Alone the (non-existing) DR of those cams those days…

Thank you Karsten. I have hopes that I can make a new smooth miniDV tape from camera to the HVR-M15AU, and today ordered the cables needed (much of my gear is in Europe while I bask in Florida).

The gaps vary in how often they occur, and many good scenes are marred by dropouts, sometimes too often to ‘cover up’ via trickery, lol.

I don’t agree the miniDV quality is bad, not necessary to see it on more than a 15 inch screen. The cameras were so compact and easy to carry/use (v. HI- 8 ) that I almost always had them at hand when conditions made for nice recordings. It does not look old, especially when you have a nicely shot and edited scene, in this day and age where there is so much relatively sloppy smartphone recording instead.

And reading your thread about the slowness and demands of noisereduction on 4K, 8K I am delighted that my voluminous recordings were mostly in DV and HD.