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General discussion

Panasonic miniDV playback problem

Jan 4, 2006 4:31AM PST

Over the holidays, I went to show my parents some video I shot of our son's Christmas program, by hooking my Panasonic DV101 up to their TV. There were several lines across the screen that look live garbled pixels. I thought maybe the heads are dirty and looked at my owner's manual. It says that the heads should rarely if ever need cleaning. What could the problem be? Is my camcorder or the footage of my son's program toast?

Discussion is locked

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More info, please.
Jan 4, 2006 6:15AM PST

How are you hooking up your camera? What output jacks on the camera are you using and with what cable? Do you have the camera in "Playback" or "VTR" mode? What about the TV? Do you have it on the correct "Input"? If you "Play" the tape in the camera, you should be able to see footage through the viewfinder. If you see the footage this way, then all is fine and it's just a matter of using the correct setups and connections.

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Panasonic DV playback problem
Jan 4, 2006 8:06AM PST

I should have indicated that the same problem is evident on the viewfinder.

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Try tape in another DV cam
Jan 4, 2006 12:04PM PST

If you know someone else with a mini DV camera, try your tape in that camera. Or, if you have a NEW mini DV tape, try recording something new and see if you get anything.

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This may fix it
Apr 30, 2006 4:17AM PDT

I have had the same problem ie horizontal lines equally spaced during playback on monitor and TV. It first happenned about 4 years ago. It seemed there was no other reports of this problem. I found by my experience to record on a blank space for about 5 secs would fix it. This fix has worked sucessfully for me on every occasion that it has happenned. However today after getting back from my holidays it wouldnt work. After doing some searching on google I found another fix is just to give it a shake. Incredibly this worked worked straight away. My camera works fine now. I have a Panasonic 3CCD NV-MX350.

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re This may fix it
May 1, 2006 5:35AM PDT

I had to use my video camera again after sending my previous post. Unfortunately the horizontal stripes problem came back. This time I tried to shake the camera whilst playing back without success. I then recorded on a blank space for 5 secs and it was fixed again. It is definitely a camera play back function problem and cleaning doesnt seem to make any difference.