Footage Degradation

[Jon Myers]

I shot a movie in March on the JVC GY-HD200U. When we were shooting everything looked great on the monitor. I used a 9" CRT field monitor. We recorded to tape and to a hard drive (firestore). Now the producers are trying to cut some footage together and it seems like the footage is degrading. First they tried using the footage that was recorded on the hard drive and it just kept getting darker and darker, to the point were they couldn't use it any more. They then tried to capture the footage from tape and the same thing happend with that footage. We've been to several post houses, JVC and spoke with the people at Apple to see if it's a FCP or Quicktime problem. What's really weird is that we went to a post house and captured some footage and it looked great, then they went back and couldn't reproduce what they had captured last time they were there. It seems to have everyone stumped. They went to NAB and went to several different booths and no one had any idea. Not only does the footage get darker but the color has changed. When I shot it, it looked really warm and now some of it's turning yellow. They let me know a couple of weeks ago about the problem but the way they told me it didn't sound that bad. I'm going to get more involved now. This is the third movie that I've shot with a variant of this camera (I've shot with the 100, 200, and 250). The first movie everything went ok. The second movie some of the tapes would have nothing (no video or audio) for the first 30 minutes into the tape and then all of a sudden the picture starts and the timecode is correct. So we lost the first 30 minutes on about 1/3 of the tapes. All I can say is that beware using these consumer cameras.

 

Jon Myers