Posted by Richard Crowley on 10/02/05 13:54

"Steve Guidry" wrote ...
>I recently shot a VHS tape (no sneers, please) (grin) with my
>ooooolllld
> camera and its JVC RS-s411 dockable. The room was hot and humid.
>
> I didn't get a dew indication or shutoff, but periodically the camera
> was
> surging and then re-locking. This was accompanied by a picture
> breakup and
> re-lock on the video coming out of the video confidence spigot. This
> is a
> new one for me . . .

Hot and humid doesn't necessarily mean trouble if the
equipment was properly "acclimatized". But moving
quickly between cool/dry and hot/humid is what causes
condensation.

Are you sure what you saw was condensation and not some
other problem (like dirty/damaged tape path, etc.)?

> Is there any way to defeat the auto-sensing speed control of a
> playback deck
> to minimize this problem ? (I'd like to play it at the same constant
> speed,
> and ignore the speed fluctuations on the playback.) And is this
> likely to
> accomplish a smooth playback ?

Some of the specialty dubbing places might have rigged
a tape deck to run at a ~constant speed and ignore temporary
perburberances of the control track, but this might be a long-
shot? Sounds worse than any normal TBC can handle.

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