Getting to the bottom of a black line

By PETER GRIFFIN

The unmarked package that landed on my desk had the air of conspiracy about it. A plain, white envelope stuffed with official documents, pictures, copies of correspondence, a freshly burned CD thrown in too.

It was the kind of bundle reporters dream of getting their hands on - one that gives you the contacts, the leads, the guts of the story.

The reality was to be not quite so, well, black and white ...

The bundle of paper was my introduction, a couple of months ago, to sickness beneficiary and video editing enthusiast Peter Fuller - and the saga of the thin black line.

That's where it started but where will it end? Maybe right here in this column - but let me tell you the story.

It really begins in 1999 when Fuller made a Tai Chi video using a Sony video camera he had bought for $2400. Fuller was joining the growing band of amateur movie makers taking advantage of computer-based digital editing suites to chop their footage into watchable home movies.

But Fuller's martial arts masterpiece had one unwanted aspect - a thin, wavering black line was visible across the top of the footage when it was played back on his computer's media player.

Fuller tried everything - getting the camera serviced, changing computer operating systems, buying a new Firewire card to connect his camera to the computer. Nothing worked.

A couple of years passed and Fuller came across his Tai Chi footage again. Sony told him there was an issue with his model of semi-digital camera, gave him a full refund as a "goodwill" gesture and sent him on his way. Fuller bought a fully-digital JVC camera and has been thrilled to bits with it ever since.

But, his interest sparked, Fuller tried out some of Sony's cameras from the current Digital8 range - semi-digital cameras that use 8mm tapes and essentially bridge the gap between analogue cameras and the more expensive fully digital cameras that employ miniDV cassettes.

Alas! Fuller's thin black line came back to haunt him - and me, it would turn out. He took his claims to the Herald where I got the task of looking into them. A demonstation at Sony's service centre came up black-line free. But Fuller persisted with his claims.

To settle the matter once and for all I borrowed a low-end Digital8 camera from Sony to do my own tests. Expecting, line-free footage, the results suprisingly proved Fuller was on to something.

Testing both Firewire and USB connections I transferred some random office footage across to my Dell Pentium 4, running Windows XP. I was capturing the footage in recent versions of MGI Videowave and Adobe Premiere, common video editing packages.

Playing back the footage on my PC using media players such as Quicktime and the player within Flash, there was the black line.

"Have you seen that movie Conspiracy Theory with Mel Gibson? I feel a bit like him. I know I'm right. He was right," Fuller told me after leaving another pile of documents in reception for me.

However using Pixela, the third party software Sony packages with its cameras, the footage was crystal clear.

Fuller claims the issue extends to footage taken on cameras making up the entire range of Digital8 cameras when several off-the-shelf software suites are used, in the same way it affected footage taken on his old Sony camera - the one Sony gave him the refund for, three years after he bought it.

His crusade to expose the thin black line, I should add, has landed Fuller in hot water with the law. Entering a Sony service centre to bring up the issue with Sony staff in person, his reality-TV style, documentary-making antics didn't go down well with Sony. They asked him to turn off his video camera and leave. Later Fuller was served with a trespass notice, forbiding him to enter three Sony premises.

But one retailer the Herald spoke to seemed to know exactly what Fuller was on about, though they did not think the thin black line a serious issue.

"It's like having a house and noticing there's a little blemish in one cupboard. I doubt whether one person in 100,000 would ever go where he's gone."

Yes, but a blemish nevertheless. Is the thin, sometimes wavery, black line at the top of the video footage a fault?

No, argues Sony, which is reluctant to admit the thin black line exists at all.

Sony said the black line appearing on the footage taken with Fuller's old camera was "due to technology associated with the 'steady shot' feature on the Digital8 handycams".

Sony pointed out that the black line appearing when the footage was viewed on a computer monitor would disappear when it was viewed on a regular TV set via the handycam.

Their explanation for the new Digital8 range is that with some software packages there may be an issue converting footage between the PAL and NTSC video standards, leaving a black line visible when viewed on computer screens. Not their problem, says Sony.

"Yes, but ... " said Fuller. These days, he pointed out, people were increasingly storing digital video on their hard drives or "burning" video to DVD and CD, passing the results to their family and friends or even customers as part of corporate video exercises.

If there was a conversion issue it should be flagged for those shelling out on expensive cameras. Nowhere in the literature or sales pitch, Fuller points out, is the thin black line mentioned.

Millions of people own Digital8 cameras but the thin black line hasn't caused much of a stir. Maybe Fuller's discovered a universally overlooked flaw. Maybe no one really gives a hoot.

The search for an answer continues. Watch this space ...


* Email Peter Griffin