I'm trying to transfer 100's of movies I recorded from mainly AMC between 85-99 from a Broksonic video player to a Panasonic DMR-EH50. The movies play fine on the Broksonic, but for some reason about 40% of the movies keep refocusing every 5-10 seconds when I try to record them to the DVD recorder. I've tried every kind of adjustment. Any idea what my problem might be? The movies were all recorded on a dinosaur of a video recorder. A 1977 RCA Select-A-Vision Video recorder. But they do play fine on the Broksonic player and many do record with no focusing problems to the DVD recorder.I can't figure it out why some refocus and others don't.
First of all I'd like to thank you for all the great advice you've been giving, has really been of great help. Everything plays fine on the VCR, but certain tapes for some reason when their played through the input to the DVD recorder the picture gets a little blurry then almost too strong like it's focusing and this pattern keeps repeating every 5-10 seconds. I did try tracking manually, but no luck. Maybe I'm wrong but it seems like the DVD recorder seems to be controlling the picture, because when I just play the VCR player the picture is great, but when I turn the DVD recorder on the picture is different and keeps focusing. Sorry if this doesn't make much sense. I just can't figure out why this happens on some tapes and other tapes no problem. All tapes recorded from the same VCR.
Some DVD recorders have problems with VHS tapes with a weak signal. There's a few things you can try, good quality cables, clean heads on VCR, if that doesn't work, a color corrector or time base corrector, those last 2 aren't very cheap.
They might, I've seen people say they did. I've never had a problem just using cables that came with equipment, so I can't really say. I picked up a new set of Monster composite cables on ebay a couple of weeks ago for $16.50. Acoustic Research makes good cables, I've seen them on ebay too.