Year: 2003

When filming video with MiniDV cameras are you the type of person who immediately rewinds and watches the most recent clip just to make sure the pervious shot was perfect? If so, you may inadvertently introduce timecode breaks to your source video. A timecode break happens when the tape is not perfectly cued for the next scene and, due to a short blank space between recorded scenes, the timecode resets to 00:00:00:00. When this happens, Final Cut Pro 3 is unable use device control to capture clips over the timecode break.

Instead, the source tape must be considered as multiple reels. If the tape has three timecode breaks, each timecode section must be labeled as a reel. For example, if your reel naming scheme consists of Foo_001, Foo_002, Foo_003, etc., then name timecode breaks Foo_001a, Foo_001b, Foo_001c, etc. This will allow batch capture to operate properly, although the tapes will need to be manually cued to the next timecode jump.