Preventing TC Breaks?

[VaricamLife]

There isn't a Z1U or A1U forum so this is close a place as I could find to ask... For the Sony Z1U/A1U's, is there any tip/technique that I can give to our subjects (they are doing some filming for us in spots we can't go), as to how to prevent timecode breaks? It seems everytime there is a "cut" in the camera there is also a timecode break. Is this just one of the cons for Sony and HDV or is there a way around this with these cameras? Can I stripe a tape beforehand for them, would that prevent the breaks? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

cheers.

 

[khmuse]

While I have no experience with these cameras, generally pre striping the tape and then setting the camera to a mode that "regenerates" the timecode, will prevent any capture issues later.

Its simple enough to test out, just try to do things that would cause TC breaks and then do a capture test.

 

[VaricamLife]

That's what I figured, but was hoping maybe somebody had some direct hands on experience dealing with the TC breaks with these cameras/HDV tapes. Mainly because I can't do the test right now. We leave the cameras with the subjects almost all the time so that incase they do anything last minute or on the spur of the moment they will just grab the camera and film it (so sometimes we get some cool surprises as random tapes show up).

 

[aronprigg]

I got a Z1U last April and shot with it everyday for the month of May so I learned a few things about the camera. If you set the camera to "quick rec" ON in the main menu it will almost always give you a time code break, even if you do an end search. The downside to having it off is that after 5 minutes it stands down and takes forever to get rolling when you hit record (like up to seven seconds). I had to digitize 34 tapes that were full of time code breaks and the only way I could get Final Cut to do it way to make a new clip on time code break, this makes a ton of clips and after the break it can take up to seven seconds for final cut to lock on to the stream and start capturing. Very frustrating, you can go back and manually redig the missing bit but you have to babysit the whole operation.