How should I deal with timecode resets on a tape?

If at all possible you should try to avoid timecode resets or breaks from the outset. Timecode discontinuities arise when you play or fast forward past the end of a recording and the camcorder either picks up an incorrect timecode value from an old recording "underneath" or encounters blank tape. You should therefore get in the habit of always using your camcorder's End Search facility every time you Play or Cue a tape, unless you know you have finished and will never record any more on it. (Ideally, you should also avoid pre-striping or reusing tapes as this does nothing to avoid the underlying problem but makes timecode breaks much more difficult to detect.)

There are two possible strategies for dealing with timecode resets once they occur on a tape:

• Leave them, and treat each segment as a separate "virtual tape".
• Make a copy of the tape with new continuous timecode.

Actually, there's a third option which is to ignore timecode altogether. This is fine if all you do is play tapes from beginning to end, but will fail if you ever plan to edit, batch capture or catalog your tapes properly, as having a unique tape name and timecode value to identify each frame of video is an essential pre-requisite for any of these operations.

Copying a tape is the best solution in the long term, and is straightforward if you have two decks connected by a FireWire cable. The copy will be identical to the original except for having new clean timecode. You can also make a copy via the computer using a single deck or camcorder, by first capturing and concatenating the segments in your editing application and then printing these to tape. The end result is the same though the process is more cumbersome.

Alternatively, you can think of each timecode segment as a separate "virtual" tape and name them accordingly, for example "Tape 12 #1" and "Tape 12 #2". The fact that the timecode starts from zero in each segment does not matter in this case, because the timecode is unique within each virtual tape. During batch capture, if your editing application asks for "Tape 12 #2" you need to fast forward into the second segment of "Tape 12" and capture from there.

If you use Live Capture to scan a tape and build up a catalog then if CatDV detects a timecode reset it will automatically create a new virtual tape name for each timecode segment.

Alternatively, if you have captured a tape containing timecode resets to disk and want to import the movies to CatDV then you should proceed as follows:

1. Select the Strictly base clips on captured DV media Preference option.
2. Import the movie file(s).
3. Show hidden clips, to make sure you correct all the clips including any that are hidden.
4. Ensure that you are not sorting the view based on Tape or In point, otherwise clips from both timecode segments will be intermingled. Instead, either sort on DV Record Date or leave the view unsorted (ie. in the order the clips were imported to the catalog).
5. Look at the In (and DV T/C) columns and select all those clips that occur after the timecode reset. Use the Bulk Edit command to give these a new virtual tape name to distinguish them from the first timecode segment.

It is very important that you set a new virtual tape name like this before building preview movies otherwise the previews will refer to the wrong clips.