Grazie my good man! Yeah, I'm excited...even just mucking about trying to get ready with an endless list of unknowns staring me in the face.

Thanks really to Mrs. Grobsie, BTW. I have one very serious Mothers' Day present to figure out.

Did you do the V6 thing?

Darryl

Did you do the V6 thing?


I'm listening to the results thus far. I've been mid project so I wanted to make sure that that was done and to the client - yeah? . . Always liked Mrs Grobsie! Great woman . ..

Grazie

The manual says to just use "miniDV" cassettes (p22). That implies to me that anything is okay. The only thing I've heard that's different from regular old DV shooting is that a dropout will be much more noticeable, so you might look for tapes that have a documented history of having fewer dropouts.

Very nice, congrats.
Marty

Thanks all. Guess I should read the manual when it shows up first off! Another manual, another month. :-Darryl

Apart from the specimen tape that came with the Z1 I've been using standard DV tape for both DV and HDV shooting, and have yet to have a dropout. Because of the compression I understand that if there is a dropout it will be at least 15 frames, but none yet ....

And no, I don't pre-record timecode, and never have - totally unnecessary as far as I'm concerned. I do make sure that I don't leave gaps on tape to avoid confusing Vegas with mutiple zeros.

Interesting you should say this peter. I just had V6 totally confused and crashing when trying to capture HDV with black/blank areas on tape when I did NOT prerecord timecode. Maybe one should?

Same question Peter (or anyone else for that matter), re the continuous timecode. I've always been advised to pre-record front to back timecode. Why wouldn't that hold true in your opinion?

TIA, Darryl

You see the result of breaking timecode already. Too many zero start timecodes mess up captures.

However, if you are careful, never take the tape out, or overwrite a bit at the end of a shoot, you should have no gaps.

If, however, you are bad like me, I am always reviewing and removing, and I don't like to overwrite too much, so I use an older camcorder to lay down a continuous time track. I use the older camie because I don't want the wear and tear on my "good" camcorder.

If I expect to shoot the entire tape in one run I usually don't black stripe it (record the timecode while the lens cap is on and audio defeated).

As far as the new HDV tape versus ordinary top grade Mini-DV tape, well, this is just one opinion. I suspect that the profit margin on ordinary tape has dropped so far from the original $25.00 per tape that soon ALL companies will be coming out with something along the line of this new HDV super tape just to keep the profit up.

That is not to say that the tape is not better than previous tapes. It undoubtably is. But how good?

If your livelyhood depends on your image, then the new tape is cheap. If not, well, you decide.

As I said, I always make sure there are no gaps. This means recording say 5 seconds extra at the end of a shoot, or whenever the tape is to be removed, and when re-cueing, making sure I stop a few seconds before the end of previous footage.

Striping the tape first, which we used to do for masters with tape to tape editing, has two effects - every shoot will be using a "used" tape, and your camera will clock up many extra hours of wear.