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Tools for the Power User

Striping Tapes

Timecode breaks are the bane of an editor's existence, especially when working with tapes shot by amateur photographers.

When a DV camera starts to record video, it looks to see if the portion of the tape over which it is parked has timecode on it. If it does, the camera matches the timecode and starts recording. If it doesn't, it starts new timecode at 00:00:00:00. If this occurs in the middle of a tape, this is called a "timecode break." To prevent these breaks, you can record timecode for the entire length of the tape. This is called "striping the tape," or "black and coding" a tape. In all cases, it totally solves the problem of timecode breaks during video recording.

Final Cut provides a facility to record audio and video black with continuous timecode on your tapes using the Edit to Tape function. Although using Edit to Tape to output your videos is discussed thoroughly in Chapter 12, "Output Your Project," using Edit to Tape to "black and code" your tapes is a good thing to learn now.

To start, choose File > Edit to Tape.

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This is the Edit to Tape screen. For now, you can ignore all of it, except…

…this tiny little widget in the top center of the screen. It looks like a squashed centipede. Click it.

This pop-up in this dialog enables you to select what kind of video black you want to feed to the deck. In virtually all cases, Current Settings works just fine.

On high-end decks, a second dialog appears, allowing you to enter a starting timecode. Generally, all DV decks start at timecode hour 0 and use drop-frame timecode. Higher-end decks allow you to specify the starting timecode (often 00:58:20:00) and whether the timecode is drop-frame or non-drop-frame.

A final warning dialog appears, alerting you that you are about to totally, completely, and irretrievably erase the tape in your deck. Once you click OK, Final Cut erases the tape by recording audio, video black, and continuous timecode on the tape.

Unfortunately, it does this in real time, so come back in an hour, rewind your tape, and you're ready to go.

Changing Reel Numbers

During the first three chapters, I've made a big deal about properly recording reel numbers. However, sometimes, the wrong reel number gets entered into a clip. Sigh…accidents happen.

Often, this is due to Final Cut using a default reel ID of 001. If you don't make a point of changing the reel when you put in a new tape, you'll end up with the Browser showing a whole lot of clipsall from reel 001.

Fortunately, Final Cut provides three different ways to change reel numbers:

Remember, back in Chapter 2, "Understanding the Final Cut Pro Interface," when you learned how to rearrange Browser columns by dragging the column header? Well, one of the clips I captured has the wrong reel number. (I, um, forgot to change it.) So, go to the Browser, scroll way over to the far-right column, locate the Reel column, and drag the Reel column header left, next to the Name column.