Help, log and capture ALL WRONG!
 

I have a reel with 30 clips that I am batch capturing. But the clips FCP 5 captures are just totally off, it's capturing between shots, or no where near what I expected.

I've compared the logged media in and out points, and they are exactly what FCP is capturing. I suppose it's possible that I have set every single in and out point to the wrong place 30 times in a row, no where near where I meant to. But since I have never made this mistake once in the 7+ years I've used FCP, it's hard to believe that suddenly I messed up 30 times in a row.

Could something else be going on in FCP? Is it possible that I am not to blame? The 15 clips I captured just before these 30 are perfectly logged, what could have happened to these 30? There are no time code breaks in this tape.

Broken time code is a likely culprit. Not broken in that there are breaks between shots but in that the time code is continuously broken but seems OK during real time playback. I've had about three DV tapes with this problem and one HDV tape over the years. The video is fine but the time code has recorded incorrectly for what ever reason. I once had a DV tape with perfectly fine video but the time code never changed.

What happens is that you enter what seems to be the right time code but it's actually in more then once place on the tape and FCP finds the first instance that it comes across.

One solution is to make a DV to DV dub but make sure the timecode isn't cloned. The new tape should have fresh time code. If it's an HDV tape you can capture the track with DVHScap and trancode it with MPEGStreamclip to Quicktime.

Of course the other thing to do is to just do a capture now. That rewrites the time code.
Then make subclips.
C.

Ditto on the "capture now" process; much more efficient and leaves more options for how to ingest and cut sub-clips.

Capture Now does not rewrite timecode, it requires timecode to be present so it can read it. The TC on the tape is the TC that will be in your clip.

However Chris is on the right track: use Capture Now to grab the entire tape. If this is DV, you can then use the "DV Start/Stop Detect" (menu: Mark > DV Start/Stop Detect) function to automatically create markers in the clip.

Capture Now will work but it might be prudent to switch device control to "Non-Controllable Device" to prevent TC problems with the file. The DV Start/Stop detect might not work with broken TC or if the file is captured under "Non-Controllable Device". I've bulk captured tapes shot with free-run TC (clients' tapes) and DV Start/Stop detect did not work at all. Can't say why.

Making a new dub will give you a tape master that can be easily recaptured in the future. If you don't need that, Capture Now is the quicker way to go.