Laying Down Black Is It Necessary When Going from DV to VHS
 

Now that I have a 3 week old GL2 and I will want to copy to VHS for distribution, do I have to lay down 15 or so seconds of black on the VHS tape before I copy the DV on top of the black layer in order for there to be a smooth transition on the copy side without there appearing to be a small explosion on the VHS copy as the copy tape is played back? I suppose I might as well ask how I would lay down the black without a black generator. I think that laying down black involves recording on to the VHS tape from some camera with its lense cover on. If that was correct, would I be using my GL2 with its lense cover on? Could I use my old HI8 camera to lay down the black. Would you have to have tape running inside the camera you were using to lay down the black?

have you done any editing? you could add the black in your NLE. as far as 15 seconds at the start of tape, that's always a safe bet when using your VHS tapes. you could use your GL2 with the lens cap on if you haven't done any editing and that should work fine.

If you do use a camera DO NOT connect the audio cables. You
can also disable the microphone ofcourse. Otherwise people
watching/listening to these tapes might have an interesting
black part of the tape to listen to!

You can't really do any editing to VHS, unless you have one of those antique VHS editing systems. Just add 10 seconds or so of black to your master DV tape, start the VHS and immediately start the master. If you're going to dub directly from the camera original and not from an edited master, you should have 30 seconds of black or bars at the head of your tape anyway.

As I have read all the fine replies to my original post about laying down black to a blank VHS target tape, I just wanted to clarify in my mind that the black (or is it black burst) is not meant to be a leader. It shouldn't be like color bars or a tone signal because after you lay it down for 15 seconds, isn't the idea then to go and back up the blank target tape sufficiently so that when you start the dub to VHS, that there is still some of the 15 seconds of black left so that when the source material hits the VHS deck, that it lands on top of what ever black is left, in order to avoid the jumping of the picture, because otherwise there would have been no control track on which the source material would land on top of.

After we talk about how VHS uses control trak, my next question would be that after I buy an editing package that will produce black (or black burst), do I have to play the same game about adding black to the target, if I want to go to DVD, which is going to be the next most popular format in the future?

Barrie,
No, it would not make sense to have such lead-in's for DVD.