Blacking tapes
 

About to do a multi-camera shoot of a dance concert on 3 Z1's, in HDV.

A question came to mind: do people worry about blacking tapes when shooting HDV?

All thoughts gratefully received.

Ciao,

marks

I wouldn't, as it simply doubles the wear on your lovely cameras for no (apparent) benefit.

As long as you're not constantly recording, taking the tapes out, and then putting them back in, you have no reason to.

I think?

Chris is right - blacking tapes does more harm than good and is totally unnecessary to boot.

And, in fact, if you are doing this, then pre-blacking the tape will definitely cause more problems than it will solve. You will have a greater chance of a timecode break, which will screw up your NLE upon capture.

Here's why (as I understand it, and someone please correct me if I'm wrong about this): HDV, at least in the Z1 class, doesn't do "insert" shooting/editing (which is the whole purpose of blacking or pre-striping -- laying down new picture over existing timecode). So while pre-striping the tape will lay down continuous unbroken timecode, the second you begin shooting, new timecode is laid down on the tape along with the picture. In a perfect world, this new timecode would be identical to the old, rendering pre-striping merely unnecessary. But in the real world, the tape won't start rolling at exactly the same field, and even if it does, the tape may stretch microscopically. So the new timecode might be just a bit off the old.

This wouldn't matter if you don't remove the tape until you're completely done with it, as the new timecode will write consecutively from where you left off in the prior shot. But if you remove and reinsert the tape, the cam doesn't realize there may be two sets of timecode that aren't in sync, and could pick up from the old timecode instead, meaning a break between where the new overlapping timecode ends and the old. But if you're shooting on a raw, unstriped tape, and you reinsert a partially shot tape, the cam will scroll back a bit as it loads, finding the timecode from the last shot and writing continuously from there.

So never black/pre-stripe. But you could FF/REW the whole tape before shooting, and run a minute of bars before shooting anything important.

And as a side-note, check out Chris' article on how to jam-sync your Z1s using the remote for a multi-cam shoot, at:

http://www.hdvinfo.net/articles/sonyhdrfx1/freerun.php

Thanks very much for the responses. The collective wisdom seems very clear. Much appreciated.

mark