I have recently been having the problem of exporting HDV back to tape. Usually everything goes well but now its getting a bit messy. I think i have found one of the problems being that the tape has previous time code on it...is there a way to record back to tape with it having pre-existing timecode? also, is there a way to save the transcoded hdv file so i don't have to re-transcode each time i want to export it to tape? thanks.

I never go back out to tape, so I can't help much, but M2T is a very lossy format and won't really benefit from multiple transcodes, so you're better off avoiding going back to tape if possible - better off archiving to a hard disk or DVD-ROM (also you're risking drop-outs by going back out to tape)..