I am very familiar with HDV clips being split at camera start/stop points upon capture - however I am experiencing a strange problem where long clips that were recorded sequentially are being split during capture in Final Cut- and I'm missing the ~10 seconds of footage at the split point? While in some few cases - these might be the notorious HDV drop-frames, in most instances they are not - because the 10 seconds are perfectly fine and I can successfully capture them after the fact. I am getting as many as 20 such gaps in a 1 hr tape capture - and am currently going through the laborious process of manually entering the time-codes for all of the gaps to capture all of the missing footage.

If I try and recapture the same long clip - the problem will reoccur at totally different time-code points. Oddly, 60% of the gaps are exactly 9 seconds 0 frames or 10 seconds 0 frames?

I am capturing 24P in final cut 6 - with the following settings:

Capture Preset: HDV
Device Control Preset: Sony HDV Firewire or HDV Firewire
Easy Setup: HDV - 1080p24

The footage was shot on a Sony Z7U, I am using a HVR-M35U capture deck.

Any helpful advice or suggestions is very much appreciated. Thanks

Jason: Lower your Pre-Roll setting to 1 second. That will minimize the gap.

Recife? Wow, I was there back in 2001. Beautiful city. Got up into Olinda as well.

We were working on a street children documentary and shot in the big garbage dump there where people actually live and "recycle" and there's an organization teaching basic literacy and numeracy.

Tip an Antarctica back for me, if that's your style.

PS. I have a Kaiser poster up in my edit bay...

Thanks Shaun, cool - lived in Olinda historic centre for 9 months - what a special place and indeed - Antartica was the drink of choice.

The issue isn't so much the length of the gaps - but that they are occurring in the first place? These gaps are not occurring at camera start/stops - but in the middle of clips - and so whether the gap is 2 seconds or 10 seconds makes no difference - I still need to backtrack after each capture to capture all the missing footage from the gaps - any idea why these gaps are mysteriously occurring on capture?

Wish I could help with the underlying issue (ie. the breaks in the first place) but all I can contribute is how to minimize the length.

Perhaps an external capture device like a Matrox MX0 series or the like that would allow capture from HDMI or analog component?