I personally do not black mark the tape. why?

some are saying that to black mark is to record with the lens cap on or to just record black(ie mini DV), but i believe that the more information you record on that DV tape, there is more of a chance that you will have drop-frames when you record since mini DV is compressed so much on such a little tape.

drop-frames means that pieces of the digital information that is encoded magnetically onto a DV tape can simply fall out or not be encoded, so when you log and capture onto your N-L edit machine, it will give you an error, and totally f#@! your source material.

I simply do not black mark, but just tape over old footage. but i still rarely do this especially on mini DV since it is video that is already compressed 9 times(one of the reasons why mini DV is so high quality, yet so subseptible to drop-frame).

if i am doing a new project of importance, i start out with a new tape, so that the possibility of drop-frames does not happen to my digital film(it could be disastrous).

I also strongly recommend PACKING your mini DV, HI-8, SVHS, VHS, BetaSP, etc tapes BEFORE you commence rolling camera. PACKING means forwarding your tape all the way to the end and then rewinding all the way to the beggining before you start rolling. tapes are highly taut. packing stretches them, and prepares them for recording. there is less of a posibility of drop-frame because of this process. i also would only recommend using only mini-DV tapes that are either SONY or FUJI. i have had problems with others such as JVC or PANASONIC.


maybe that will help most of you out there, so START PACKING!!

I don't understand what exactly happens when the editor detects dropped frames. So it won't let you use the entire tape or just that frame?

Don't be silly.

Unpacking the tapes as you call it is a complete fallacy and a waste of time.

Striping/Black Bursting the tapes is a highly recommended thing to do. Why? You are recording a continuous timecode track onto the tape.

Why would I want to do this? Well, it helps prevent timecode breaks which very nicely screw both footage and any kind of batch capture list you are trying to prep.

Take it from me, black those tapes!

definetly black the tapes. i just did a film where i didnt black it because of time constraints and in order to find footage i had to watch the entire tape insted of just ff to the right time.

You're beautiful, just touch it.

dam, some say that you have to and others say you don't. Make up your mind people!
A question though. If one decides to blackmark for the continuous timecode reason, will they have to film black, or can they just film something for a whole hour nonstop? Or does that matter?

Blacking tapes was more important in the Analog days. Even then, the only time I ever blacked a tape was when I was using it as a master edit tape. I always let footage tapes ride and was careful to always allow enough pre-roll before the action just in case there was a break (Which was rare).

In those days it was important for it to actually record black (Although some people would 'Stripe' the tape with color bars) because ghosting could occur on most of the analog formats, particularly with sub-par heads. With DV it doesn't really matter if you use black or color bars or any other footage if you're actually gonna go through with it.

It's nice to have a clean continuous TC for DV, but it's not the end of the world if you don't have it. Good notes and a crafty editor can work around it with minimal effort. Before, if your master edit tape had a TC break you had to start all over again (Thank goodness for NLE's).

For those that are careful, and run slug everytime they need to check a take, remove the tape or turn the camera off it's kind of a waste of time to black out your tapes.

Nota "Wouldn't suggest 'Striping' film either" Mono

Nice to black? Nice???

It's in my view, ESSENTIAL to black out tapes before use.

Why? Well, my current film project is completely screwed because there are time code breaks on my tapes which the avid i'm using has hissy fits over.

I think the fact I was using DVCPRO doesn't help either since no-one seems to use that format.

A competent shooter will not get timecode breaks on DV regardless of whether they black a tape or not. I've never handed a tape with broken timecode to an editor and I've shot a multi-cam feature, a music video, a mini-series, and a whole mess of shorts on DV.

Nota "Hasn't heard anyone use the term 'Control track' in about 4 years" Mono

so now the deal is with timecode breaks. Well NotaMoto has a good idea, if you shoot a scene, view it and FF to a few seconds before the end, the TC should'nt break. OK

Pretty much. The trick is to make sure you always have some redundant "Slug" footage that you can record over whenever you have to switch to VTR mode or remove the tape.

My advice: Just play around a little with leaving some left over footage and switching tapes etc.

"Competent" may be a misleading term in my above post because failing to do this does not make one "Incompetent" (I definately wouldn't mean to suggest rjpurves of being such, as he has the right idea). Just want to clarify that as it didn't read the way I intended it to.

Nota "Wonders if PAL cameras have more TC issues than NTSC" Mono