What is time code? What problems does it present?
Time code is a value put on every frame of your digital video tape, showing the number of hours, minutes, seconds and frames you are in your tape, starting with 00:00:00;01 and moving on, normally to 01:00:01. The importance of time code is that it lets your video editing software find a position on the tape easily and automatically. If I know I want to go to 00:30:01:10 (30 minutes, one second and ten frames) into the tape, I can just tell the capture software, and there it will go. Unfortunately, this is not as good as it sounds because many DV cameras, including the Canon XL1, record time code on the tape as it is written. So if you have gaps in your recording (as you will if you run the camera, turn it off, and then run it again), you’ll find gaps in the time code as well. When recording on blank tape, you see, the camera simply starts at 00:00:01 again. You can fix this problem in one of two ways: First, you can record blank information or colour bars on the entire tape.
Time code is a value put on every frame of your digital video tape, showing the number of hours, minutes, seconds and frames you are in your tape, starting with 00:00:00;01 and moving on, normally to 01:00:01. The importance of time code is that it lets your video editing software find a position on the tape easily and automatically. If I know I want to go to 00:30:01:10 (30 minutes, one second and ten frames) into the tape, I can just tell the capture software, and there it will go. Unfortunately, this is not as good as it sounds because many DV cameras, including the Canon XL1, record time code on the tape as it is written. So if you have gaps in your recording (as you will if you run the camera, turn it off, and then run it again), you’ll find gaps in the time code as well. When recording on blank tape, you see, the camera simply starts at 00:00:01 again. You can fix this problem in one of two ways: First, you can record blank information or colour bars on the entire tape. Second, a
