Hi,

Help! Tape from my Z1U, played from a M10U playback deck or from the camera itself, is getting X seconds cut off the front upon capture into FCP5 (set to the HDV 1080i-60 'easy setup'). This does not happen to tape from my FX1.

After thinking this may have something to do with that "quick start" setting (it did not), I went into Audio/Video Settings | Device Controls in FCP. I noticed the Sony HDV device control's pre- and post-roll settings were 5 and 3 seconds respectively - 8 seconds, about what I was losing. So I changed them to 1 second (the minimum allowed) and now my loss per clip is two seconds. How do I get it to 0?

To summarize: no matter what I do, I am now losing a total of two seconds at the head of each Z1U clip. Again, not the FX1 clips; they are fine. Obviously something having to do with the more "pro" timecode being laid down on the Z1U tape, but how can I not lose *any* tape during capture?

- I've tried using external hard drives and internal
- Tried changing all timecode record settings, and resetting to 00:00.00:00
- Tried playing back from camera as well as M10U

This has been quite a sherlock holmes process for me .. anyone here run into the same thing?

PS - The Z1U clips capture in their entirety and FINE in iMovie HD, nothing lost! iMovie is probably seeing some sort of dumbed down timecode or handling it in a more simplistic way without pre- and post- roll...

THANKS for your time... :)

Try using capture now. Rewind the tape, press play and hit capture now immediately.

And maybe next time, put about 10 seconds of black or color bars at the front of the tape and every time you stop shooting. Not having any space for preroll and postroll is going to cause all kinds of problems if you ever need to recapture the tape. It will also be much easier to find the end of the tape in case you need to review previous shots while shooting. I use color bars because they're very easy to distinguish from regular shots, but black (lens cap on) will work too.

BTW, the reason iMovie works is that it doesn't really care if some frames are dropped because of a tape that's not running up to speed.