Do you need to put Bars and Tone on each P2 card after each time it has been formated if you are going to continue to reuse that card several times during the day?

Or would you only have to do it once, for a day of shooting, if no settings are changed in the camera?

It seams like a silly question, but I have not thought of it before, nore can I recall reading about it.

Charlie

Theoretically every clip of B&T you lay down will be identical, since there are no analog settings on the camera that would affect the B&T, and no tape variability. Even if you change scene settings, your B&T will remain unaffected.

If you're outputting P2 to tape, pre-edit (for example, I have one client that I shoot P2 DVCPro50 for, then go component out to DBeta and build source reels for him...no hard drive archiving at all) it might be worth throwing B&T on the transfer tape at the beginning of each day's shoot, but certainly no more than that. It'd just help the editor set up the playback machine. (But in my experience with a wide range of digital tape formats, the B&T usually comes off the tape exactly where it's supposed to be if the playback deck is at unity. I only give a cursory glance at the scopes on digital tapes in edit, they're so predictable.)