Editing question - to rough cut or not
 

The problem with nature videography is no matter how careful you are you end up recording a bunch of cr$%. You just start filming and the bird flies off, etc.

So, while I wait for FCP4 and think about how to deal with old footage I'm wondering about rough cutting my footage in iMovie. Basically, import a tape, trash all I don't ever want to keep and dump back out to a new tape.

Will this cause problems when I go to bring it into FCP? Even now there can be breaks in time code. At least if I rough edit it would record onto the new tape in one unbroken act, although I don't know what it does to the time code.

Thoughts?

I can't quite envision what advantage you would accomplish with such an activity, Jeff. All shoots produce undesirable footage...lots of it. The biggest advantage I see in your proposal is that it will force you to look at your footage again, always a beneficial activity.

Just getting itchy, eh? <g>

Not only itchy but it will reduce the number of tapes I have footage scattered over. For example, I can probably get three tapes worth of footage from Arizona down to one. For stock footage I can start pulling all similar species together (so I pop in one tape instead of using the timecode to grab snippets off of 5 or 10).

Is there a disadvantage to doing this? I can also see going back to some completed projects, reimporting them and cleaning them up, color correcting, etc. once I have FCP4.

Honestly, I've never tried going back to tape from iMovie. I don't think it would hurt anything, though.

It is all a matter of editing style. You have nothing to lose as long as you don't copy over your existing footage.

But will the time code be messed up or might cause problems in FCP? If not, then I really have nothing to loose as long as a tape doesn't get eaten. It's good practice anyway.

I believe that when you export back to your cam, you will create a new timecode. Just send one stream back to the cam and go with the new timecode.

I also do a great deal of nature and wildlife work. I never compile tapes to save a little space or to reuse tapes. I never reuse tapes, too many chances for something to go wrong and tape is cheap. I log each tape as to TC and scenes and keep a data base of all the tapes and scenes.

You never know when you'll need a background noise or obscure shot that you thought wasn't needed. There are too many risks involved and the few advantages don't out weigh the risks for me.

Hey Jeff,
One thing that I've been doing is to have a few tapes going at once. If I Know I'm going to be shooting a lot of a specific subject I'll have a tape for say... one for flowers, insects, time laps, misc, etc. It's almost like doing what your talking about only backwards. It's cut search & downloading time in half. I thought at first that I might get the tapes mixed up but its really worked out pretty smooth.
Chris