Capturing HDV footage with incorrect timecode

Question

Rookie mistake. I started shooting a new project on my brand new canon xh-a1s, and in the excitement I forgot to stripe my first few tapes. And it being a film project I've been constantly using the playback to look at the takes I just did. So what's happened is I don't have a nice clean 0;00;00 to 1;04;00 timecode on all the tapes, rather there are frequent spots on the tapes when it's started a new timecode at 0;00;00. So when I capture my footage into premiere pro cs3, it gets confused and either drastically unsyncs the audio or repeats the same 4 seconds of sound through the whole clip.
Oddly enough when you play the captured footage outside of premiere, in windows media player say, it looks and sounds fine. But premiere chokes on it everytime I import it or capture it.
Right now I've managed to capture successfuly going clip at a time with the capture now function, and staring at the timecode waiting to hit stop just when it gets to a new timecode. Sometimes I hit stop on time and it captures cleanly, sometimes I don't and it doesn't sync or skips the audio. But obviously trying to go through 8 hours of footage this way is an arguous, unreliable, and incredibly time consuming process. Logging clips doesn't work either because it never seems to stop the capture on time to save the clip.
Does anyone have any suggestions as how I can get the audio into premiere properly without doing what I'm doing now?

Answer 1

...or, always look at the timecode display in the viewfinder or the LCD before you press REC.  The nice display will ALWAYS indicate when you've reset the timecode. If the display is 00:00:00.00 or similar and you are NOT the very beginning of the tape, pressing record will start a new time code sequence everytime.
If you have END SEARCH, use it.  this will usually work as long as you haven't removed the tape.  Either way, rewinding the tape until a non-zero timecode appears and then pressing REC works.  The camera will increment the timecode from that value..
I'm not at my editting station, but I seem to remember that PPPro has a capture setting that will cause it to ignore timecode breaks--you then edit out the rough section at each break when editing.  Unless you're going to do something clever like recapturing HDV after capturing SD, you're not going to use the timecode anyway.
Then in the future, always look at the timecode display before you press REC.  There is really no reason to stripe if you always remember this.