Not really FCP realted but how many times do you use your mini DV tapes???

Question

I mean, do you buy new ones and only use them once or do you record over them to save money?
When working professionally does it make much difference?
Cheers,
Alex

Answer 1

Oh, yeah. On the subject of blacking DV tapes, I don't either. But I do prep a tape by recording a minute (more or less) of bars and tone to it before rolling. This might be unreasonable paranoia on my account, but my gut tells me that there's more likely to be a problem with the very beginning of a tape or the very end than the middle. Plus, putting down a minute of bars and tone ensures that I have plenty of preroll for cueing later.
Whenever possible, I do the same on the end of a tape. When I'm done with that tape, I turn on the camera's bars-and-tone generator and roll for at least a minute, to give myself postroll. Since DV and HDV cameras record timecode along with sound and picture, stopping the camera means you stop the timecode, making it darned near impossible to log-and-capture that last frame you shot. So putting on a minute or so of postroll is a habit for me.
Sometimes that's not possible. If I'm shooting a live event, sometimes I have to roll right up to the end of the tape, then switch as fast as possible to my next prepped tape and keep shooting. But whenever I can, I put the postroll on it.
None of this would be necessary if we could lay down black and timecode to DV tape the way we can to Digibeta or what have you, then record only sound and picture leaving the continuous timecode track alone. Alas, ain't possible.
(Wildly off-topic, but does anybody know if DVCPRO has the same limitation? If not, it's just another reason to be jealous of my friends who shoot HDX-900s.)