Timecode and Canon DSLR

Question

Do the Canon DSLR cameras shoot timecode? If so, can Premiere recognize it? I've had 2 projects with source footage from Canon 7D cameras and all of the clips start at 00:00:00:00. This latest project has over 6 hours of source footage, I could really, really use some timecode...
-Jeff

Answer 1

Hi Colin,
Thanks for the reply on this. I don't care how they do it, a sidecar file would be fine, but it's soooo useful.  I don't even mind if it's something we had to trigger in Bridge, since Bridge seems to be where I start out with hundreds of clips.  I use Bridge to add the metadata to multiple clips at once (e.g. the tape/card name/number and scene).  Bridge can see the camera model, lens, ISO, etc for photos, but doesn't seem to bother for video.  Please, pretty please Adobe?
Getting the camera, lens, iso, aperture and shutter speed has been useful in tracking down a couple of issues in the past, like why is this shot so noisy, oh someone stuck it at ISO6400!  That sort of thing.
Yes, you are correct that the timecode is not frame perfect, but since we sync the times on all cameras at the start of the day it's close enough to be able to pin point clips fairly accurately when looking for them.  We can then run them through PluralEyes to sync them perfectly (oh, that's another story!).
In FCP we use a chequer board system to lay all clips on the sequence according to the timecode, using multiple tracks, one for each camera.  If we had 3 or 4 cameras rolling then we simply reduce the video size to 50% in the sequence and move them to the 4 quarters of the monitor so we can see them all at once - similar to multicam. The difference is we can still see every single clip taken by every camera throughout an entire day of shooting, on a single sequence timeline, in chronological order, more or less synchronised.  We can scrub through seeing all cameras simultaneously, and instantly see what each camera did that day. 
Why would we want to do this? It's just a really quick way of reviewing the day's action! If the cameras were split during the day covering different things happening then this allows the editor to quickly scrub through all the clips, see what was happening at the "same time" in different locations (how do you even begin to do this without timecode or slate?).  It also familiarises them with all the clips and scenes in a single sequence for the entire day.
Now, as Colin pointed out, the timecode is not accurate enough to sync with, but it's close enough that knowing roughly what time of day something was shot we can quickly scrub through and find a shot very quickly.  This effectively becomes our reference sequence.
I can't find any way of doing this in Premiere Pro CS5, but it was literally 2 or 3 mouse clips in FCP to take all the clips from the logging bin and create a sequence like this. There seems no way of doing this in CS5.
How long would this take without time code, and with CS5 as it stands today?    The THREE things I really miss from FCP are the timecode, multiclip sequence and the join through edit.   Oh well......
Naturally, I've submitted a feature request
Message was edited by: ExactImage - Fixed a couple of typos!