Home Video Hints: I've Got This Great Footage...

What good is that great footage if you can't find it? What are you going to do if you can't find the original footage to a scene you need to re-edit? Reshooting is rarely an option, so you'd better look harder. Often overlooked, tape storage and organization should be a priority and you should start as early as possible. After all, the problem only gets worse after every shoot. Here are some ideas about how to prepare, organize, and store your important tapes.

Be Prepared, Pack and Black Your Tapes
People often ask if tape packing (see sidebar) is still necessary with DV tapes. I'm afraid so, maybe even more than ever. I've had a number of DV tapes that wouldn't play back correctly. The tapes play with big blocks of fluorescent green or pink scattered around the screen or large horizontal black strips across the video. I've found that if I repack the tapes they would then play correctly in any of the previously used decks. How do you repack your tapes? Simply fast-forward all the way to the end and then rewind.

Besides packing you could also "black" your tapes. In the days of pre-digital video, it was critical that you black analog tapes in order to insure that the last frame of recorded video was synced to the next one you were going to record. If you didn't do this and you had a tiny gap between recordings, there would be a short section of tape that appeared scrambled between your shots. Most often, this happens when you rewind and play back a scene to check and see if you got the shot, and then you play back a little too far. By blacking a tape, you set down a control track so that the video synchronizes up with that black video. To prevent this, you had to record black to your entire tape, perhaps by just leaving the lens cap on and pressing Record. Then, if you started recording a few frames after your last recording (which was synced to the original black recording), you'll get a few frames of black, but you won't get the nasty glitches or scrambling.