I had a friend contact me the other day about an issue he was having with one of his tapes. It basically would crap out every time he tried to import it into his editing system. A quick diagnosis lead us to the land of timecode breaks. In order to stay far away from this land of no-return, follow these simple steps:
- Run tape before your first shot, or add bars and tone
- When taping, make sure you record a few seconds after all the action you want captured has stopped
- If you stop or take out the tape, make sure you roll back a couple of seconds and record over that extra few seconds of footage instead of blank tape. Recording over blank tape will cause your timecode to break
- Look in the viewfinder before shooting. If it says this: --:--:--;-- you're going to have a timecode break. If it has numbers, you're fine
- Some people like blacking out a tape before recording (recording through a whole tape with lens cap on to stamp timecode). I think it just wears the heads and wastes time - but it's an option
- If you already have a problem tape, import the scenes in chunks into your editing system or you can turn off "Abort capture on timecode break" on Final Cut Pro
- If it still refuses to import, get another camera and make a clone of your tape by playing on one and recording on another. This will give the new tape a fresh timecode
Here's more info on
timecodes 
1. Capturing video in iMovie, and importing the DV files into Final Cut is another great way to get around time code breaks. Won't work if you have tons of screwed up footage, but if you have more than is convenient to grab with "capture now" in final cut...
Posted at 7:03PM on Nov 8th 2005 by Ryan McLean