Your post made me smile… sorry I made you write so much, because you’re preaching to the choir. My comments were not about tapes or cards, I had mainly stills on my mind (and in my browser).
I’ve been a professional editor for several years now, thank you. I’ve onlined and supervised TV shows that required a real offline-online workflow. Tapes and cards without timecode are a nightmare. I was scared when I had to cut an HDV feature 4 years ago w/o timecode (the JVC HD100 just came out, no one supported it properly) and I’m disappointed that the same problem surfaced again with DSLR clips.
Anyway, the current project I’m working on has dozens if not hundreds of stills. It also has plenty of stock footage from a plethora of sources, and they’re not in any manner accommodating each other with continuous TC.
Reel names were not meant to be unique identifiers of individual clips, but of containers. When you’re given a hundred glass jars with 1 tag in each, the simple & sensible way is to handle them by what the tag says; not by creating a parallel, non-automated catalog of jars. Do you think a workflow where you have to manually type in timecode for every clip is a good one? No, it’s a broken workflow.
I’d like an exact name match, *in addition* to reel & TC. Better yet, with an option to turn it on or off. Looks like it’ll work fine with the situation you described. Anyway,
p.s. While batch Capture was the only way in when I started, I find myself using it less and less these days. If my media is lost I bring up the backup drive and reconnect to it.