This is something that has come up more than once: You shoot a multi-camera switched VariCam shoot, recording the line-cut in addition to recording in-camera iso’s. In post, you want to digitize the line-cut in Final Cut Pro HD using the 1200A deck, using the iso’s to improve the edit without having to rebuild everything from scratch. It you shoot at either 24 or 30fps, here is a tip that will save you some time, sweat and/or hard drive space:

Rather than run time code directly from your timecode generator to the VTR recording the line cut, pick a camera that is running off of a power-supply (so you know it won’t have to go down for a battery change at any point in the shoot) and run the timecode out from that camera to the VTR (making sure that the VTR is set to take external _USER BITS_ in addition to TC). Now you will have the proper flags on you line-cut tape to allow you to capture your footage at 24 of 30 fps in Final Cut. The only caveat is that at 30 fps, when you cut in footage from a camera tape you may have to shift it a frame back or forward. This is because on many VariCams (depending on how recently its firmware was updated) the pulldown cadence at 30 is not locked to timecode. This isn’t an issue at 24 since the cadence is locked so that A-frames are always on 0 and 5 frames.