The reason it saves on hiccups is because (quite often) amateur footage has very small gaps of blank tape (no timecode written) between shots.

Most video editors, and their software tools, will use timecode to capture various scenes. If there are gaps in the time code then each shot (after the gap) starts again at zero. This makes the timecode method of capture worse than useless and increases the amount of time the Video Editor has to put in to capture video.

So black (write timecode to) the tape and avoid the hassle.

Enjoy

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IBM A51p with 160Gb Boot Disk, 160Gb external Firewire Disk, 2Gb Memory and a super duper sound card, 17\" TFT Monitor etc etc etc
Sony TRV33e : Sony TRV310e : Canon XM2
ULead products mostly including Mediastudio Pro (V8.0), Video Studio 8, Movie Factory 2.0, Premiere Elements

Remember, there is always more to learn than there is to teach.