Please Help. Does Premiere 6.0 Automatically Split Video Into Clips When Capturing?
 

I was capturing video into Premiere 6.0 and it put it into one long clip even though there were many clips in it. Is there a way to make it automatically put the video into clips or do you have to do it manually?

Wait, did you just do batch capture? or what did you do?

I did Movie Capture and then did these steps:
Clicked "Play"
Clicked "Record"
After everything was recorded I clicked "Stop"
And then a window popped up asking me to name the file, which I did

And then when I open up that file, it's one long clip.

Are you using Premiere 6 by itself, or with a Pinnacle DV500? On it's own I don't recall Premiere 6 being able to batch capture to separate clips. However, the DV500 came with Pinnacle's own capture utility, which may have been able to do this. I also know that with the later version(s) of the DV500 drivers a utility was included for automatically separating one long clip into separate, scene-based clips inside Premiere 6.

Premiere 6.0 has a batch capture feature, but it is based on tape timecode (i.e. you define a list of clips using start and end times before starting the capture). I use this extensively to get around the 4GB file size limit I have with a FAT32 hard drive.

As far as I know it does not have a way to automatically split clips based on scene changes. Maybe the Pinnacle system Christopher mentioned can do this -- I'm just using a basic OHCI Firewire card.

That's really weird. So Windows Movie Maker does that for you but Premiere doesn't?

I couldn't say for sure as I have barely touched WMM, but I do recall that one of the Ulead programs (came with my firewire card I think) could do it too. Premiere of course beats it on all other features, but I was surprised that scene detection was not supported by the "better" of the two.

If you really want to you can probably capture using WMM and edit in Premiere.

I know Premiere Pro 1.5 breaks up the different shots when you capture. Just capture the tape.

I don't get it... "Capture to tape" Aren't we capturing FROM tape? I was thinking this same question.

Hugh,

You're right, but he has Premiere 6. Separate clips by scene detection during capture were not introduced until Premiere Pro 1.5.

Capture from tape... sorry, typo. And, I didn't know version 6.0 didn't separate clips.

I'm in need of something as well. I found the Pinnacle DV-200 offers a capture utility that should do exactly what we need. It comes with a standard firewire card and Premiere 6 but the capture utility is the main feature. It is no longer offered by Pinnacle but they should still be around.

I was able to download the full install program from Pinnacle. I allows me to install and open DVtools, the capture utility, but it seems to want to see the DV-200 card. It will not connect to my Panasonic DV-2000 deck. The test utility also wants to see the card before it will do a test of the connected firewire device.

I will try and locate a card to test properly. If anyone has access to one, please post your results for all to read.

You could try Scenalyzer, a capture utility which has scene detection. It's $39; the company has an older version available for free in the download section of their website. I don't know if it has scene detection or not.

Website: www.scenalyzer.com

I just tried Scenalyzer, the freeware version, and it does exacly what I need.

Basically, you capture the entire tape into your hard drive from start to finish as one file (operating system permitting... I'm using W2K w/NTFS so no problem for me). Then open that big file in Scenalyzer and click on "scan datestamps". It then goes through the file and creates scene markers for each new shot (camera restart) based on the new time/date of the clip.

Then you tell it to save the markers as new DV files. You will need to have twice as much space on your HD as it will need it to copy the tapes contents all over again. After that you can delete the original capture file.

It's very simple to use and it worked perfectly in my tests. Since each time you start your DV camera you will create a new date stamp you will have a new DV file and a new picture icon in Premiere to work with.

It's free. Check it out!

WinDV is a free program that captures from and to tape. It also has scene detection so it creates a separate file whenever there's a scene change on the tape.

You can download it here.