Capturing - all at once or piecemeal?
 

Hi all,
Being the video 'expert' at church (i.e. I can walk and chew gum at the same time <G>) I take care of the church basketball league's awards night video, small pre-recorded skit productions, etc. My raw Canon GL-1 footage ranges from recording bits and pieces of games and practices to multiple full scene run-throughs. My question is, when y'all are working from raw footage that's more piecemeal in nature, do you review it and capture only what you want or transfer the whole tape to hard drive and pick from there (I'm using Adobe Premiere 6.0.1)? On the one hand, full transfer seems to me to be easier, puts less wear on your camera and leaves you with one file to take shots from, but on the other hand, there's going to be a lot of tape transferred you won't use and a lot of trimming of the main file footage for specific shots.

Any advantages, disadvantages between these approaches? Also, I don't remember offhand how much space raw DV takes up vs analog, anyone got any thumbrules?

Thanks for any info,
Jeff

I transfer the whole thing and then just use the pieces I really want.

Well Jeff,

I use a mixture of capturing the whole tape and cutting bits out in the computer and capturing small parts.

The proper way to do it is to review your tape, logging timecode on a sheet of paper, creating an EDL (Edit decision list). Then you use the batch capture facility, type in your timecodes and then let the computer do the rest. Obviously this does not work well if you have 'broken' timecode.

I guess you should use what ever you feel will get the job done :)

RAW DV footage will take up about 13GB (a little bit less) for every 1hour. Since analog can also use a DV codec it will take up the same amount of space provided its captured at full resolution, 720x480 (ntsc) 720x576 (pal).

Cheers,

Ed

The edit list was the reason I asked...my basketball video edit list has about 200 clips over 3 hours of tape. I don't think Premiere has enough batch capture slots for all that <G>. Sounds like it might be easier to capture the whole thing for this one. I did the same thing with our drama series earlier this year, but that was more like 2-3 minute segments, so the batch capture sounds good for that.

Thanks for the info,
Jeff

For most projects I log and then capture selectively. When I don't, I batch capture 8-9 min segments, because I find them much easier to scrub in the source window than a full hour. I get frustrated trying to find five seconds in 3600 of them.

David Hurdon

I have discovered that doing one shot captures can lead to audio drift in some instances. The batch capture function is the best way to go. I usually review the footage, and place in and out marks at that time, start the capture, and get another cup of coffee while it works away.

For those of us without decks, single pass capturing is the way to go.

Granted, it takes longer than batch capturing, and wastes disk space, but I'd wager for most hobbyist-level people, it's hardly that big a deal.

Honestly, even if I could afford a decent deck (this may change now that I've heard about JVC's SR-VS30U), I can't see myself doing the back, forth, rewind, fast forward, stop, play, pause maneuver.

For me, batch capture is dangerous. Can't afford to be replacing camcorder tape mechanisms.

The usual process we follow is to transfer the DV footage to VHS with the time code 'burnt in' - essentially this means the TC display is turned on, so that on the VHS copy, the time code is visible in a seperate window.
We then review the VHS tapes on a standard VHS VCR, forwarding and rewinding as much as we like without compromising the original tapes in any way. We select our footage from the VHS tapes, noting the TC ins and outs on a log sheet, along with a short description of the take. (Sometimes, we select more than one take of the same shot so that we leave the final decision for the editing table.) The additional advantage of this kind of logging is that if you need to go back to thetape looking for some footage, you have notes on the entire tape, and can go back to the exact point on the original tape without scrubbing through it. Also, any additional review of the footage can use the VHS copy rather than the original tapes.
We then type in the relevant take information into a simple .txt or Word .doc batch file in this pattern: Tape number - TC in - TC out - description/take identity. Seperate each item with a simple tab space.
Start up the edit software, import the batch file, and ask it to batch capture. From then on, the software will run through each tape once, capture the specified portions, and ask for the next tape. TC breaks, of course, will create issues, as will the same TC recorded at different points on the same tape.
The best way to set TC on each of your original tapes is to set the TC to the tape number: Tape 1 starting at 01:00:00:00, tape 2 at 02:00:00:00, and so on. After the 23rd tape, you'll have to go back to 01:00:00:00; but in your log info, you'll have a different tape number for the time code, so the edit software will not get confused.
Hope this helps!