how do i capture material without KILLING my mini DV?
 

ok, i'm sort of new at desktop editing and all. i have a dv camera and a cassette with about half an hour of footage and i want to edit it on vegas 4.0. i don't have a dv player and therefore will be capturing straight from the camera via firewire.

MY QUESTION: when capturing the footage, is it possible to capture the whole half hour, in one go, as one big media file. then in vegas, break down the shots within the half hour of material into smaller media files to be edited later?

or do i HAVE to capture each shot seperately, starting and stopping the camera for each shot? - ouch.

i don't want to wear down my camera by using it as player for capturing. i doubt it's built to go through that kind of abuse. on the other hand, i don't quite have the budget at the moment to go out and buy a dv player.
if the first option, of capturing a whole cassette as one media file and then breaking it down on vegas, is NOT possible - what can i do??

thanks,
adihead

You can capture an entire tape with Vegas; it will use scene detection, which will result in an uncompressed AVI for each scene on the tape. You can split these into multiple uncompressed AVIs if you want, or just start editing from the raw footage.

This is the preferred way to work. You shouldn't start/stop your camera for each shot you want to transfer. The only catch is that you need enough disk space to store the raw footage while you edit.

Capturing an entire tape and/or section at a time is fine. Edward actually cued me into this workflow. It's much faster and easier on the heads of the cam. Not only is it fairly hard on your heads to keep stoping and playing it's time consuming. Now I capture all my tapes as one long media file, go back and review it once it's on the harddrive to extract the good footage. Tsunami has a great tool that compliments this workflow very well called "extract good footage".

The only downside to this workflow is you end up using much more hardrive space than usuall. Though when you have 360gigs who's counting. ;)

Beat me by 2 minutes Bruce. doh

One thing to add though- you don't have to use sceen detection as I usually opt not to have it enabled. I like having 4 or 5 clips rather than 40 or 50. Much less cluttered IMO.

The file will be DV25 compressed, not uncompressed.
Since the source is DV25, there's no reason to waste all the disk space to store it uncompressed. But, you probably meant DV-compressed, anyway.

For some editing packages, the timelines don't scale well with large video files. I find that < 10 minute video files are easier to edit.

I would REALLY like to see an option for a video editor that would do scene detection and separate each scene into its own file.

thanks for all the quick replies. but... i'm a bit confused.
points of confusion:

1. scene detection - if i understand correctly, vegas has a tool that detects cuts in the footage, made by camera while shooting and uses these cuts as reference points for seperating scenes, while capturing the footage onto the the hard drive. each scene it it detects is captured as a seperate .avi file in the media pool. right?
questions:
a. gints klimanis wishes in his post that he would like to see an option that seprates each scene into its own file. - isn't that exactly what scene detection does? that part is still a little foggy to me.

b. does the scene detection tool let me name each scene and orginize the scene files in the bins as i capture. also, does it give me the option to trash scenes which i don't need as i go along?

2. compression
a. if i work dv-in dv-out, what compression is there other than the already compressed dv format?

3. regarding glen elliott's first post
a. tsunami??

thanks guys. sorry if some of these are dumb questions.

adihead

Sceen detection works during capture only. It'll split your footage up into sections according to how you shot, (ie everytime you hit stop then record again on your camera it'll detect those points and create separate files). The sceen detection does it's thing in the background without annoying you with dialog boxes everytime a new sceen is detected. It captures like normal (continuously) untill you stop it, at which point it'll let you know how many files it capture (or how many files it "broke" your footage into). As far as naming- you can create a base name and it automatically renames every clip. For example if you choose the base name of "Tape1".....each clip will be named "Tape1-Clip001", "Tape1-Clip002"... and so on. If you want a more descriptive name for each clip/file you can go back and rename them afterwards.

Regarding compression- there really is no such thing as uncompressed DV, beings DV is compressed as soon as it's captured in-camera. I'm not sure what Gints meant regarding his compression comment. Maybe he can fill us in.

Lastly, Tsunami is a script written by Edward Troxel, our moderator. In easier terms think of it like a plug-in. You can run it from within Vegas and it has lots of usefull tools to help automate many editing tasks, therefore making your workflow more efficient. Tsunami also includes some artistic scripts like picture in picture, and video wall.
There's another script called Excalibur that is available as well. I'll let Edward do the bulk of the explaining regarding these two products.....

>1. scene detection -

Adi,

With the packages I've used, scene detection is just index information. All of the video stays in the same file, and a screen info file is created. My tools don't allow scene names. Both you and I want to permanently delete scenes, which is why I would like each scene to be stored in separate files in some cases.


>2. compression
>a. if i work dv-in dv-out, what compression is there other than >the already compressed dv format?

None.

>3. regarding glen elliott's first post
>a. tsunami??

That's the Tsunami MPEG encoder, also known as TMPGEnc.

If you have Scene Detection enabled, Vegas will definitely capture separate clips, and you can immediately discard any you don't want, to save space.

To avoid going back and recapturing other footage later, I tend to capture a whole tape in one clip then use saved Regions if I need to store and index separate scenes. Doing this is a VIRTUAL exercise, i.e. there is always just one large clip which the Regions are references to.

If space becomes a problem, you can Save as with Trimmed media - this makes copies of all used footage - the original can then be deleted.

OK, let's see if we can straighten this out:

1. Scene Detection is NOT required if you want to capture the full 30 minutes into one clip. I usually have scene detection OFF.

2. Vegas can easily handle a 30 minute clip. Restricting to 10 minutes is NOT necessary. I routine use hour + long clips

3. The captured video is NOT uncompressed. It will be a standard DV-AVI file which IS compressed - roughly 5:1

4. The Tsunami that is referred to here is my plug-in for Vegas at http://www.jetdv.com/tsunami and is NOT the MPEG encoder. Specifically, look at the Extract Good Clips feature.

ok. thanks guys. i think i understand now. and whatever might still be a little confusing will probably clearified as i work. so i think i'll just start capturing as you suggest and learn as i progress. thanks.

adi.

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Wright :
If space becomes a problem, you can Save as with Trimmed media - this makes copies of all used footage - the original can then be deleted. -->>>

Peter, the only way to chop your clips up and delete the source material while keeping the extracted peices is to encode the peices you took from your original clip into a new file.
*Or I'm reading your post incorrectly*

Scenalyzer can break up clips into individual files during capture based on scene detection.

You have to be careful how you set the capture thresholds or you can end up with dozens of files.

"Peter, the only way to chop your clips up and delete the source material while keeping the extracted peices is to encode the peices you took from your original clip into a new file.
*Or I'm reading your post incorrectly*"

Glen, to check this out I just did the following:

Started a new project, and put two ten second events on the timeline. Both events were from a one hour captured clip.

I then Saved with trimmed media, and two new clips were created, each ten seconds long, plus 1 sec "handles"

If I had no further use for the one hour clip, I could now delete it and still have the pieces I selected in my new project.

Peter

What is "Saved with trimmed media"?