Capturing Footage: Always .avi's?
 

I'm using Vegas 5.0. Is all footage always captured as .avi files? Are there any other file types that footage can be captured as? What's the best type for quality?

thanks,

Jeremy

Well, if you're on a PC, and since you're running Vegas, then you are, then all the clips will be captured as .avi, unless you're doing HD, then they'd be captured as .m2t.

I think Macs capture as .mov (Quicktime), because that is the default media player for that OS, just as Window's is .avi.

I hope that helps.

SB

The term "Capture" is really a mis-nomer. When pulling in video from MiniDV, it's really more equivalent to a "file copy" from the tape to the hard drive. "AVI" is just the file "type" that is given to the file and is just a wrapper for the real information inside.

Thanks for quick replies!

This is a oft-argued point(!)

In many ways, it is more like a capture than not. The camcorder (or whatever), blindly streams the DV data to any FireWire device (e.g., PC) that happens to be listening. If the receiver misses a packet, it's gone - forever. The "file copy" scenario would work differently - the receiver would control the flow of data. The data sent over the FireWire connection is also not arranged in the same way as it is on tape (I've buried my head in the DV specs for too long!) and there's extra information on the tape that doesn't get transmitted (error correction etc).

In the streaming data model, the PC "grabs" the data that are being streamed - so "capture" is appropriate.

Also, with the packet analogy, it's similar to "packet capturing" using in networking.

Sometime in the last decade, though, someone decided that "capturing video" is exclusively the domain of analog signals. I don't know who that someone was, but I believe that they were/are misguided!

I'm sure today for every proponent of the term "capture", there is an opponent....