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"?

File > Save As ...

You can then tick a box to "Copy and trim media with project.

There is then another choice:
Copy source media OR Create trimmed copies of source media.

Selecting the second choice does the following:

Saves a new version of the project

Writes new media files using only those parts of clips you have actually used in the timeline, plus whatever Heads and Tails duration you choose - this allows minor adjustments to in/out points.

This means you can then delete the original captured footage, if you have no further use for it.

Very nice- I did not know that! Thanks for the heads up.

Now when you choose this option is there any rendering that has to be done beings it's making new (Shorter) clips from the original long clips?

Yes - media for the whole project is rewritten, so rendering time depends on the programme duration and complexity ....

So wait...how would it be any different than if I chopped a single large clip up into small peices and just simply ran "render as" compared to save as and clicking the "copy and trim media with project" tick box?

Another difference is that the audio will converted to w64 and will no longer be grouped with the corresponding video. I like "render as" better.

Glen - the big difference is that Vegas does it automatically for you - if you have a program with hundreds of events it wouldn't be practical to go through rendering each one. And rendering to new track or new clip combines all simultaneous events into one, whereas save with trimmed media keeps each track as is.

But, the issue Ed raises of making audio W64 format is a complicatioon though - I don't know why it does this - does this mean the audio in events on the timeline is also W64 and separated from its video, Ed?

Peter

<<<-- Originally posted by Peter Wright : does this mean the audio in events on the timeline is also W64 and separated from its video, Edward?

Peter -->>>


No. When you add an AVI clip, the audio is a part of that AVI file. Notice that when you do a PTT that the last step is the creation of a W64 file. My understanding is that W64 allows for large file sizes than WAV and is probably the reason it is used. Now as to why the W64 is created instead of just creating a separate AVI file with original audio, I do not know.

Speaking of PTT, this maybe a bit OT but....say if you have footage thats already rendered or doesn't need rendering- when you go to PTT does it need to re-render it anyway for any reason?

A WAV file has a maximum of 2 or 4 GB depending on certain
things. This runs down to 186 (3 hours) minutes or 378 (6 hours)
minutes of audio when using 48.000 hz, 16 bit stereo. You
can devide these numbers when going to 4 channel audio
(if you store it as incompressed wav).

W64 is a 64 bit version which moves the maximum filesize in
the terabyte range. You will need to be using an NTFS file
system though to store these files.

Why is a thing I don't have the answer to. Perhaps just to
be safe? Perhaps it is a setting you can change somewhere?

<<<-- Originally posted by Glen Elliott : Speaking of PTT, this maybe a bit OT but....say if you have footage thats already rendered or doesn't need rendering- when you go to PTT does it need to re-render it anyway for any reason? -->>>

It will only create the W64 file for the audio if everything has already been rendered and/or does not need rendering.

the reason i am reviving this old post is that after all this time i still haven't come across the mentioned 'scene detection' feature in vegas 4.

i'll try here to explain once again what exactly i'm looking for:
let's say i have a dv tape with 40 minutes of recorded material for a short film. i capture the full 40 minutes of material in one go so that i don't have to stop and play my dv device repeatedly. but what i end up with is one big .avi file.

what i'm looking for is a way to capture the full 40 minutes in one go, but somehow have vegas detect the break between scenes and save the different scenes as seperate .avi files in the media bin. this way i can delete scenes i don't need and save disk space.
is there some way to do this?

if so, please explain how.

thanks,
adi

Capture program - Options - Preferences - Capture tab. The very first option is "Enable Scene Detection" and is ON by default.

One thing to note: Scene Detection will ONLY work IF you have set the Date/Time in the camera! This is because it works by detecting jumps in the Date/Time (since the timecode will be continuous).

If you need optical scene detection, try Scenalyzer Live.

it's me again.
i downloaded a trial version of scenalyzer live and tried it out.
as edward said, it can detect scenes optically (detecting the stop/rec pauses between shots). but it is not perfect. you can set the sensitivity level of the detector to one of four different levels. low sensitivity tends to miss breaks between shots and when sensitivity is set too high it breaks up single shots (especially where there is camera movement), which is no good.
after testing scenalyzer, set at different levels of sensitivity, i came to the sad conclusion that it couldn't capture even 5 minutes of material without misjudgments of scene detection (either too sensitive or not sensitive enough).

is it THAT difficult to create a scene detector that can detect breaks between shots flawlessly?

do you know of any other scene detector which might work better than scenalyzer?

i can't use vegas scene detection, because my material has the time code running and not the date/time.

thanks

Why don't you do it manually this time and set the date/time on your camera?

There are some automation scripts over at the sundance media site that may help you export your stuff into individual files.

Check out the Vegas shortcuts sticky at this forum. The trim functions may be helpful.

hi glenn. thanks for replying.

<<< Why don't you do it manually this time and set the date/time on your camera? >>>>

i don't do it manually, because i don't want to start, stop and rewind my dv camcorder (being used as a dv input device to my computer) all the time, wearing it out by doing so. unless i didn't get what you mean by "manually"

<<< There are some automation scripts over at the sundance media site that may help you export your stuff into individual files. >>>

i checked it out. couldn't find a script that does what i want. i do admit: i only went through as far as ten pages of files, and gave up. do you know of anything specific? is there no search engine in the sundance media site?

<<< Check out the Vegas shortcuts sticky at this forum. The trim functions may be helpful. >>>

not sure i understand how vegas shortcuts will help?

By manually, I mean you capture the whole thing into Vegas and then split up the scenes yourself. Then export them all as individual files.

I think someone made some sort of script that will do batch exports. I remember hearing about one.

ok. i see now what you mean by manually. i'll look for that script. otherwise, it seems to time consuming.
thanks.

Adi, as I think others have said, Vegas already does exactly what you're asking for.

If time and date are set in the camera at time of shooting (AFAIK all DV cameras have Date/time), and Scene Detection is enabled in Vegas Capture, it will split the capture into separate clips for each time you stopped and restarted the camera.

There's no stopping and rewinding involved.

ALWAYS make sure the date and time is set on the camera. It doesn't even have to be correct - it just has to be SET.

If the date/time is set (while recording), scene detection will work correctly in either Vegas Capture or Scenalyzer Live.

in order for the date information to be recorded onto the tape (without it appearing in the picture), do i have to use tapes with cassette memory?

No. Any Mini DV tape will store date and time as long as the camera had this up and running.

The date/time is part of the media recorded to the tape. NOT part of the video image. Those are two totally separate things.

cool. thanks.