Capturing and logging process

longshanks

longshanks

Well-known member
Hi everyone,

I have 55hrs of DVX footage ready for ingestion into FCP and I was wondering what might be the ideal set-up for a finished product of 30-60mins. I'm debating whether to capture the tapes as a whole and then make subclips out of that or log and batch capture my clips straight from the tape. I know this is a issue of debate, but my set-up is:

1. 4 terabytes of HDD space
2. Running an 8-core Mac Pro
3. Don't have a capture deck, using a cheap miniDV camera for capture.

I'm undecided because I would rather not over-tax the system by having 1hr long clips(despite the subclips) and naming each subclip for every take. However, logging and batch capturing clips, especially off of a crap camera sounds very time consuming as well.

Thoughts?
 
In the real world you'd have someone log all the tapes on a separate system. Even a VTR would serve well here.

Since you don't have someone to do that you are right back where you are. YOU have to make the decision. ME? I'd have had all my tapes (and do) logged already either electronically or on log sheets.

CaptM
 
True a VTR deck would be nice and I might pony up the cash if I feel its necessary, but in either case I don't have a PA to do this kind of job, just me :)

But is there an easy way to manage this? Basically I'm stuck capturing a whole tape which ends up being a nearly hour long clip. From there, I break it into subclips which ends up being around 280-300 clips per tape. Once that's done, I go through each clip and name it accordingly.

So my question is, should I take another approach to this that would save me time and energy such as a 3rd party program that helps manage media? Or go back to either batch captures or whole tape captures?
 
I use a program called CATDV and it's accompanying software that does the capture. It will automatically create clips on camera start/stop. Then you can log them AS it is recording or just wait and do it later.

Plus, it doesn't care about timecode breaks or DVX mode switches... it just captures!! ALSO -- it will retrieve the date stamp from the meta data that FCP refuses to catch.

Nice.

CaptM
 
I say if you are going to subclip for sure anyway, why not just log and capture each clip. It would be easy to just log all the clips from the tape then do a batch capture and walk away for an hour. It's kinds double time, but at least you have individual clips.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top