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How to capture media so that if i need to recapture it, it will still line up perfectly with all edits in project file
Hi, my fear is that i capture all my footage onto firewire drive through final cut pro, proceed to edit the video and the drive crashes and i lose everything. Now it is very easy for me to backup the project files anywhere because the file size of the project file is small enough, it contains all the pointers and edit points etc but doesn’t contain the actual media itself, which is huge. The source media however is too big to backup to a second drive so I want to avoid that.
Now, I keep all the source tapes with the original media on it, so if i lose my work on the firewire drive i will still have all the media on the source mini dv tapes and i will also have the FCP project file itself regularly backed up somewhere else as well. However, it would do me no good because when I re-capture all the media, it would seem I would have to RECUT the whole video from scratch.So my question pertaining to all this is the following:
Is there a way to capture the media from tapes in a way that when i cut the video on final cut it would remember the timecode or some other reference on the tapes itself so if i lose the media on the drive then i can still re-capture all the footage from the tapes and it would all line up on the project file so i don’t have to recut it?????
Sorry to ask my question in such a longwinded way.
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5 Replies
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If you actually did a log and capture from your tapes, your FCP project will allow you to batch capture from your original source material.
Hopefully your time and date was set on the camera that shot the footage. That is needed for DV Start/Stop detection.
Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group -
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ok so how should i capture my footage into FCP in the first place so that if my drive crashes and i need to recapture it will all sync up? Let’s see, how can I do this correctly, i goto file -> capture, right? is that automatically a batch capture? i’m confused about the steps i need to take.
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What you need to know VERY WELL is a couple of things:
Label each tape with a Unique name.
(If you have to redig, you have no clue what shot you need, so you must be able to insert the correct tape…)If the tape has TC breaks, it’s no problem, but you need to stop capture before the break, and pick it up after.
for this, you normally log first, creating a list with clips and then batch capture.If the TC resets on a tape, you’re in for a lot of work.
Make a ‘ second ‘, ‘ third ‘ reelname for that tape.
Reason, FCP (anyone actually) expects higher numbers to be more towards the end of the tape. So if half way the TC resets to 00:00:00:00, there is no way FCP can know this. It will always start rewinding while it should forward.
If you have a lot of breaks like this, forget recapture and invest in harddrive backup.Make sure you have a decent deck with machine control.
re-capturing HDV with a cheap deck will take forever.
You can do so if you want to restore long originals, but a media-managed show with hundreds of clips will take forever.
(A decent deck winds-cues-captures in about 20 second per shot and will have trouble in less than 1 out of 100 clips. A cheap HDV setup will take up to 2 minutes (!) per clip, and will fail 1 out of 3 clips…)Toy around first so you know what you are doing.
It is very well possible (actually, untill a couple of years ago this was common practice as harddisk were way more expensive than time/machine wear, and that was with 50K decks…)Bouke
https://www.videotoolshed.com/
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Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group
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