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Looking for a way to index a LOT of footage
Hi all,
I’ve got a client that dumped about 80 hours of footage on me last night. He wants to have it all digitized and be able to sit down and browse through it and pull out selected scenes for editing into a future project.
Another catch is that the footage all in analog Hi-8. I do have an Sony Digital8 camera, so my plan is to capture it in full DV resolution right into Premiere Pro.
But now that I’m looking at disk storage requirements, I’m realizing that to accomodate all that footage would require over a terabyte of storage.
So my question: Does anyone know of a program that runs on Windows that can create indexes of captured footage? I understand that there is some sort of utility on a Mac that can quickly scan a tape and stores mpeg4 quality thumbnail images which are suitable for viewing to create basically an EDL list from.
I did look at Scenalyzer, but it seems that even Scenalyzer Live is more geared towards batch capturing and realtime scene detection, something that PPro 1.5 now does anyway.
What I want is a utility that I can point to all my captured footage, and have it compress them down into indexes that can reduce my storage requirements.
Thanks!
Doug
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4 Replies
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The Executive Producer
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You can easily overlook some of the great benefits of Scenalyzer without knowing it. Scenalyzer will scan and record (index) a 60 minute DV tape in 5 minutes (x12). The recorded AVI can be viewed at x12 speed which is fine for previewing tapes for shot selection. You can then select those shots and capture. Brilliant piece of software, inexpensive and great when you have over 800 tapes to search constantly.
Redgum Television Productions
Broadcast & Corporate Documentaries
Brisbane, Australia -
I like ScenalyzerLive a lot and love the index feature.
But it can’t control an analog deck/cam. And the tapes he has are all analog. Doug *might* be able to fast-play the tapes manually in his hi8 cam and output through a A->D converter or DV camacorder, and then capture the fast play. I don’t know how the a/d converter will like being fed sped up video. But since the total running time will be shorter the storage space will be reduced. Scenalyzer’s optical scene detection might even work some of the time.
–Shayne
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>>What I want is a utility that I can point to all my captured footage, >>and have it compress them down into indexes that can reduce my storage >>requirements.
I’m confused on what you want to do. Do you want to capture all of this footage and then make the indexes? Or do you just want a way to index what is on the tapes for your client use?
If the client is just looking for a way to communicate to you which clips he/she wants to use from the raw footage, consider this:
This device will allow you to make VHS copies of your Hi-8 footage with time code running on the screen (but not encoded on the tape). This will give your client a fairly close approximation of where on each tape desired clips are located.
Once your client has given you a list of clips, as long as your Hi-8 tapes are rewound to the beginning and the counter reset to 0:00, you should be able to digitize just what you want to use, and not all 80 hours.
Not sure if that helps.
J. D.
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