not capturing

[Bill Dewald]

This is the ugly side of capturing full tape loads – if the ingest fails, you’re out 40+ minutes.

I’ve been in your situation before – its rough, and can take some experimenting to find effective solutions.

A couple things to check –

1. Is the range of timecode that you are attempting to capture a valid range for the tape? If the capture hits the end of tape, it will bomb it out.

2. Try capturing one tape at a time, rather than batching a whole list of tapes. That way, if a capture goes bad, you only lose that tape.

3. Try using head cleaner on your camcorder, or consider renting a deck. Camcorders are not designed for hours of playback on a daily basis. And a dropped frame will cause the condition that you are experiencing.

4. Consider using the media manager to re-ingest your current timeline, rather than all of your source footage. If this is practical, it can save you a lot of time.

Does this happen sporadicly, or just with a certain tape?

[Marisa Miller wolfson]

Thanks, Bill! This is helpful.

I’m afraid I can’t rent another deck, but I can look into some kind of head cleaner.

It just seems to happen with certain tapes.

Just curious…how would using the Media Manager be faster?

Thanks again,
Marisa

[Bill Dewald]

If you use the media manager in a certain way, you can chose to only recapture the footage used in your timeline, rather than having to recapture the full duration of each tape.

So, it could drasticly shorten your re-ingest time. The trade-off is that you won’t have access to the full camera tapes in FCP.

I guess the deciding factor here is how close you are to finishing your edit. If you’re almost done, and just tweaking, then the media manage makes sense. If you’re still putting the show together, then this technique probably won’t be as useful.

If its just a handful of stubborn tapes, you could always bite the bullet, reingest them in chunks, and recut their scenes in your show by hand.

[Marisa Miller wolfson]

Thanks, Bill! I’ve been meaning to thank you for this. Unforunately, I’m still editing and not just tweaking, so it’s good to have the full tapes.

But I’ll keep this in mind for the future (should I need it again.)

I’ve been re-importing manually on my own. It’s taking a while, but it’s worth it.

Thanks again,
Marisa