PPro, MacPro Late 2013 Capture Solution – What are using to digitize your tapes?

[Buddy Brett ramker]

Currently we are using Blackmagic cards and Blackmagic Media Express for capture. Before we were using FORK and AJA cards. We replaced all of our AJA cards with Blackmagic after discovering pervasive playback issues due to bad drivers. I would not recommend AJA hardware with Premiere Pro on OSX. Our trash cans are in Sonnet Thunderbolt 2 racks.

Hope this helps,

Brett

[Jeff Coleman]

Brett,
Thanks for that feedback.
Does that Blackmagic Media Express software allow you to digitize field tapes that have timecode breaks (automatically creating a new clip and continuing the digitizing/capturing process)?

[Chris Borjis]

have you tried doing a “capture now” without any machine control?

I’ve been digitizing tapes as part of my job for 12 years.

Any time I run into a timecode breaking tape, I capture it
without machine control enabled, hit play on the deck, capture
on the app then afterwards, if necessary, change the source
timecode to what it needs to be.

I own black magic and AJA cards. both work great. (2009 MacPro 4,1 though)

It would be a bit tedious with that many years of tapes, but it can be done.

[Jeff Coleman]

I haven’t tried that. I suppose in a pinch I might resort to that, but doesn’t strike me as an everyday workflow due to the time and effort involved that you’ve indicated.

I think I would take the tape to a machine running FCP 7 and a Kona card and capture it using those professional applications and devices and avoid trying to identify every timecode break on the tape and manually reconciling exact timecode on each clip I’ve captured.

It doesn’t sound like you are capturing field tape successfully with Premiere either unless you resort to such fix-it-in-post kind of methods you’ve mentioned.

[Chris Borjis]

Its true I’ve not had to deal with that many tapes with broken time codes.

fortunately when I did, most of the time the client didn’t care what the time code
was, they just wanted files from tapes.

So the “capture now” without machine control was the best
workaround for me.

[Jeff Coleman]

From this informal survey, it appears that no one is using Premiere Pro on a new Mac Pro to capture from field tape. At least not successfully without some workarounds or hoop-jumping.

[Jeff Coleman]

BTW. Never heard back from BlueFish.

[Andrew Paul]

I have just started to use Premiere to digitize footage. It is a bummer that we can’t capture tapes with timecode breaks properly. What will be the best solution once FCP stops working?