Recapture – 1: greyed out. 2: nothing happens.

[John Rofrano]

> I captured 45 minutes of a tape at low res.

Just curious but how did you capture at low res? What was the format and what was the original hi res format?

> I want to recapture at high resolution. I could recapture the 45 minutes, and then select Replace to replace the low res capture with the high res capture, but I want to recapture only these 13 events totaling 2 minutes

Vegas recapture doesn’t work that way. It only recaptures the original footage and it recaptures all of the footage. So it doesn’t acre that you trimmed a 1 hour clip down to 5 minutes, it will recapture the whole clip.

The only way to capture less was to originally use batch capture and log your in and out points and then Vegas would just recapture those parts of the tape. It would still ignore and trimmed events.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jill Simpson]

So “recapture” won’t recapture only the events on the timeline.
Can I create a BATCH CAPTURE from my Project’s EVENTS SPREADSHEET?

In Edit Details view, the Events list is a spreadsheet with TapeName, TimeIn, TimeOut etc. It can be copy-and-pasted into a spreadsheet application. Can I create a BATCH CAPTURE file from a spreadsheet or straight from the events list? That way we can recapture the (e.g.) 2 minutes we want, without also capturing the 44 minutes we don’t want. I saved a batch capture list (the file extension is .sfvidcap) and opened it in Notepad++. I’m comfortable reading most code but this was almost all non-alphanumeric gobbledygeek, so I don’t know how to convert the Events spreadsheet into a batch capture file. Do you?

Wo! We can’t capture at low resolution? I had talked with my colleague about how uncompressed video eats up disk space and I thought he had captured at low res, but I see he did not – and that it cannot be done – in Vegas. Vegas Help includes an entry on Intermediate Files, which says if you can capture, _then_ convert to low res, then edit, then replace the project media with the high res version. I’m working with 68 hours of SD DV – I don’t have room for all that uncompressed video on my computer or on my external hard drives – especially not for the few months it will take to edit the video. So I’m supposed to capture, convert to low res, delete the uncompressed video, edit the project, then recapture all the tapes that have something we want, capturing 60 minutes each time even if we know we only want a specific 30 second chunk.

I’ve never heard of anything more wasteful. Until now I’ve been a big fan of Sony Vegas. Is Sony concerned about this inefficiency?

Do Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premier, Windows Movie Maker, AviDemux, VirtualDub and other programs have these absurdities?
(1: can’t recapture only the contents on the timeline, must recapture the whole original capture.
2. can’t capture at low res.)

Best Possible Workflow:
I read most of Vegas’ Help file and did numerous searches on their support site, trying to find a suggested workflow. I found nothing. Given the limitations of the software as described above, it seems the following is the best possible workflow:
1. Watch the tapes in the Advanced Capture window, logging in and out points.
2. Review and revise the in and out points if necessary, while the tape is still fresh in memory.
3. After watching all the tapes, do a bit of editing in my head or on paper, thinking if a previously logged clip is no longer needed now that I’ve seen some clip on another tape, or now that we’ve changed the design/theme/structure of the movie. Then review and revise the in and out points if necessary. This would require changing cassettes multiple times, unless you remember the previously viewed tapes well. (For this part of the process, it would be very helpful to have all the clips on computer in low res, but alas we are in a catch-22.)
4. Batch capture to an external hard drive.
5. Convert each clip to a low res “intermediate” file, by
(a) using some other software
(b) opening a clip in Vegas, rendering it at low res, and repeating for each clip. (Can Batch Render help here? How? I understand Batch Render for rendering a single file to multiple formats, but can it be used to render multiple files? If I bring all the files into my timeline, and then click batch render, is there a way to make it render the files as separate files, or would it just render the project as one file?)
6. Edit.
7. Replace the project media with the uncompressed clips.

Do you agree? Should Sony include that or something similar in its Help files and its online support?

[Douglas Spotted eagle]

GearShift is perfectly suited for what you’re wanting to do here.
Batch convert to separate, low rez files, replace low rez files with high rez onlines…

Douglas Spotted Eagle
VASST

Certified Sony Vegas Trainer
Aerial Camera/Instructor