[Austin Baur]

Thanks! I’ll have to give that a try, although I ended up finding an alternative way to do it: I rendered out a still frame of frame 1, went into Photoshop and applied a layer mask and started painting out the ground with a low-opacity custom brush and then converted the values to grayscale. Then I brought that back into AE and used it as a Luma Matte and parented the Matte to my Null objects, which worked great if anyone runs into the same problem.

I’m definitely going to give that expression a try though as it would make the workflow all around a bit easier.

Thanks, Dan.

Austin Baur

[Austin Baur]

Hmm. Sounds interesting. Now, forgive me for being inexperienced, but what do you mean by edit code? The part about timecode makes a lot o’d sense, but then you started talking about edit code.
PS I’m not wasting time here, I took chris’s advice and bought a 1.5TB external hd, and I’m just waiting for it to come in.

[Austin Baur]

Cool. Thank you very much. I will probably go out with some buddies and shoot a short little 5 minute (which could easily have up to 30 min to an hour of footage) and then use that as practice footage for these new capture methods. I’ll probably try each one. Thanks again!

Austin

[Austin Baur]

Yes, I am am using firewire and I figured around 75 or 80 GB of space would be eaten up too. So I guess I’ll take your advice and go buy an external hard drive, because dropped frames were super frequent for me and I just assumed it was a natural part of the editing process.

Anyway, this batch capture method you are talking about – I have never done it. So, what would be the easiest, most efficient way to do it? Would I hook my cameras up to a standard TV monitor and then watch each tape while logging my desired in/out points in a notebook or something, then proceed to enter those points in Premiere and then capture away?

I have simulated this sort of batch capture method in the past in FCE by imply pressing the Esc key when my clip was over, stopping the capture. Then I would simply restart the capture and repeat. What are the advantages and disadvantages to simply doing that versus your batch capture method?