May, 2001

Basic Capture Techniques for DV

NOTE: As of 5/01, this article is appropriate for FCP 1.2+.
Any changes for v2.0 will be added at a later date.

By Gretta Wing Miller

If you are shooting DV, it's already digital. What you need to do is 'CAPTURE' the digital footage onto your HD.

As with everything FCP, there are at least a couple of methods to accomplish this. The methods seem to parallel certain personality types, so read the following, and pick the method that works best for you.

There is one rule that is not subject to discussion or personality type:

YOU MUST LABEL EACH REEL OF TAPE CLEARLY AND DISTINCTLY, AND YOU MUST ENTER THAT NAME INTO THE 'REEL...' FIELD IN THE LOG and CAPTURE WINDOW.

No ifs, ands, or buts. A cassette without a label might as well be blank, and if you are the stubborn personality type that must learn by experience, soon you will record over a very important tape because you didn't label it.

Luckily, FCP won't let us get by without entering a reel number, but it will let us get by with using the default 'Reel 001' for every tape. Please be vigilant and enter a unique reel number every time.

The default Reel 001; use this only for your Reel #1!

A note on methods:

I prefer to use and teach a two-handed, keyboard in the left hand, mouse in the right approach to editing in FCP. If you are more comfortable using the mouse alone to begin with, here is a substitution chart:

Preparing to Capture:

Put your first tape in deck/camera.

Open Log and Capture under the File menu.

The open Log Capture window

Enter the Reel name on the Logging tab, and put a check in the 'Prompt' box.

Click on the Clip Settings tab to define what you want to capture:
Audio and Video, just Video, or just Audio. The default, 'Audio Video, ch1 ch 2' will be perfect for most situations.

The buttons on the 'Preferences' tab are for verification of the settings you have made earlier
when you set your Preferences (See "FCP: An Ambitious Beginning"), or for making changes
to those settings without leaving Log and Capture.

Method 1: Classic Log and Capture

Best for Slated, Multiple-Take Narratives.

Spacebar to start the tape rolling, press 'I' at your chosen In point. I would mark the In point after the slate to conserve scratch disk acreage, using the slate as a reference for naming the clip. When you come to the end of the take, press F2 (Log Clip). Pressing F2 sets the Out point and opens the Log Clip dialog.

You will get this dialog window after pressing the Log Clip button (or F2)
if you have put a check in the 'Prompt' box.

Name it correctly, write any comment in the Log Note box, and check the 'Mark Good' box for the takes you like best, then OK. The tape should continue to roll, and after the next slate, mark the next In point; F2 at the end of the take, name this take, or allow FCP to increment the take number automatically if it is another take of the same scene.

The red line through the clip icons indicates that they are 'offline' (not captured yet).

This method doesn't capture any clips to the HD; it creates a comprehensive LOG, in the Browser, of all the shots on your reels.

When you have finished Logging, you can select the takes with which you want to begin editing, and Batch Capture only those (see below). All the takes you have marked as good will have a check mark by them in the 'Good' column of the Browser for easy reference.

Some of FCP's many Browser columns. Good takes can be marked during or after logging.

Batch Capture

With clips selected in the Browser, go to File>Batch Capture. Choose 'All Selected Clips', and OK.

Handles

Specify extra seconds to be added to the head and tail of each clip as it is captured. This makes up for reaction time as you press your In and Out points. Your logging should be fairly loose anyway, with at least several extra seconds at head and tail.

Final Cut Pro will call for reels to be inserted in the deck, and it will find and capture the clips you have selected based on their timecode In and Out points.

All you have to do is feed tapes as Final Cut Pro calls for them. This is the time when your naming scheme for tape reels will be called to account. FCP will assume you have inserted the right reel, and will capture the associated timecode range. If it is the wrong reel, it won't be the right shot.

Speed Logging

If you want to quickly separate a reel into individual clips: uncheck the 'Prompt' box, enter a name in the 'Label' field, start the tape playing and enter a first 'In' point.

Every time you hit 'F2' (at the end of each clip), a new clip will be created in the logging bin, with incremented numbers attached to the original name. The tape will not stop rolling, and you will not be given a dialog box to write log notes, or rename the clips.

This log was created by putting the name 'horse show' in the 'Label' field,
then pressing F2 after every discrete clip.

Method 2: Capture A Whole Tape, then Make Subclips

Best for Interviews and Chronological Documentary Situations

Put your first tape in deck/camera.
Open Log and Capture under the File menu.
Enter the Reel name on the Logging tab.
Click on the Clip Settings tab to define what you want to capture.
Click on the Scratch disk tab to make sure these are correct.
Now, back to the Logging tab. Start the reel playing, and click on the 'Capture Now' button.

Let the entire interview, or the entire reel, if you have HD space, be captured. I advise watching it and making notes. You can't screen your footage too much. The more you watch it, the better you know what you have to work with.

Press 'Esc.' before the end of the tape, so that it doesn't run past the end of the time code. Click on and drag this 'Untitled' clip into your Browser.

In the Save dialog box that opens, navigate to the Capture Scratch folder that you designated in your Preferences. You will know you have found it when you see a greyed out 'Untitled 0000' in the folder.

Name it, save it, and then close the clip window.
Close the L and C window. SAVE.
Drag your new clip into the timeline.

Now you can play and cut this one big clip into smaller, discrete pieces. Cut an interview into coherent sound bites, cut out the interviewer's questions, cut out the shaky camera and swish pans, etc. Use ripple delete to remove chunks, or the razor blade to cut between sections.

Ripple Delete: To remove the selected piece without leaving a gap,
hold down Shift and press Delete.

Put edit points around the section you want to remove, or select an entire clip. Then hold down Shift as you press Delete. The selection will be deleted and the space closed up. SAVE

You'll notice that these new smaller clips all have the same name.

Option-click on one of them and select 'Properties' from the pop-up menu that appears. (Or choose 'Item Properties' from the Edit menu.)

The Item Properties window tells you everything you might need to know about a clip.

Change the name of each new clip to something relevant and descriptive.

Next, select all the clips in the Timeline (Edit>Select All or cmd-A with the Timeline active).

Now you can drag all of the clips into the Browser (or to a specific bin in the Browser), and they will appear as separate clips. At this point, they all refer to the one master clip on the scratch disk.

After dragging all your newly cut apart and renamed clips from the Timeline to the Browser,
they appear as if they were always separate clips.

If you need to conserve disk space, go to File>Save Project, then quit FCP, open the Scratch Disk, drag that clip to the Trash. (Please be conservative when working with video; quit FCP before you do anything at the Finder level.)

When you open FCP again, all the individual clips will be offline, and you can selectively Batch Capture (see above) just the clips that you want.

I hope these techniques will provide a swift and happy start to your successful Final Cut Pro projects.
Best, Gret

copyright © Gretta Wing Miller 2001

Gretta Wing Miller
www.downtowndailies.com
Digital Video for NonProfits and Independent Artists