Little clips out of big captures

[szvacek]

I would like to get some validation of my idea.
I am capturing directly from my digital 8 camera. The capture program is doing seamless capture and creating 4 gb files. These 4 gb files contain several different events (kids soccer games, birthday parties, etc.) I want to bring in each 4 gb file and trim the clip to have just the specific event then output that specific clip to a mpg file for later processing. The process is repeated until done. I will then combine the mpg clips into one longer video and output to a DVD.

My plan is to capture all my film and edit them this way. My end result is a 30-50 video of one child's Life on film (up to this point)! Does this make sense and is there any problems down the road I don't see now?

Thanks

[heinz-oz]

I'm not sure why you feel there might be a problem. I capture all my video with the "Split by Scene" function. That gives me a large number of clips for each tape. I organize them in folders based on where they belong and place all the clips on the time line. Up to this point in time these are DV-AVI clips. When I have all the footage I want for this video together and have added my transitions, titles etc. I create a DVD compliant mpeg2 file from that. I may also then combine several short mpeg clips in MF and author them as separate titles to one DVD rather than just having one title.

[Devil]

A few comments:

1. Why 4 Gb? Are you using FAT 32 FS? If so, I suggest you convert to NTFS which has no practical limit.

2. I presume your file transfer ("capture") is in AVI. If you intend post-processing your excerpts, I suggest you keep them in DV-AVI and not convert them at this stage to MPEG.

3. You can temporarily store about 17 minutes of DV_AVI (type 1) of pre-selected clips on a data DVD or 4 hours on a 60 Gb HDD (or pro rata for other sizes), until you are ready to edit.

4. Please tell us what you are using. Read http://phpbb.ulead.com.tw/EN/viewtopic.php?t=8961 and, also, tell us what version of MSP you are using. We are working in the dark.

[szvacek]

Thanks for the responses. I am using MS Pro v8 sp1. My capture is via a firewire connection to a Sony DCR-TRV820 NTSC. All drives are NTFS. The captures are AVI files.

Some of these tapes are late 80's, early 90's. Several of them probably don't have a timecode on them. The Capture program does not seem to recognize the different scenes, it just captures in 4 gb files. One of the newer tapes I did first did scene capture as described in the manual. I believe my plan will work, just don't want to get 75% done and find out something was wrong and have to start over.

Thanks

[cgould]

The old tapes are likely analog 8mm or Hi8, not digital8.
The sony (some models) digital8 camcorders will encode analog tapes on-the-fly during playback, and output DV over the firewire, which is a great feature to capture old analog tapes in good quality.

However, for analog, there is no other (meta)data on the tape, eg time of day or timecode recorded in the video datastream. Digital recordings (digital8 or miniDV) would record this metadata along w/ the video information, and MSPro uses this to automatically "split by scene" during capture or in the timeline. For your newer tape, recorded on this digital8 camera, the video on tape is actually digital w/ the metadata, so it retains the scene cut information.
Hence "seamless capture" of analog source, is only splitting at 4gb filesize boundaries, not anything w/ scenes.

You can actually still split-by-scene such analog-convert sources, but in the timeline (or in the library), using "content scan" instead of DV scene metadata... it's much slower, has to scan for image changes, and isn't 100% accurate, but it works.
Note this is done w/ captured video files, in the editor, not actually splitting files during capture.

As with the other posters, I strongly recommend you always capture and edit DV/8 video as DV-AVI files, then you can create an MPG video file for DVD authoring later from the edited timeline.