From the book
From the book
From the book
Capturing video
Before you can edit your own video, you need to transfer it to your computer’s hard drive. In NLE parlance, you need to capture it. Capture is a somewhat-misleading term used throughout the NLE world. All that Adobe Premiere Pro does during DV capture is to place the video data in a movie file “wrapper” without changing the original DV data.
The capture process in the analog world takes several steps: transfer, conversion, compression, and wrapping. Your camcorder transfers the video and audio as analog data to a video capture card. That card’s built-in hardware converts the waveform signal to a digital form, compresses it using a codec (compression/decompression) process, and then wraps it in the AVI file format.
Three DV capturing scenarios
Adobe Premiere Pro offers tools to take some of the manual labor out of the capturing process. There are three basic approaches:
- Capture your entire videotape as one long clip.
- Log each clip’s In and Out points for automated batch capturing.
- Use the scene detection feature in Adobe Premiere Pro to automatically create separate clips whenever you pressed the pause/record button on your camcorder.
To do this lesson, you need a DV camcorder. Most DV camcorders have a FireWire (IEEE 1394) cable that you hook up to your computer’s FireWire connector. If your computer does not have a FireWire connector, it is recommended that you buy a FireWire/USB combination card.
You can work with HDV or with a professional-level camcorder with a Serial Digital Interface (SDI) connector and a specialized video capture card.
Adobe Premiere Pro handles HDV and SDI capture with the same kind of software device controls used with a standard DV camcorder. SDI requires an extra setup procedure. Refer to Adobe Premiere Pro Help for more on that.
If you have an analog camcorder, you need a video capture card that supports S-video or composite video connectors. The only option with most analog camcorders is to manually start and stop recording. Most analog capture cards do not work with remote device control or have timecode readout, so you can’t log tapes, do batch capture, or use the scene-detection feature.