Online Video Production Blog

The basic rule of thumb when selecting project settings is: Match settings to your source material and not to the final output. Even if your goal is to create a low-resolution video to run on the Internet, wait until you finish editing and then reduce the output quality settings.

Before capturing you should critically view your raw footage and look for "keeper" clips and sequences, the best interview sound bites, and any natural sound that will enhance your production. The purpose is twofold: to better manage media "assets" and to speed up the video capture process.

Capturing or transferring video from a camcorder to a PC can be mindlessly easy or maddeningly difficult.  Digital video transfer falls on the easy end of the scale. On the other hand, analog video capture is fraught with potential problems. You need either a video capture card with analog video inputs, or a camcorder with analog in capabilities. You cannot automate the capture process with analog capture it's completely manual.  I recommend copying analog video to DV where possible, analog captures can become corrupt where as DV captures rarely do.

Transferring digital video to your hard drive should be a two-step process: logging and capturing. You can log clips manually or have Adobe Premiere Pro do it using its Scene Detection feature. Logging clips manually will save significant amounts of time during the editing process.

The standard operating procedure is to log a number of clips and then have Adobe Premiere Pro automatically transfer them to your PC. Or you can simply mark the in-point and out-point for a single clip and capture it. As you log your tapes, you give each clip a name (or Adobe Premiere Pro does that automatically) and then Adobe Premiere Pro stores each clip's in-point and out-point data in your Project Window under each clip's name. You specify in which folder you want to store that data so that when you do the actual capture, Adobe Premiere Pro places that clip's reference information in that Project Window bin.

If your tape does not have continuous time code and you logged clips from different areas of the tape, Adobe Premiere Pro might not be able to automatically capture your clips. Your tape will not have continuous timecode, for instance, if you record on the tape, eject it, reinsert it and record some more. It's best to stripe your tapes first.