I am about to begin a long overdue project to rip all of my 50ish DV tapes from the past several years. I picked up a 750GB external drive for $150 at Fry's and I can't wait to get started. The tapes are all personal stuff like vacations, children playing etc.

I have not done a large ripping project like this before and I need some advice about best practices and conventions that will make the process and the final product a little better.

I'm going to be using Sony's capture tool that comes with Vegas 8 to rip the DV tapes to hard disk. I'll then be adding them to the Media Manager that is part of Vegas 8.

Here is what I need help/advice with:

1. conventions for naming all of the DV tapes - any smart practices here?

2. how to name the captured clips - should I name them each with a description of the clip or is that crazy? Perhaps better to use a standard naming convention and then use the tags and comments in Media Manager to identify their content?

3. Should I use one big .vidcap file to do all of the capture or should I create separate .vidcap files for each tape? or something in between?

4. Where should I save the .vidcap files and the captured clips? Should they be on a separate physcial drive from the one that runs Vegas?

5. Any suggestions about how to organize the folder hierarchy that holds all of my clips?

6. Any advice on how to tag the clips in Media Manager? What is important to tag about video clips? Who, what, where, when, comments... what else?

7. Finally, are there any books anyone can recommend that address a lot of what I'm asking here?

I enthusiastically thank you for any help you can provide to any of the questions above.

THANK YOU!!

Jim Vetter

Hmmm that's a lot of stuff you're askin' ;-)

Let's see if we can help out.
First in the capture process I always start out with a folder that has the name of the job. IE, JONES-SMITH Wedding. Thats my master folder.Then for the tapes I put in another folder and name it PRECEREMONY tape 1-1, CEREMONY 1-2 or whatever it is. Each tape gets it's own folder. I try to get a bit descriptive so I know for later in case I get dumber as I get older. (which I am) I also keep a log sheet of the tapes with name, tape number and a brief desciption that goes into the job bag. When you open Vegas capture you can of course direct where the folder and video go as well as name the tape. As for the clips themselves I let them default to a numerical sequence which works (or should) with SCENE DETECTION checked in preferences.
Other than that use common sense to name stuff so it can be found later and you should be all set.
Yes by all means DO NOT capture and store on the system drive. Capture to the 750 and work off that drive.
Enjoy yourself
Don