What's the best capture software?
 

Hello,

I am faced with capturing footage from over 40 miniDVs for the latest movie I shot. Instead of logging every single clip and running the tape back and forth to set time code for an EDL, can anybody recommend some quality software that will self log a tape while ingest?

What I mean is, as the tape is capturing to the hard drive and the take ends, the computer will start a new clip. This is a feature I used on some product a ways back and I can't remember what it was.

I think the software could see when the camera turned on and off and used this information. I seem to remember it beinf very reliable. I'm not worried about the giant space usage as I have a Terrabyte free.

Any advice would be much appreciated. I have both a PC with FCP 5.1 and a PC with Adobe Production Studio Premium. I can ingest on either but would prefer the mac as I will edit in FCP.


Cheers!

Capture the whole tape using something like "capture now". After its captured, you can use the "DV scene start/stop detection" feature, which will dump a marker wherever there is a change in date/time (this needs to have been set on the camera). From there, make subclips out of that master file.

2- Will you need to re-capture off the tape?

3- Timecode breaks on the tape may sometimes screw things up.
FCP will also sometimes screw up when it sees TC breaks that aren't there... hopefully you won't run into this.

Thanks. I will check it out!