So you shot everything you need for a beautiful movie and you’ve spent the money on the high tech hardware and software. Now you need to get that footage into the computer. There are a few ways to get footage into the computer. You can capture from a dv tape, transfer from a hd camera hard drive, and import footage that exists on your computer. Its all pretty straight forward, lets start from the top:
How to Capture from a DV Tape
1. Make sure that you have connected your camcorder to your computer via Firewire.
2. Check your system settings and make sure that your capture settings match your camcorder. Or choose an Easy Setup that matches. For most standard definition DV camcorders in the US, this will be the DV-NTSC setting.
3. On the top menu, click File -> Log and Capture, or press Command-8 to open the Log and Capture window. Final Cut Pro will take a moment to check and ensure that you have a camcorder connected.
4. Now you should be able to control your camcorder using the playback controls in the Log and Capture window.
5. There are a few ways to capture footage in Final Cut. The first way is to Capture Now. Using Capture Now, Final Cut will simply import whatever footage is playing from the camcorder until you tell it to stop, it reaches a time limit (you can set this in your preferences), or you run out of disk space. Capture now is useful when you are not sure what parts of certain footage you will need. If you are capturing from a device that you cannot control from your computer, than capture now will be your only option.
6. Another way to capture footage and the method that I use most often is to log all the clips from a given tape first and then Batch Capture all the clips. This process takes more time than using capture now, but it will save you a lot of time and frustration once the clips are in the computer. Basically logging your clips is a process of choosing in and out points for each clip and giving the clip a name. Once you have completed this process, you batch capture the logged clips. Once you click batch capture, Final Cut will go through the tape and based on the timecode it will take out only the clips you logged and give them the names you chose. This way, once the clips have been captured you have some organization and can get into the editing right away.
Transferring from a Hard Drive Camcorder
If you are capturing from a Hard Drive Camcorder instead of step 3 above you must choose Log and Transfer from the File menu or press Command-Shift-8. The window is slightly different and Final Cut Pro will show you all the available clips from the drive. You simply select the clips you want and click transfer, you can name the clips before or after the capture.
The process is similar to capturing from a dv tape, but it is much quicker because you don’t have to scroll through the tape. For a good explanation on the pros and cons of hard drives vs dv tapes go here.
How To Import Videos from Your Computer
Note: I will go into the more advanced imports such as EDL and XML in a later post. This just covers Files and Folders.Sometimes you have video on your computer that you want to edit in Final Cut Pro such as a Quicktime that you ripped from a DVD. In order to do this you must first import the file into Final Cut Pro. On the top menu click File -> Import -> Files/Folders or press Command-I. You can also drag a clip from the Finder into the Browser in Final Cut.
As long as the video is in a format that Final Cut Pro can read, it will show up in the Browser with the same name as the file. You can then drag the clip into the timeline in the same manner as if you had captured it directly from the camcorder. Depending on the clip’s settings you may have to render it once you drop it in the timeline.
Loading ...