capture format for pc capture vegas & fcp edit

willlisub wrote on 10/17/2008, 6:41 AM
I'm not a noobie, but just checking to see if I'm missing an easier way of sharing and viewing video on a mixed network.



Not sure if I'm missing something, but can anyone suggest a format or method for:

Capturing composite/SVHS and DV video on a PC (with any suggested program). We can grab the comp/VHS-S video via a pci card or plug into a converter box and bring it in DV.

That unedited video will viewed on the PC as well as occasionally accessed by Mac's running OS X. Don't care whether it's windows based or QT for playback., although on the MAC, it's easier for QT.

That video will be edited in both Vegas Pro and occasionally in FCP.

Would like to not have to covert, but guessing we will have to at some time.

I realize there are probably 2 different answers for the composite and DV.

Any help/suggestions will be appreciated.


Comments

Former user wrote on 10/17/2008, 7:22 AM
Final Cut can use Windows DV AVI files.

Dave T2
willlisub wrote on 10/18/2008, 2:51 AM
When I tried the AVI DV files about 1 year ago, they weren't recognized by FCP. Will try again.

We are now thinking about capturing the files to WMV as the ability to easily use windows media utils, to quickly put in markers might be of some interest. WMV capture program even worked with the SD DV files via firewire and we could set the amount of time to capture to the number of minutes for the tapes. I wish Vegas would ad some features to their capture program.

I tried capturing the analog composite (no S-VHS on the camera) with windows media at archive quality w/ interlacing and set at 8mb. The quality looked good and after capturing, using windows media encoder utils, when saving the file with markers took seconds.

Editing in Vegas will be simple cuts and transitions and Vegas seemed to handle this with ease. Output was fast in some formats so since the WMV files are pretty small, we are thinking that maybe we will leave the files in WMV and output a second (mirror file) in some format for the MAC. The other possibility is use Flip4mac with FCP on the WMV files for FCP.

I did a little research on using Flip4mac with FCP and it seems there are lots of posts. I'm a little confused as to how efficient it is and how much it slows down the process on the MAC. Plus it's a little expensive.

Anyone have any experience with flip4mac w/ FCP? Does it work? Is it slow?

Anyone know of any "gotcha's" using windows media files for editing in Vegas?

Thanks in advance.....

Chienworks wrote on 10/18/2008, 6:13 AM
The biggest problem with using WMV is that every rendering generation will lose some quality. If retaining quality is important then DV is a better choice.