HDV Batch Capture Needed

Opticus wrote on 6/18/2009, 11:51 AM
I am beginning to edit a 1- hour documentary shot in HDV, and I need to batch capture scenes into Vegas (similar to advanced capture in DV, by setting in-and-out-points for multiple scenes on a tape, then automatically capturing them all, and keeping a capture list for future reference). Does anyone have a way to batch capture HDV for use in Vegas? Thank you!

Comments

ushere wrote on 6/18/2009, 4:11 PM
if you ever find a way, LET ME KNOW!!!!

i have to say that the only let down for me (not to mention quite a number of my clients) moving to hdv has been the loss of batch capture.

other than going sdi with some pretty heavy expenses, there is NO batch capture (i'm told it's to do with long gop mpeg).

i find it pretty amazing that we have an incredibly cheap, yet good looking acquisition format, an nle that'll do amazing things with what we capture, but no way of telling a tape deck to go to 3:25:10 start capturing - stop capturing at 4:54:05.

leslie
blink3times wrote on 6/18/2009, 5:21 PM
Batch capturing mpeg2 is a slightly more complicated an affair than DV.... hence the reason why you don't see it often. Mpeg2 has a gop structure that doesn't like to be cut in the wrong places and for that reason things get complicated. If you mark an in or out point in the middle of a gop it then has to be uncompressed, the frame structure completed and then recompressed to from a new gop structure at the point cut.

This is not to say that it can't be done.... but a different approach needs to be used if you want HDV batch capture to be at all accurate. Avid Liquid in fact has frame accurate batch capture abilities.... but this is because it doesn't actually split anything. The tape is captured as a whole (or to the end of the last gop should you decide to stop the tape) and the various in/out points that you have placed are written in a file while the capture takes place..... which of course gets used in setting up your time line

The disadvantage to this sort of thing however is that you can't use these batch captures in anything other than the program you originally captured with.... whereas with simple scene detect the tape can be split physically because you're splitting at the end of completed gop structures... thereby creating complete and independent clips that can be used in any editor/player
ushere wrote on 6/18/2009, 6:14 PM
nice explain b3t....

heck, i'd be happy with approx batch capture! i mean, getting 3 x 5sec clips from a stock 60min tape is such a pita with hdv.....

and my lib. is too big to transfer to hd!

leslie
JHendrix wrote on 7/25/2009, 7:03 AM
what about HDV Converter or MPEG_Streamclip


do these actually work?