Digital Home Thoughts: From Home Movies to Hollywood Blockbusters with Adobe Premiere Pro

Capturing Video & Audio – The Old Way
Sometimes you just can’t beat the old way of doing things … well, other than improving the user interface to make it easier to do the things the old way :D In this case, I’m talking about manually working through a tape, logging the in and out points of each clip then performing a batch capture of the clips.


Figure 4: Premiere 6.5's capture window. Click on the image for the full size image. (14KB)

Figure 4 shows the Movie Capture window as it existed in Premiere 6.5. You would use this window to capture or log between the in and out points that you specify. The various controls in the bottom left-hand corner of the window allowed you to navigate through the tape. Choosing to log the in/out added an entry to a batch capture log file. This would be saved as a separate file. Once you’ve logged all of the sections that you want to capture, you then go to the batch capture window and tell it to record the various clips.

With Premiere Pro, several things have changed about this process. To begin with, the capture window is much easier to use. As you can see from Figure 5, the tape controls are laid out more logically, with step back/forward, rewind/forward wind on either side of the play button, rather than grouped together. The jog button, located below the shuttle, is a lot easier to use than the frame step feature in 6.5. Above the transport controls, you’ve got time codes for the current timecode, the in point, the out point and the duration, respectively. Each of these can be typed into, or you can drag left & right across them to decrease or increase the values. To the left of the transport controls are clip navigation aids, allowing you to go to the next scene, previous scene, in and out point, plus buttons for setting the in and out points.

In addition to the new layout of the window, though, the workflow is also improved. With Premiere Pro, logging a clip doesn’t add those details to a batch capture window, it instead adds the details to the current project as an offline file. This ensures that all of the relevant capture information is retained within the project file. The big advantage of this is that you can give the source tapes plus the project file to someone else and they will be able to capture the clips automatically because Premiere knows which tapes the clips are located on and where in the tapes the clips can be found.


Figure 5: Premiere Pro's capture window. Click on the image for the full size image. (29KB)

In keeping with the more logical layout of the capture window, Adobe has also added a Settings tab (as shown in Figure 6) where all of the relevant parameters can easily be changed without have to search through project preferences, general settings, etc.


Figure 6: Settings for the Capture window. Click on the image for the full size image. (14KB)

Capturing Video & Audio – The New Way
Premiere Pro now does automatic scene detection capturing! Woo hoo!

OK – excitement over – what the heck does that mean!?! If you’ve got a DV camcorder, as it records the video, it lays down a timecode. So long as the timecode is consistent (and more on this in a moment), it is possible for capture software to work out from the DV data stream when you started and stopped each clip. This “scene detection” process allows Premiere Pro to automatically read in the video from your DV camcorder, spotting the stops & starts and splitting those scenes into separate files. No more manual playing through the tape looking for the in and out points of each section.

Now, this isn’t particularly new technology. There have been other tools available for a while, including Scenalyzer and the Matrox MediaTools application bundled with the RT series. However, the inclusion of this feature into Premiere Pro goes a long way to simplify the workflow process since you no longer have to involve any other tools. The facility is really easy to use – select the “Scene Detect” checkbox and click on the “Tape” button. Premiere Pro then does its stuff!

Now, I mentioned earlier that the timecode needed to be consistent. What does this mean and why is it necessary? For the timecode to be consistent, your tape needs to have a continuous and increasing time counter. This then ensures that when you ask Premiere to go to one minute, 42 seconds and three frames into the tape, it can always find the right place. It won’t be able to do that if there are multiple locations on the tape with that timecode.

The recommended method for laying down a consistent timecode on a new tape is to stripe the tape (also known as blacking the tape). This involves putting the blank tape into your camcorder, putting it into record mode and letting it go through to the end of the tape. The end result is that the tape now contains a timecode that runs continuously from the start of the tape to the end. The reason this works is because when you start using the tape for real, i.e. recording video onto the tape, the camcorder realises that there is a timecode on the tape already and doesn’t overwrite that part of the tape.

If you haven’t striped your tape (or used any other mechanism for ensuring consistency), the timecode will reset to zero every time you swap tapes or if you record over a bit of tape that doesn’t have any timecode on it. The only time a camcorder will know to continue on from a previous timecode is if your camcorder has an “End Search” facility or if you play the previous recording to the end but stop before the playback goes past the end of the recording.

No Change For Analogue
All of the above, though, is 100% dependent on there being a timecode stream that can be read, which means a DV connection. If you’ve got an analogue video connection (S-Video, Composite or RGB), you won’t have a timecode, which means you can’t use any of the above features. All you can do is press play on the camcorder, click on Record in Premiere and capture the clip through your video input card.

No Stop Motion Capture
Unfortunately, Premiere Pro isn’t all about improvement or new features. Some features have fallen by the wayside and one such casualty is the Stop Motion Capture feature. This allowed you to specify how many frames to capture in a minute, hour or day, plus whether or not there was a limit on the number of frames you wanted caught. For some reason, this facility did not get carried over. It is possible to have both Premiere 6.5 and Premiere Pro installed on the same system so if this is something you used, you might want to keep 6.5 around just for this reason.