280 The Digital Filmmaking Handbook, 4E

Transcoding DSLR Media

If you shot your project with a DSLR, your camera original footage was most likely acquired with the h.264 codec, which uses 4:2:0 color sampling and 8-bit color. Choose an intermediate codec that offers 4:2:2 color sampling and 8-bit color that matches the frame rate and image size of your camera’s original footage.

Capturing Tape-based Media

Most editing packages offer a capture utility to get video into your computer (see Figure 13.7). The simplest packages will work like a tape recorder: tell them to start recording, and they’ll record any video that’s fed into them. More sophisticated applications will let you specify, or log, which sections of a tape to capture, and can be configured for unattended capturing of whole batches of clips.

Logging

Because digital videotape isn’t broken down into files the way tapeless media is, you’ll have to help your editing software by telling it where each shot starts and ends before you have it ingest the media.

Following these technical tips can save time and frustration in the editing room, both now and later:

nLog first, and then capture. Logging your tapes lets you skip unusable takes that would waste disk space if captured. Usually, it’s best to log all the takes, whether good or bad, during a first pass. Then you can capture only the good takes during a second pass. This way, you have a complete log of your tapes and can later easily grab additional takes.

nAvoid logging across timecode breaks. Any section on the tape that displays no timecode in your deck’s counter is a break, and they tend to occur whenever the camera was turned on and off. If that is the case, it’s likely that what follows the timecode break is a new shot, so log it separately. Some timecode breaks are very short and hard to spot so most editing apps let you choose to “capture across timecode breaks” in the project capture settings.

nLog with “handles.” It’s best to log each shot with a few seconds of padding at the head and tail. These handles give you flexibility to extend a shot or add dissolves. Some programs enable you to set up a predetermined handle length for your shots.

nAvoid logging extremely long takes. As you log your tapes, you might find yourself faced with a seemingly endless series of uninterrupted multiple takes. Rather than logging these as one giant shot, it’s better to pick the best usable sections and log them separately. After you decide which take to use, you can delete, or take “off-line,” the media that you’re not using. You don’t want to log a shot that’s ten minutes long if you only use five seconds of it. Remember, the goal of logging is to make some initial decisions about the content of your project. While it’s nice to have lots of choices in the editing room, too many choices can bog down the editing process.

Figure 13.7

Tape-based capturing in Avid Media Composer.

nLog the blue-screen correction shot. If you’re logging blue-screen footage, log the empty blue-screen shots that either proceed or follow each shot. These are important for compositing.