How to Capture Footage in Premiere Pro CS4

Welcome back to another Premier Pro CS4 tutorial, I’m David Basulto. Today, we’re going to take a look at capturing footage from your camera that runs over the tape, DV tape or any other tape. So first, what we’re going do is click on file, capture. You can also use the short cut F5 to get this capture window up and unfortunately on this, my Mac right now, I don’t have my camera hooked up but I think you’ll understand what we’re doing.

So, this little dialogue will come up first and capture settings. It's going to ask you what capture format. I’m going to macro some of the capturing quick time. You can also use HDV, I don’t know why I would want to but quick time is what I’m going to choose. I have other options here of course to look at but just leave them all default, choose quick time and have it on the macro. I believe on the PC side, it’s AVI files. I’m pretty sure and we’re going to click okay. And so once you’re in here, you have options here. This is your screen that you can preview your camera that’s running your footage. Premier Pro has a complete list of controls down here just as you had on your cameras. So if your camera was online with say device captured, device online and so the sort of offline and you would actually be able to stop play and rewind, do all of that here which is really handy.

So here, you have your logging window and your settings window. Let’s take a look at the logging window. You have an option to capture audio or a video or both, pretty much you will want to do both and then you’re going to log clips to wherever you have this project to and you could have set that up at the very beginning.

Now, we’re going to call the clip data so you’re going to write something in here like let’s say golf tape one, for example. Maybe you shot a bunch of golfing equips and here you’re want to say, putting and clip 01. As long as you put a numerical of numbering here, the next clip that you have will go to two and three and four and all that.

This is where the metadata is really cool and from your Pro, you can write a description, your scene number, your shot or take, your log note. This is a great plot and I want to have this in my video and then you’re all set.

Now down here, you have an option to use in and out points and log the clips. So for example, you want to set—so let’s say it works starting here as an in point and that’s the out point and we want to log the clip. So here’s and let us choose an offline file and we’re going to click okay and right here is our putting clip and the next time we attached this to our deck two Premier Pro and we’re going to capture a batch capture. It’s going to start capturing our blog clips that we have here. So it's really handy to have that. You can have all these things log down here. See, right here, it says putting clip two. So now, you write some more information here and you change where everything is and you log your clip again and click okay.

So, as long as this tape comes in here, it's going to read the time quotes there. So, let’s say, your DV or whoever gave you, your camera operative gave you a list of time codes. You’re going to need to tape it using that list to write down all the time cards in and out points, log the clips according to whatever name you want or whatever you’re following and once you get the tape, you’ll hook this up and it will start running and capturing all your tapes. So that’s really handy.

The other option down here is the capture, in and out points. So let’s say your camera starts and then stops. It will scene detect which is down here. It’ll scene detect and go from A to B for one clip and then B to C for the second clip, etcetera. So, Premier Pro has the option and the ability to find in and out points. And the last thing, you may want to do some people might just want to capture the whole tape and all you do is press tape and it will start capturing.

Now handles, I usually set it at 20 frames and that means that my video is going to have 20 frames to the start and 20 frames to the end. So I have some room to mess around with that I need to if I maybe I’m off a little bit or the time goes off. I’ve got 20 frames either to side that I can use. So, that’s logging which is really, really handy.

Let’s take a look at the settings. Now, here you have an opportunity to change them if you want it to. Like I said, we’ve got quick time and HDV and there are more advanced things but you’re pretty much in the Mac as far as you’re going to want to do quick time.

Video capture locations, maybe you’ve changed your minds and you want to change it to another area so you can do that, same with the audio but usually, you can do the same in this project which is what you set up in the beginning of the project.

Device control, none or you have HDV and then you have some options here. So in the options area, it's pretty handy. You can choose NTSC or PAL. If you’re from North America, here you want to choose NTSC. If you’re European, you want to choose PAL unless you pick which device you have. So if you know exactly which camera you have, you can choose from all of these or just keep it generic. If you just kept the generic and standard, it's still going to work fine. But like I said, let’s say you have a Canon, it's got a lists of Canons here that you can choose from.

Auto-detect or if you want to do drop-frame or non drop-frame, you have option for that. Auto-detect I usually keep it like that and it does fine. Check status, it will say online or offline and then you want to go online for device info so if you wanted to actually go on the internet, it will let you know whatever third party hardware, I apologize for my slow. And let you know you have CS4 and you’re trying to find out which camera and NTSC and Adobe lets you know what you have here. What kind of support it has. So, if that’s really, really handy as well and let’s cancel out of that. And so that’s it for these quick tutorials. I just wanted to show you how to capture.

Now, we have down here current device set for pre rule time, two seconds time cut off set. Abort capture on drop-frames. You want to make sure that’s unchecked. That’s at least what I do because it will go through the motions of capturing and waste your time and if you have one drop-frame which might happen, it will just abort the whole thing so I would not recommend having that unless that’s something you can do with your workflow. That’s it. That was a quick look at Premier Pro CS4, how to capture from tape.