Archiving

Whether you're archiving your clips or creating a master of your movie, you should use the best resolution possible - which is DV. The problem is the large filesize of DV, 3.6Mbytes for each second of movie. Because a mini-DV tape will hold 60 minutes of DV, while a DVD will hold only about 30 minutes of DV, archiving/mastering your clips/movies to miniDV tape is the best option.

The way you archive will depend on your camcorder, but to illustrate how to do it, here is a walk-through using a Sony TRV-30 camcorder, a standard firewired PC and Pinnacle Studio 7 Video Editor.

The procedure is as follows:

Capture in the usual way.

 

Studio 7 allows you to control your camcorder's tape position before you start capturing.
As you button through the tape, the image is displayed on Studio 7's display. If you're doing
a normal capture, you should check that your tape is rewound by using the appropriate camcorder controls on Studio 7 as shown below. Before we actually start though, we must set our camcorder to VCR.

 

On the camcorder avatar, the window gives the count in minutes, seconds and frames., as well as a tape direction indicator, and the function, e.g. stop, play etc. This control/indication is easier to use than the small buttons and display on the camcorder. In addition, while capturing, the scene is displayed in the Studio 7 viewfinder, so you can position the capture start point to wherever you wish.

You have two options to select from, before you start capturing, Full-quality, or Preview-quality. Preview-quality converts your DV video to the highly-compressed but much lower quality MPEG-1 format. Since we are going to write-back our archive from the hard disk to our camcorder's tape we should select Full-quality, which puts raw DV on the hard disk when we capture. Studio 7 also shows the capacity of our hard drive's free-space for our video - depending on whether we select Preview of Full-quality.

 

This arrangement allows us to load clips from as many tapes as we like. So, for instance, we can make a collection of clips of a particular category - say our family, to archive on one tape, and make a collection of clips (say for a particular documentary) on another tape.

 

Now we can see how we can select what clips we bring into our hard drive, starting and stopping the capture as appropriate using the Start Capture button (which changes to Stop Capture while capture is in progress). We can even interrupt the capture to change a tape to bring in clips from multiple tapes.

When we initiate capture, at our chosen start point, we're asked to give a name to the particular capture. This allows us to label each individual clip, or to name a sequence of clips. We can also set a timer to capture for a particular time period. Once we are ready, pressing the Start Capture button starts the capture, and the clips are automatically brought into our catalogue (i.e. stored on our hard disk). If we've selected Preview-quality the DV is brought in as MPEG-1, while Full-quality brings in in DV (we should be using the latter).

At any time we can stop the capture. Better still, we can restart the capture after repositioning the capture point on the tape - or even change tapes, reposition, and pull clips off that tape.

 

 

As our clips are captured they are written to the catalogue (actually the file is on the hard disk). Each clip is labelled with Scene number, which we can change to allow us to label each clip to anything we like. The running time of each clip is also annotated in (minutes), seconds and frames.

As each page is filled the next page is accessed (turning pages as necessary).

The next phase of our operation is done by switching to Edit, which allows us to move all, or selected clips into a timeline. Its this timeline that determines which clips are put in our archive. So any poor quality clips can be discarded.

When we move each clip to the timeline, its audio is moved with it.

As we're only archiving, we can ignore the timeline titling, transitions, commentary and background music features.

Now we're almost ready to archive, but first we must do three things:

1. Change the tape (unless you want to overwrite the one you've captured from).

2. Set our options to output to miniDV tape (see below).

 

3. Set our camcorder to CAMERA mode, then set record to
DV-in using the record button simultaneously with the
button next to it. Now, when we press the Create button
in Studio 7, the camcorder is started in CAMERA mode but
sourcing the picture from the DV-in rather than from the
lens/CCD, and at the same time Studio 7 outputs our DV to
tape.

 

When the operation is complete, we have our archive.

After reading the above, it might seem a long-winded process - but archiving can be done surprisingly quickly. Because Studio 7 doesn't have to do any file conversion, even low-powered PCs can read in the original, and write-back to tape very quickly.

If you have any half-filled tapes, you can top them up simply by moving the start point before you write-back. The Sony TRV-30 has a particularly useful feature to help here, that of End-Search, which automatically finds the end of the recorded section of the tape with frame-accuracy, then stops, waiting for you to write-back..

Although we've been dealing with archiving, making a movie is only marginally more difficult in that we can select the type of file, AVI, MPEG (-1 -2 or -4 depending on the codec we select), RealVideo or WindowsMedia. We can also select our output medium (e.g. VHS, VCD, SVCD or DVD).

And its all very user-friendly.

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