How To Make Capturing Easy In Digital Film Production
In simple layperson language, capture means to transfer a video you have shot with an external device such as a camcorder or a digital camera onto the hard disk of the computer. For effective capture, your computer has to have a good enough configuration to read the data and store it. If your computer is slow, you will find that capturing takes a very long amount of time, and it could really put a dampener on your digital film production experience. You have to also make sure that there is enough space on the hard disk for dumping the captured file. Roughly speaking, a thirty minute video will require about 10 gigabytes of space on your hard disk.
Capturing is the first step of digital editing. But it can also be the most nerve-wracking step. The main reason for that is, you cannot do anything unless the entire video has been captured. Most times, since the transfer will be using a large amount of resources of your computer, you will also not be able to use your computer in any other way. Then, some digital editing software programs have a cap limit of 2 gigabytes on the videos they can handle (this is common in cheap digital editing software). If that is the case, you will not be able to capture a long video at one go.
However, there are certain options by which you can make video capture an easy task in your digital film production routine. Here are the important ways in which capture is done professionally:-
1. If you have a fast machine, good enough space on your computer and professional video editing software, then you can go ahead and hook up your camcorder to your computer for direct capture. For all computers above Pentium IV, you will find that the transfer process will be a breeze and be over in a matter of minutes. You will also see that this capture will be rendered on your computer in good quality. 2. If your machine is not quite fast, and if your digital editing software cannot handle more than 2 gigabytes of data at one go, then you could break your video into smaller pieces - five minutes at a time would be ideal - and then transfer them, piece by piece, on the computer. The capture will be done faster like this. When the capture is finished, you can integrate all the videos into a single one. 3. Finally, you could invest in costlier digital film production software that would read your data shot by shot. Some of the feature-packed software applications do that, and you will have to find out on the package. They will find out the beginning and the end of a shot and then store each shot in a different file. The biggest plus point of this kind of capture is that it makes your editing process much simplified. You can work on each shot individually and then merge it into one running video.
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