Make “Capture Now” Just a Little More “Now”

If you cap a lot of tapes (and I still do), perhaps, like me, you often simply start the tape rolling and hit “Capture Now” to ingest everything and you sort out the bodies later in the Browser. This is especially useful when capping tapes that are comprised of many clips due to broken timecode.

Capture Now is particularly useful when capping corporate or documentary footage that does not consist of many “takes.” In cases where I have a number of takes (and especially if someone has already specified which takes are the keepers), it can be more useful to work through the tape and log each take then batch capture the needed footage once you’ve worked your way through the whole tape.

Well, this is not an earth-shattering or jaw-dropping shortcut by any means, but if you can remember to hit SHIFT C immediately after hitting L to play, you will get the capture process underway a couple of seconds faster than if you have to reach your hand out and mouse over to the “Now” button on the log and cap interface.

In cases where you don’t have much leader to work with and the camera person started shooting useful footage right out of the gate (sometimes due to “run and gun” necessity and sometimes due to a negligent failure to lay down a bars and tone leader), this might save you a few frames.

Note that, in this scenario, I like to use the following settings in my User Preferences (OPT Q):

• Abort capture on dropped frames checked on
• On timecode break: “Make New Clip”

So the overall workflow is:  CMD 8 (to initiate Log & Cap), L (to start play), SHIFT C (to “capture now”) and finally: go make a sammich! After all, when not ingest a meal while your workstation is ingesting that tape?