In the previous lessons in this book, you worked with footage that was already captured or transferred from a recording source. In this lesson, you will learn to transfer the footage from your camera or storage card.
What you’ll learn in this lesson:
- Creating a new Premiere Pro project
- dding bins and set a capture bin
- Capturing footage from a digital video camera
- Adding and editing metadata footage
In the previous lessons in this book, you worked with footage that was already captured or transferred from a recording source. In this lesson, you will learn to transfer the footage from your camera or storage card.
Starting up
In this lesson, you will work with the project files from the pr10lessons folder. Make sure that you have loaded the prlessons folder onto your hard drive from www.digitalclassroombooks.com/epub/premierecs6. The Starting up section at the beginning of this book provides detailed information about loading lesson files, resetting your workspace, locating missing media, and opening the files in CS6. If you have not already done so, please review these instructions before starting this lesson.
When opening the Premiere Pro project files used in this lesson you may experience a missing media message. You must locate any missing media before trying to proceed through the lessons. For more information refer to “Locating missing media” in the Starting up section of this book.
Creating a new project
The Premiere Pro project file contains references to the media you import (video, audio, or images) and to the original content, such as titles and sequences you create in the application. The project file has very few options to set; in most cases, it functions mostly as a container and organizer for your footage and sequences.
To begin this lesson, you will create a new Premiere Pro project from the beginning.
1 From the Premiere Pro welcome screen, click the New Project button to open the New Project dialog box.
The welcome screen always appears when you first start Premiere Pro; you can create new projects or open existing ones from this screen.
If Premiere Pro is already open, choose File > New Project to open the New Project dialog box.
2 At the bottom of the New Project dialog box, click the Browse button, navigate to the pr10lessons folder you copied to your hard drive, and click the Choose button to set this folder as the destination for your project. Click the Name box and change the default name to pr1001. Do not click OK, as you will be adjusting other controls within the new project setting dialog box.
3 The New Project dialog box contains a limited number of editable settings, most of which control how audio and video tracks appear in the Timeline. If necessary, in the General tab of the dialog box, adjust the following properties to the settings listed below:
Video Display Format
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Timecode
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Audio Display Format
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Audio Samples
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Capture Format
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DV
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The general settings of the New Project dialog box are mostly used to adjust display settings.
4 Click the Scratch Disks tab in the dialog box and confirm that all four scratch disks, Captured Video, Captured Audio, Video Preview, and Audio Previews, are set to Same as Project. This choice keeps together all the files for this project, thus making it easier to locate and backup files.
The scratch disks are an area of a computer’s hard drive used for temporary file storage; in video editing applications such as Premiere Pro, scratch disks are used to define an area to store captured and rendered files.
The scratch disks are used to store files during capture and preview.
5 Click the OK button located in the lower-right corner of the dialog box to create the new project.
Creating a new project automatically opens the New Sequence dialog box. You will adjust these settings in the next part of the lesson.
Creating a new sequence
Premiere Pro allows you to create a new sequence whenever you create a new project, including an initial sequence. The creation of this initial sequence is purely optional; you can choose to skip it by clicking the Cancel button on the New Sequence dialog box and the application will still open as normal. As you have learned in other lessons, the sequence is where the actual editing process occurs. Each sequence can have as many separate video and audio tracks as your system configuration allows, and each track can hold a range of individual clips. This lets you assemble a wide range of projects that can contain video, audio, still images, text, and other graphics.
In this section of the lesson, you will create a new sequence for the project you created earlier in this lesson.
1 In the New Sequence dialog box, change the default name of the sequence to NTSC Capture.
2 In the Sequence Presets tab of the dialog box, choose Standard 48kHz from the DV-NTSC preset folder. The capture process is only used for footage that is recorded in either the DV or HDV formats. In this example, we presume that you would be capturing from a standard definition NTSC camcorder.
Premiere Pro contains a wide variety of sequence presets.
3 Click the OK button located at the lower-right side of the dialog box to create the new sequence. This completes the project creation process you initiated in the previous exercise.
4 After the Premiere Pro interface appears, set your active workspace to Editing by choosing Window > Workspace > Editing.
To make sure you are in the factory default editing workspace, choose Window > Workspace > Reset Current Workspace.
You need to reset the workspace because Premiere Pro saves all changes you make to a workspace; if you add or remove panels, the new workspace will have more or fewer panels than the default setting.
5 Choose File > Save or press Ctrl+S (Windows) or Command+S (Mac OS) to save these changes to your project. Do not close the file; you will need it in the next part of the lesson.
The current state of the workspace saves with the file.
Creating a capture bin
The term bin comes from the days of film editing, and is taken from the practice of storing developed film clips in bins for easy organization. In the Premiere Pro project panel, bins are used as file folders to hold and organize your media assets. When capturing footage from a camera or deck, you can define a capture destination to organize your media in the Project panel. This destination bin is called a capture bin; once created, you can set it in the Capture panel so your footage is automatically placed in this location. This is only an internal setting, it does not affect where the footage is captured to on your hard drive.
The capture bin is not the same as the scratch location. The scratch folder is the location on the hard drive where all captured and previewed media is stored. In this project, you set the scratch to be the same folder location as your project file, so all captured video and audio files will be placed with your project file into the pr10lessons folder on your hard drive.
1 Click the New Bin button located at the bottom of the Project panel to create a new bin.
Call this bin Video Capture and press the Enter (Windows) or Return (Mac OS) key.
Bins function almost exactly like file folders on your computer.
2 If necessary, click the List View button ( 
) located at the bottom of the Project panel to change the panel display into a list of items.
) located at the bottom of the Project panel to change the panel display into a list of items.
3 Choose File > Save or press Ctrl+S (Windows) or Command+S (Mac OS) to save the project file.
Don’t close this file; you will need it to complete the next part of the lesson.
Now that you have created a capture bin in the Project panel, you can capture media from a camera or deck, as explained in the next part of the lesson.
Capturing from a tape-based camera
If you are working with tape-based media, before you can add footage to a Premiere Pro project you must capture it from the digital tape-based medium where you recorded it, to a digital file on your hard drive. To complete the activities in this lesson, you need a digital video camcorder or a video deck connected to your computer via a FireWire cable. FireWire connections are very fast, but capture from a linear device, such as digital video tape, always occurs in real time, so capturing 40 minutes of video takes 40 minutes to accomplish.
Video decks are the digital video equivalent of a VCR (Video Cassette Recorder). Video decks have a FireWire or other connection to attach to a computer, some have a display screen, and they let video editors capture video without connecting a camera.
Before beginning the capture process detailed in this part of the lesson, you should perform the following steps to set up your FireWire equipped digital video camera or video deck and the tape you want to capture:
1 Connect your camcorder or deck to your computer using a FireWire cable, also known as ieee1394 or iLink, and turn it on.
You can connect the FireWire cable when either of the devices you are connecting is on, but we strongly recommend turning the devices off before connecting them to avoid possible damage to the devices.
2 Place the tape you want to capture from into your camcorder or video deck.
3 If you are using a digital camcorder, set it to VCR mode to let Premiere Pro interact and control it.
4 Position your tape to the area you want to capture from.
Understanding the Capture panel interface
A. Video Preview. B. Camera/Deck status message. C. Capture Setup. D. Clip Data. E. Timecode. F. Capture. G. Playhead Position. H. In Point. I. Out Point. J. Duration. K. Transport Controls. L. Capture Settings. M. Capture Location. N. Device Control.
Using the Capture panel
You can use the Capture panel to log and capture footage from digital video camcorders or decks. Logging is the process of reviewing and annotating every scene and shot recorded on a tape. Capturing is the process of transferring the digital video from the tape where it is stored in linear form to a file on your computer, where you can access each clip in a non-linear fashion. The term used is specifically called capturing instead of digitizing because modern video tape camcorders already record footage into a digital format.
When the cost of stable digital storage could not be easily afforded, editors would log everything on a tape and only capture the needed footage. Now, high capacity hard disk drives are affordable and reliable, so many editors capture every piece of footage on a tape and sort it after capturing. Premiere Pro can automatically detect different scenes on your tape based on when recording was started and paused (every time you pressed the Record/Pause toggle button on the camera) through a feature called Scene Detect, which can help you sort and capture all footage on your tape.
In this section of the lesson, we will demonstrate the capture of clips from a tape that contains shots taken in and around the city of Boston, Massachusetts. You can adjust the clip settings used in this exercise when you capture your own tapes; the specific values used in this section are for demonstration purposes only. Later in this lesson, you will discover how to work with non-tape based systems as many devices are now recording directly to removable high capacity memory cards and integrated hard drives.
Due to the nature of the tape-based capture process, this section of the book is intended to be used more for informational purposes so that you have the knowledge to capture your own tapes rather than an actual step by step lesson.
1 With the pr1001.prproj project still open, choose File > Capture to open the Capture panel.
If the capture panel does not detect a device, text at the top to the panel lets you know the capture device is offline.
You can also press the F5 key to open the Capture panel.
2 In the Capture panel, locate the Logging tab on the right and click the Video Capture bin in the Log Clips To menu.
Clips are placed in the root area of the Project panel by default. You can specify a different bin to log clips to.
3 Set your tape and clip names in the Clip Data section of the Logging tab. We recommend matching the name on the physical label on the tape so you can easily find it should you need to recapture your footage due to loss or damage.
For this example, we used the following settings:
Tape Name: Boston Travelogue Tape 1
Clip Name: Boston Sites
Description: Video taken of and around the city of Boston for use in Adobe Premiere Pro Digital Classroom.
The fields Scene, Shot/Take, and Log Note were not used for this footage. These fields are often used when capturing dramatic or narrative works divided into scenes and usually contain multiple takes for each scene.
4 In the Capture section of the panel, select the Scene Detect check box to make this feature available.
For the purposes of the Capture panel, a scene occurs every time the camera recording is paused.
5 Click the Tape button in the capture section of the dialog box to begin the capture process. Premiere Pro automatically begins playback on the capture device.
After capturing is complete, the status message displays paused, and the clips appear inside the logging folder you specified.
The clip names are automatically enumerated based on the name you indicated in the Capture panel.
6 Close the Capture panel and choose File > Save or press Control+S (Windows) or Command+S (Mac OS) to save the project file. Close this file; you have completed this section of the lesson.
To capture from other tapes, eject the tape from your camera or deck, insert a new tape, and begin the capture process again after changing the tape and clip names.
Transferring from a non-tape based camera
Many of the cameras sold today store footage onto a variety of digital storage media and are not tape-based. These file-based camcorders are produced by different manufacturers with their own specifications; some examples include the Panasonic P2 camcorders, AVCHD camcorders, Sony’s XDCAM HD and CDCAM EX camcorders, DSLR cameras and the RED digital cinema cameras. The storage media used by these camcorders varies from hard disk drives to optical media such as a DVD or flash memory cards like CF or SD cards.
As is the case with mini-DV tape-based devices, the tapeless camcorders perform the capture and digitizing process so you do not need to capture or digitize the files before importing them to Premiere Pro. The process of reading the data files from the recording media and then converting it into a format you can use in your projects is called ingesting. Premiere Pro CS5 is designed to ingest and work with the native files of tapeless formats without pre-importing conversions.
Adobe provides specific guidelines and recommendations for working with footage from RED, XDCAM, and other tapeless formats at www.adobe.com.
You can import assets directly from the camcorder’s tapeless media, but best practice is to transfer the footage to your hard disk drive first and then import it into Premiere Pro. Most tapeless cameras have a built-in USB port you can use for this purpose. For cameras that record onto portable media, such as CF and SD cards, you can use card readers.
Backing up a project with Project Manager
You could work on a project with media imported from different hard drive locations. You could also have more imported footage than you need to complete a project. In such situations, use the project manager to consolidate your project files for easy backup or transfer.
You can find all the media used in this project file in the Media Library within the Travelogue-Boston folder.
1 From the Premiere Pro welcome screen, click the Open Project button, or with Premiere Pro already open, chose File > Open Project. Navigate to the pr10lessons folder you copied to your hard drive and locate the pr1002.prproj file. Double-click the file to open it.
You will back up the contents of this project using the Project Manager.
If you had to locate missing media before opening this project file, you should save the project by choosing File > Save before continuing.
2 Choose Project > Project Manager to open the Project Manager dialog box.
Use the Project Manager to back up your entire project and all the media files it contains.
3 From the Resulting Project section of the dialog box, choose Collect Files and Copy to New Location.
Using the Project Manager, you can add files to create a new project in one of two ways:- • Create New Trimmed Project: use it to create a new version of the current project that references only the footage you used on the timelines of the selected sequences.
- • Collect Files and Copy to New Location: use it to copy and consolidate the footage you used in the selected sequences to create a new stand-alone project.
If you want to create a stand-alone backup of your project and its associated media, choose Collect Files and Copy to New Location.
4 In the Project Destination section of the panel, click the Browse button, navigate to the pr10lessons folder on your hard drive, and choose it as the destination for the backup of your project.
5 In the Disk Space section of the dialog box, click the Calculate button to calculate the amount of space available on your hard drive and the space required by the project manager to back up your project files.
6 Click the OK button to start backing up the files. A status bar appears on the screen to show the progress. Project Manager will close when the task is complete.
7 Close this project; you have completed this section of the lesson. You do not need to save; the file manager does not make any changes to the project.
Self study
Attach your tape-based camcorder to your computer, and then capture your own footage.
Review
Questions
1 The Premiere Pro project file contains references to the __________ that you import and the other original content, such as _______ and __________, that you create in the application.
2 What are the four types of scratch disks you can set when creating a new project?
3 What do the terms logging and capturing mean?
Answers
1 media (video, audio, images), titles, sequences
2 The four types of scratch disks you can set when creating a new project are: Captured Video, Captured Audio, Video Preview, and Audio Previews.
3 Logging is the process of reviewing and annotating every scene recorded on a tape. Capturing is the process of transferring the digital video from the tape where it is stored in linear form to a file on your computer, where you can access each clip in a non-linear fashion.
