For better or worse, logging by hand at least makes you watch all the footage and make a decent catalog of it for later reference. The ironic thing about this is that this is probably MORE valuable for small projects done by amateurs than for professionals. The professional user will probably log one big clip and then look at all the footage anyway because she has to know what’s there.

If it’s me, I’ll just skip to the stuff I remember being on the tape and forget to look at the rest.

So, I’m back to logging by hand for now.

Capture the footage from your tape, catalog and organize it and then create preview copies of your clips. Then you can view or search for footage from any of your tapes easily. When you find clips you want to recapture just export a batch capture list and have FCP do the recapturing.

There’s a time unlimited demo available at http://foottrack.com for anyone interested.

Thanks for your comments (and the corrections); I was certainly under the impression that using capture now made working in OfflineRT and/or recapturing material later more difficult; I’ll try it sometime this week and if it works I’ll be sure to update and correct the article. I suspect the main difference will be that if you capture via capture now, FCP will require you to know which tape the material is on, since you didn’t log it at capture time. This is easy if you are working on a small project and have one tape. If you are doing a large project and have many tapes, I’m betting that either you have an eidetic memory, much better notes than -I- have, or are screwed. Like I said: i’ll give it a shot and correct my explanation if I I’m wrong.

I think your statement “There is no reason not to use subclips” is wrong. The reason not to use subclips is that the master/subclip relationship in FCP4 is utterly confusing and not well explained by the documentation. I see questions about the master/subclip relationship all the time, and the way they are implemented has repercussions (for example, applying transitional effects on a subclip can result in material from outside the subclip appearing in your effect.) I’m sure that once you master the idiosyncracies of the implementation using them is fine. But I sure haven’t, and I’ve tried, so I’m not going to advise others to go do it. Yet. Maybe when I figure it out, that can be the subject of another (wildly inaccurate?) article.

You don’t believe my explanation for the 30 minute capture now limitation; I don’t believe yours. When did it ever take a long time to count the number of free blocks (even contiguous blocks) on a disk? 1983?

I agree with you that there are multiple ways of working on a video project, and that FCP should provide as much flexibility as its users need (or more). Let a million flowers bloom.

Ask Bj¯rn: Y’know, I knew about the DV start/stop detection (and referred to it obliquely) and advised people not to use it specifically because of the problems so many people (including me) have in using master clips and subclips. But because I’m a bonehead, I completely forgot that you can just choose the magic “make this subclip into its own master clip” menu option. You are right, and I’ll update the article later today to discuss this option in more detail.

-Peter

What really needs to be updated is the FCP software, which is using the same paradigm it did five years ago when hard drives were half the size and cost twice as much. In the 21st century there is no reason to log your material prior to capturing. It is much easier, and much more efficient, to log your material after its captured. This is what computers do best, handle large amount of data, and it’s much easier to input this data when you can look at your material and organize your material with all the control the NLE provides, creating and using multiple sequences and multiple bins.

There is no reason not to use subclips, and in fact in FCP4 with it’s master/affiliate relationship, I would recommend this as the preferred method of working as creating subclips creates new master clips.

Your statement about capture now and OfflineRT is completely bogus. Timecode is captured with capture now and the material can be converted to OfflineRT. In fact you can use capture now with an OfflineRT preset without problem. That entire paragraph is completely wrong and shows a complete misunderstanding of the capture process. Just because you’re using capture now does not mean that the FireWire protocol is not providing timecode and controlling the deck. There is no difference between capture now, and marking in and out points in 20 minute or 60 minute segments.

The reason for the 30 minute limit on capture now is/was to speed up the capture process. When you give a capture now instruction, the computer looks first to see how much available drive space there is. If you have a lot of drive space, this can actually take quite a bit of time, by limiting it to only looking for 30 minute blocks it speeds up initiating the capture. As computer have gotten much faster this has become pretty much a legacy issue, and most users simply switch it off.

You can still free up drive space if you’re running short, and that’s one of the tasks Media Manager is designed to do, to consolidate your edited media. Either that or buy another hard drive.

Obviously each of us has there own way of working. I used to be of the log first, capture what you need school of working in the days when a 18G hard drive array cost $5000. You’d log, you’d capture just what you needed in low res, and then edit it. So often I found that looking back through the material after the cut that there were shots I should have digitized in the first place because they worked in unexpected ways with how the program actually came together. Often this necessitated a lot of workarounds, and reshuffling to get the new material in the project. We don’t have to work like that any more. We now have the luxury of having all our material available at any time, especially if you can work in OfflineRT, letting you capture enormous amounts of material.

I just wish FCP would gear itself better to the paradigm shift in editing that the DV revolution they touted has actually created. There are new ways of working while FCP still is primarily focused on working in a linear logging, narrative fiction model that does not suit most of its customers needs. Search changes for instance need to be made to the application to assist the new ways of working, rather than constantly forcing users into its own dated methodology.

All the best,

Tom

When I’m using a deck I’ll usually do the proper logging and all. When I am capturing from a camera, I’ll usually just log one (or few) big clips and then make subclips from those. The subclips can in turn be turned into “normal clips”. Logging without fighting with the deck/camera!

– ask