I’ve recently been working part-time uprezzing an hour-long series for Animal Planet, which involves a ton of batch digitizing. When you’re staring at a computer screen for hours on end, waiting for the Capture Tool to do its thing, it’s very easy to get annoyed at little deficiencies in the software that would make my job easier and maybe even save a lot of time. I have no idea if the Capture Tool is undergoing any changes in the new version of MC, but here is my list of gripes that seem like they could be fixed without too much effort.
- For the love of God, please allow me to abort the capture at any stage of the process, rather than just when it’s in the middle of digitizing a clip. Whenever the deck keeps searching and searching for a timecode I know it won’t find, I have to switch the deck into Local mode to confuse the Avid into asking for the next tape. Nothing else seems to work.
- I wish there were an option for the Avid to attempt increasingly shorter prerolls whenever it can’t find the preroll point due to a timecode break. As anyone who works on multicam shows knows, with time-of-day timecode, there can be dozens of timecode breaks on a tape. If you’re attempting to capture a clip that starts right after a break, the Avid will try several times and then give up, forcing you to abort the batch capture to manually override the deck configuration settings with custom preroll.
- It is tremendously inconvenient that the message bar (which indicates what the Capture Tool is currently doing) is limited to 2 lines, and everything else gets cut off. Anytime it’s working on a clip with a long name (which is frequently), it’s impossible to see how much time is left in the batch capture (see screen capture below). Couldn’t they put this vital piece of information (as inaccurate as it usually is) somewhere prominent and permanent? Or at least make the message bar 3 lines…
- I always like to keep my bin of master clips open so I can see how many clips are left on each tape (this is useful when planning quick jaunts to the bathroom or refrigerator). However, you cannot access the bin when a batch capture is running. Meaning every time I want to scroll down to see more clips, I need to stop the batch capture to do it, then restart it again.
To avoid sounding like a total whiner, I will now espouse the many virtues of the Capture Tool. I love how it instantly calculates how much media you can fit on each drive at every resolution. I love how it estimates how much time is left in your batch (even though I routinely have to inflate the estimate by about 90%). I love that you can easily auto-configure a deck and set custom preroll right from the Capture Tool. With a few improvements, the Capture Tool could be unbeatable. Seems that way with a lot of Avid’s features, doesn’t it?
July 17, 2008 at 12:08 pm
For stop capture in the midlle of the process do you try botton apple + . ?
August 19, 2008 at 8:12 pm
I seem to remember that hammering the space bar during preroll/cueing will stop the deck and abort the capture.
On thing that I always loved about Avid’s capture is that in those cases where the tape has been cued past end of timecode (seems to be very often in online, when the tape was just totally sucked in start to finish for offline) that I can flick the deck to local when I can see what’s happening and cue the deck back into timecode and then put it back in remote and Avid picks it up without freaking out or aborting. In FCP doing this completely freaks the capture out, and I actually have to completely abort the capture process and come right back in before it will be happy again.
With time of day code I always tend to do batch capture with a pretty short (1-2 sec) preroll anyway. Modern decks tend to have no hassle with it.
October 7, 2009 at 11:40 pm
To mke Avid abort a capture during the pre-roll stage, all you need to do press and hold the following buttons
“CTRL and + and .”
they are the same combination as the “cancel render” / “cancel Import” command.
this will work every time, at least on a PC.