Apple Cinema Tools 3 - Manual (Page 38)

38 Chapter 2 The Cinema Tools Workflow
Capturing Tactics
There are several approaches to capturing your video and audio. Determining which is
right for you depends on a number of factors, including whether you have device control
of the source tape deck and the transfer type used (camera-roll or scene-and-take).
Device Control
A primary consideration when determining how to capture video and audio is whether
Final Cut Pro supports device control for the deck you use. Device control allows you to
capture precisely the video and audio you want in a way that can be exactly repeated,
if necessary. You can even set up a “batch capture” that automates the process, freeing
you to do other tasks.
Capturing without device control presents several challenges. Clips that are captured
manually do not have precise start and end times. If you intend to match start and end
times from a telecine log, you must trim the clips after capturing them. Additionally,
without device control, a clip’s timecode does not match the timecode on the tape.
Final Cut Pro has a provision for changing a clip’s timecode, but in order for that
timecode to match the source tape you must have a visual reference (hole-punched or
marked frame) with a known timecode.
For more information on device control, see the Final Cut Pro documentation.
About Compression
Compression, in terms of digital video, is a means of squeezing the content into
smaller files so that they require less hard disk space and potentially less processor
power to display. The tradeoff is lower quality images.
It’s important to remember that the edited video that results from Final Cut Pro when
used with Cinema Tools is not typically going to be used for anything where high
quality would be expected. The most common use of the edited video is to give the
negative cutter a visual guide to go along with the cut list. This means that the
quality of the video only needs to be good enough to make your edit decisions and
read the window burn values. However, because your edit decisions are sometimes
based on subtle visual cues, it’s best not to get too carried away with excess
compression.
UP01101.Book Page 38 Thursday, March 10, 2005 3:16 PM