Batch Capturing a Sequence

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Batch Capturing a Sequence

There might be times when you finish a project, delete its related media files, and want to re-create it at a later date. Or, perhaps you are moving your work from one workstation to another. Instead of re-capturing every clip and re-editing the entire finished sequence, you can simply select the edited sequence and choose Batch Capture from the Bin menu. Batch capturing is possible only if you have the original source tapes.

Batch capturing a sequence creates new media files and master clips. The lengths of the master clips are based solely on how long the clip existed in the finished sequence. Any links to original media files will now be broken, as described in the chart shown in Figure 2.19.

Figure 2.19. When batch capturing a sequence, the old links to media files are broken.

When Batch Capture is clicked, the Batch Capture dialog box will appear (see Figure 2.20).

Figure 2.20. This box allows you to add "handles" to the clips that are going to be batch captured.

Select the Offline Media Only radio button. Click the Handle Length box and type in a number of additional frames you want to add to each clip. This number will add frames to both the beginning and the end of the clip. The default is 60. This means that each new clip will have 60 frames or two seconds of media at the beginning and the end of each clip.

If possible, try to decrease the number of additional frames or handles you're adding to each clip. The default of 60 frames can add a lot of media file information to your hard drives . For example, let's say your sequence or finished edited master uses 100 shots and each shot is six seconds long. Essentially you'll need to re-capture 600 seconds or 10 minutes of material. If you decide to add an additional two seconds or 60 frames to the beginning and end of each clip, you're going to re-capture an additional 400 seconds. This might not seem like a point of concern now, but imagine re-capturing a sequence that contains thousands of edits and clips. The extra "handles" you'll be capturing could fill up a hard drive fairly quick. But, do not type in zero, either. A handle length of zero will prevent you from adding any effects or trimming any edits.

Click OK and the system will ask you to insert the first tape needed to re-capture the sequence. After you insert the correct tape, click on Mounted. The system will scan through the tape and re-capture each clip from that tape in order of ascending timecode. After each master clip is re-captured off the initial tape, the system will alert you when it needs another source tape. You have several options (see Figure 2.21).

Figure 2.21. The system will alert you when a new tape is needed.

You can insert the next tape the system needs and click on Mounted. You can also skip a clip, which allows the system to ignore the next clip and continue recording the remaining clips, or you can even skip a tape. This option might be needed if the tape the system needs is being delivered at a later time or doesn't even exist. If you do not have some of the tapes needed to re-capture your sequence, areas throughout your finished sequence will retain clips, which will appear as offline media.

You can also choose to abort the process. If you already started re-capturing a sequence and decide to abort, all links to previous media, yet captured, will be broken.

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