Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
The next step after starting a new project is getting your video assets into that project.
In the old days, that was pretty straightforward. Took a videocassette out of the camcorder
put it into the video editing machine and got to work.
Well, these days things are different. There are basically three ways to get video
assets into your project. The first is called capturing or transferring,
and you do that from a DV or HDV camcorder that uses a videocassette.
The second way is to download assets from camcorders that use hard drives or
flash media or recordable DVDs. And the final way is to import files directly
from your hard drive into your project. I want to talk about the latter to later in
another tutorial, but I want to focus on the capture or transferring method
now. You typically capture or transfer from a DV
or HDV camcorder and you use FireWire, a FireWire cable to do that.
You plug the cable into your camcorder, the other end into your PC, you hook up
your camcorder in to AC power. You don't want to lose any juice during
the middle of a transfer. Then you switch over to the VCR, the playback
mode, as opposed to the camera or the record mode.
Once you get things all fired up you can begin to capture or transfer video via
Premiere Elements into your project, so let's do that.
For this tutorial I set the Project Settings to DV NTSC Standard Definition,
because those match the camcorder we are working with.
By the way you can see your Project Settings by choosing Edit > Project Settings > General.
And here are the Project Settings, DV NTSC. Notice that they are grayed out.
You can't change the Project Settings once you start a new project.
So to get started with our capturing go to the Organize tasks panel, and click
on Get Media, and then click on DV Camcorder. That opens the Capture window.
One of the cool things about video capture using a digital video or HDV
camcorders that you can use what's called device control.
FireWire cables have device control that allows you to remotely control a
DV or HDV camcorder. So we're going to use these VCR like controls,
and then control my camcorder remotely.
In this way you can queue up the tape to whichever clip you want to start
recording and then record from there. So let's get that process rolling.
The first thing you do is you name the clip. In this I want just call it golf.
And if I just type golf, every clip that is recorded up to this point will be
called golf01, golf02, golf03 because Premiere Elements will find breaks in the
footage and name new clips based on the brakes. I'll explain that in a second.
Now we want to save that to some place, so you select the file folder where you
want to put that, then you need to then work on these final features down here.
I want to capture both video and audio. I don't want in this case to capture the Timeline.
Usually you want to be able to edit the clips in the order that it will
best work for your project. Infrequently will the clips actually match
the order that you shot them in. If that's the case then leave this checked.
I'm going to uncheck it in this particular though.
I like this little thing called Split Scenes down here.
This will automatically create new clips for each scene change.
You can choose between by the Timecode or by Content.
Content is kind of iffy. Premiere Elements sometimes doesn't really
know when the content has changed, but the Timecode is a certain thing, because
every time you click pause on your camcorder that changes the timecode and
so every time Premiere Elements sees that little Pause Record button being
pressed, it will create a new clip at that point.
Finally there is this option down here, called Auto-Analyzer and Auto-Analyzer
will analyze each clip, looking for motion, faces, blur, and will indicate those
things in tags that are attached to little clips.
But the Auto-Analyzer is very slow and can really eat up computer resources.
I think you can probably do a better job looking at your clips in figuring out
if there is motion in it, or faces in it, or if it's blurry.
So I tend to just turn that off to have things go faster and I'll be able to
check those things out later. So once I've decided okay, this is where I
want to start capturing, all I have to do is click Capture and my camcorder will
start playing and Premiere Elements will start making new clips.
There is the next clip and notice that it goes to golf02.
Each time there is a new clip, it will be the next clip. golf03.
So now I've recorded three clips. I'm going to click Pause.
Let's say I'm done now. I have recorded the three clips that I wanted
to record. I can close this and those three clips will
now show up in the Project View, golf01, golf02, golf03.
Premiere Elements stores your clips as AVI files.
That's Audio Video Interleave. That's a standard Windows video file format
and it's the full digital video resolution that was on your camcorder's tape.
So nothing is lost during transfer. Let me just show you how one of these clips
look. We just got it moments ago. I can preview
it.
(Whack! Golf ball being hit.) And there you go.
That's how you capture video from a DV or HDV videocassette camcorder and
now that you've captured these clips, you are ready to start editing your video project.