Capturing from a VCR URGENT!!!!

Hey, I have a problem. I have to finish a small presentation till Friday and therefore I need to capture some old footage from a video cassette.
I bought an ADVC-55 converter and made all the cable connections but when I start 'log and capture' in FCP it says 'no connection.' I've never captured from a VCR before, so am I missing something?

Totally random guess? Set your device control preset to "non-controllable device" and do everything manually.

Or just send the tapes out and have the dubbed to a format you can work with directly. That'd probably be faster than trial-and-erroring.

Non-controllable device, make sure FCP gets audio/video playback. You should be able see/hear playback in the Log and Capture window, and no, there's no deck control for VHS, so you need to run a capture now (so make sure you give it a name before capturing). Capture as Uncompressed SD/ ProRes (or whatever you are editing in).



www.strypesinpost.com

ha haaaa! thank you guys! the cable was broken! who'd think of that? once I set it to non-contrallable device and capture now it works fine!
thanks a lot!

Ha. It's always the cables. Just make sure that you capture in your final resolution (and have a good back up) as you can't recapture later, not on VHS (no RS422, no timecode).



www.strypesinpost.com

strypes Wrote:
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> Ha. It's always the cables. Just make sure that
> you capture in your final resolution (and have a
> good back up) as you can't recapture later, not on
> VHS (no RS422, no timecode).

Honestly! I exchanged it and it worked!
Why can I not recapture? I captured it twice, first dv pal anamorphic then non-anamorphic.

>Why can I not recapture?

You can't recapture. Eg. Do the edit, then during conform say "okay, I need higher resolution", pop in the tapes, recapture. There's no tape timecode information, there's no deck control.

Then again, I'm actually wondering if it's possible to do batch recapturing with Mpeg Streamclip...



www.strypesinpost.com

I'm not sure what you mean, it's an old DV Pal tape with a length of 6 minutes which I captured full resolution because...well, it doesn't take that much space really. (and the quality suuuuucks)
forgive me, I'm not so good with the technical site of editing.

> Why can I not recapture? I captured it twice, first dv pal anamorphic then non-anamorphic.

He means you can't capture at offline quality because the captured clips you use for editing can't be batch-recaptured from the VHS tapes because there is no real timecode.

Given that it's only six minutes, though, a manual eye-conform isn't out of the question. Still, in this case there really is no point in capturing at offline quality -- unless you're really, really low on storage space.

But wait, you wrote this:

> it's an old DV Pal tape with a length of 6 minutes

If it's a DV tape, why would you need a converter in the first place? A DV camera or deck would do, and you can use FireWire, and that would retain timecode. Plus DV quality shouldn't be that bad.


www.derekmok.com

Ohhhh, now I get what you mean with the recapturing.
Well, it's so bad quality because the tapes are really old and it's flickering and noising all over. It's not that much of a problem because the clients are aware of the problem.
Aehm, I just THOUGHT it's done by a mini DV camera and I don't have the original DV tape to capture just the VHS tape so I can't use a camera or a deck. So I captured it with DV pal 48khz. It looked bad on the VCR and looks bad in the viewer...we'll see what we'll use.
This is all really new to me, never really had to capture stuff before.