Video Editing : Saving Time: Editing Tapeless
It's about Time... The "tapeless" production future everyone has been dreaming about might be closer than you think.
Direct-to-edit tapeless systems record digital video data directly to a portable hard drive -- bypassing the need for videotape. The big benefit is no logging and capturing from tape -- you simply "drag and drop" your finished video clips right to your desktop and you are ready to edit.
Some of the biggest video companies in the world, Sony, Panasonic, JVC, etc. have developed various direct-to-drive or even direct-to-chip cameras -- all looking toward a tapeless future. Why the rush to leave tape behind? Time. And, as the pundits have long noted, time is money.
Time has Come Today
A typical log and capture operation can more than double the amount of time you spend in processing your field footage and preparing it for digital editing. That's because you have to load the field tapes, go through and log them (even if you can use fast shuttle between the takes,) and mark your in and out points. Then you must run the tapes again in order to capture the content to the hard drive in real time. Even if you walk away to get a snack while your computer is batch capturing, you're still using time... time on your computer... time on your camcorder... time on your work flow. Direct- to-edit completely eliminates this by letting you take the field clips and "data copy" them right to your drive -- and then directly into your timeline -- in a fraction of the time.
In the Nick of Time
The process itself is reasonably straightforward with most of the digital capture units working just like an outboard videotape recorder. One nice bonus is that most of them also allow you to "trigger" capture with your camcorder start/stop button. So you get digital versions of the same clips that would be on the digital tape -- not one long continuous recording.
Most units also allow you to set the capture format to match your editing software's native format. That means there's some basic menu setting before you begin shooting that determines whether the clips will be written as PC type .avi files, Mac-friendly QuickTime .mov files or other common formats. Properly set up, you can drag and drop your clips directly onto your timeline with no transcoding or rendering time used at all.
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