2. Capture Your Video

Video capture procedures are program-specific and generally well covered in product manuals or help files, so I'll defer to those materials. My only caveat: make sure you capture with "scene detection" enabled.

Part of the information stored on the DV tape is the start point and stop point of each shot taken with the camcorder. During capture, video editing tools use this information to "detect scenes" and create separate clips for each time you started and stopped the camera. In my project, this won't break up the interview footage into separate clips as it was shot without turning the camera on or off, but the editor does place most of my cutaways, establishing shots, and noddies into separate clips, which are then easy to identify and use. I always capture with scene-detection enabled usually a single-click selection in your editor's capture preferences (though you may have to set scene-detection "sensitivity," too).

After capture, all video editors insert the captured clips into some kind of library (also called bin or collection), which generally opens automatically when you close the capture window and switch to edit mode. However, capabilities and features differ substantially from program to program, as I'll discuss in the next section.