Manual Captures, No Device Control

If you have a camera connected that does not support device control or if you are using an RCA to DV converter box (called a bridge), which takes an analog signal and converts it to a DV stream of data on a FireWire cable, then you should turn off DV Device Control. In the Capture panel's Settings tab, choose None from the Device drop-down list. You will still be using the DV Capture Recorder because you do have a signal into your FireWire port, but you will not have device control for that signal (Figure 2.23).

Figure 2.23. With the capture device offline, you are unable to access any of the transport controls because Device Control cannot be initialized

If you have a VCR wired through a DV converter, for example, you just press the VCR's Play, Pause, Fast Forward, and Rewind buttons to find the segment that you want to capture. Press G on your keyboard (or click Record in the Capture panel) to begin capturing, and then press G or Esc to stop (or click the Stop button). In the Capture panel's Clip Data area, you can enter a tape name and filename, as well as the other metadata that you want associated with the captured file. After you click OK to confirm the data in these fields, Premiere adds the newly captured clip to your project.

Clips captured via FireWire using a converter box have a timecode value starting at 00;00;00;00 for frame 1. Because the FireWire port does not detect any timecode information on the cable, it starts timecode from zero.

Notes

Background Capture

A feature that arrived with Premiere Pro 1.5 is the capability to capture in the background. You begin capturing, then minimize Premiere. The program will continue capturing while you are doing other things on your computer.

If you have captured clips without device control and thus without timecode, think carefully before deleting the media and making those files offline. Because there is no absolute method of ensuring that you can recapture these files with exactly the same In and Out points, your edit will change if you have to recapture your media.