Edius Pro – Capture
Rather than having a separate pop-up video capture interface, as a lot of editors do, Edius integrates capture tools into the main program’s source monitor, with each individual digital or analogue channel accessed through a drop down menu up top. It’s a neat way of doing things and works well for DV sources, with device control, logging and batch capture capabilities.For analogue sources, RS-422 device control is provided for compatible editing decks, but most prosumers won't have VCRs with serial control so will have to work the tape transport controls manually. In all cases, video can be captured with or without sound, and sound can be captured from video on its own.
Things aren’t so neat with HDV. Rather than being integrated into the main editing interface, HDV capture is managed through a separate utility called, rather cleverly, MPEG Capture.
HDV acquisition from tape and for real-time
MPEG capture from SD sources
On our first attempts to capture from a Sony FX1 HDV camcorder we found that the software provided device control and correctly saw and understood the incoming footage. To our surprise, though, footage was captured as a standard definition DVD-compliant MPEG stream. We have to admit that the file it made looked fantastic, but it wasn’t what we expected or wanted.
But we can’t allow Canopus to take the rap for this hiccup. We discovered that the FX1’s settings must be just-so if the system’s operating system is to recognise it as an HDV device. The camcorder had previously been used to feed DV footage to a display via its component output. To do that, a change of settings had been required to allow the camcorder itself to decide whether it would behave as a DV or HDV device when in playback mode.
In this state, the operating system (and all HDV-compatible software we've used with the Sony) saw the FX1 as a DV device. Some programs are able to capture HDV correctly, but none will accept it as an export device when set up that way.
Trying again with the camcorder’s playback format switched from Auto to HDV, the MPEG Capture applet launched with a subtly different interface, providing no access to analogue inputs and no VCD or DVD-compliant encoding templates. What we did get, though, was a choice of capturing native MPEG-2 footage or having it transcoded in real time to an I-frame format using Canopus’s own Codec. Lovely!
Most editing programs don’t offer a choice of HDV capture method – it’s either native MPEG (as with Pinnacle Liquid Edition) or I-frame intermediate formats (as with Apple’s Final Cut Express). It’s good to have a choice but though the IPB-frame structure of HDV MPEG-2 isn’t ideal for frame-accurate editing, MPEG cutting has been with us so long that most editors should be able to manage it.
And, where a project just requires straight cuts, it makes sense to work in the native format, meaning that the only footage that gets rendered and reprocessed is the group of pictures in which each cut is placed.
Canopus’s I-frame intermediate AVI Codec is a mixed bag. For a start, the option adds an additional decoding stage to a production, making the final picture quality as dependent on the editor’s decoder as it is on the camcorder or rendering Codec. Fortunately, Canopus's Codec is first-rate. But, the resulting Canopus HQ AVI video file is huge in comparison with the native MPEG stream.
In our project, an HDV clip lasting ten minutes and 32 seconds occupied 6.46 GByte of hard drive space when captured using Canopus’s HQ Codec. The same footage would have taken up a little under 2GByte if kept in its native form. On the plus side, Canopus’s Codec is a wise choice for effects – particularly compositing and green screen work – all of which are helped further by the fact that Canopus’s files use a 4:2:2 colour space.
What's noticeably missing from MPEG Capture’s toolbox are marking, logging and batch-capture features but we’re hopeful that these will be introduced - and integrated into the main Edius program - by the next version, V3.3.
