Video
Cutting Captured Video - 5
Using the MSP Production Library
MSP includes a cataloging system called the Production Library. This is, among other thing, a thumbnailing catalogue that allows you to organise a library of your clips, images, and projects. Most important, it is linked to all the other programs in the suite, so serves as a central reference for your working material.
Whenever
you save anything in any of the MSP programs, you can check a box Save
to Library, and also select which library file you want to use
(you can create new library files at any time if you need to). Doing this
saves a thumbnail of the video file into the library, together with your
subject and description. If you save all your cut clips to the library
you can then easily review, sort, and select them when you come to use
them in your video project.
Many editor suites come with some form of cataloguing tool to help manage and organise your video and related files. Organising your material in a manageable way is half the battle when it comes to putting a good movie together, so a little time invested in learning how to use your album or cataloguer effectively will pay many dividends later.
Tidying up
At the end of all this, you can close the cuttings project - no need to save the changes because next time you'll start again with another capture file - and delete the capture file itself.
The Backup Advantage
Apart from reducing wear on the camcorder, this technique has another big advantage in terms of data integrity. Everyone knows you should backup important data on your computer. The problem with video data is there is so much of it. Not only do you need an expensive backup device, it takes forever to run the backup.
Backing up is like insurance, it's a trading of risk. It's a trade of the cost of backup hardware and the time involved backing up, against the time and cost of re-creating any data that might be lost. A video project can represent a lot of painstaking time, and so be very valuable, but the real work is all encapsulated in the project file. These are at most a few hundred KBytes each and easily saved to a modest-sized backup device, or even a diskette.
The rest of the project is contained in the source AVI files. Assuming you keep the original tapes, at least till the project is finished, the video can be re-captured from tape if it gets lost from the disk. However, this will only work if you can re-create the source files with exactly the same starting point that you used the first time.
If you follow the cutting technique above, you can precisely re-create all your source files from tape at any time, and probably in not much more time than restoring a few GBytes of data from a backup device if you have one that large. So just backup your project and album files, keep the video tapes, and sleep soundly!
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