User Guide

Chapter 2: Capturing Video 33
SmartCapture: Preview-quality capture
SmartCapture is a unique feature of Studio. It allows
you to capture from DV videotape in a reduced quality
file using minimal hard drive space. With
SmartCapture, you can capture an entire tape onto your
hard drive, instead of picking and choosing which
video clips to capture. You can use this “preview-
quality” video to build and preview your movie.
When you are ready to make your finished movie,
Studio will recapture the scenes included in your movie
at full quality, automatically controlling your source
deck to locate and capture the desired footage. The
reduced quality of the preview video therefore has no
impact on the quality of your finished movie. Scenes
captured at preview quality are denoted in the Album
by a dotted border.
Continuous timecode
For SmartCapture to work well, your digital tape must
have continuous DV timecode. Studio cannot capture
through breaks in the timecode. If your camcorder has
a timecode-striping feature, stripe your tape first. If it
does not, there are two ways to ensure that your tape
has continuous timecode.
1. Put a tape into the camcorder, put the lens cap on,
and press record. This will record black through the
entire tape, creating a continuous timecode source
track.