How do I automatically log non-DV material?
If you want to perform automatic scene detection on material that was not originally recorded in DV format, whether digital or analogue in origin (including BetaSP, DigiBeta, footage captured via a DV converter, or analogue footage dubbed to DV), you should proceed broadly as described in How to log with an external capture application then use CatDV's visual scene detection capability.
- Capture the whole tape to disk, using whatever format and capture application you would normally use for editing.
- Enable Visual Frame Differencing and disable the DV info based Scene analysis options in Preferences and import the captured media file(s) into CatDV.
- Unlike DV-based scene analysis, the visual (image based) scene detection can never be totally frame accurate and in addition to entering a meaningful name and comments, you will need to review and correct the scene boundaries within the Clip Details window:
- Press the Review transition button to check that two adjacent clips really are from different scenes. If the scene detection was too sensitive and both clips relate to the same scene, press the Merge into previous button to merge the two clips into one.
- Conversely, if the scene detection was not sensitive enough and a clip ought to be split into two separate scenes, move the timeline (in the Movie or Preview tab) to the first frame of the new clip and press the Split clip button.
- The Consolidate Footage command is only available for DV clips but you can achieve the same results (reducing disk usage by trimming unwanted material) by exporting those clips that you want to keep as self-contained movies and then deleting the original files.
- If you have the Professional Edition you can tune the sensitivity of the scene detection. Uncheck both options at step 2 to disable automatic scene detection, then import the file, select the resulting clip and apply the Detect Scenes command where you can set the sensitivity.