digitizing in premiere pro - purdue...

AD30400 Video Art Prof. Fabian Winkler Spring 2014

Digitizing in Premiere Pro This workshop demonstrates how to digitize recorded material from your miniDV or SD card/solid state HD camera for further use in Adobe Premiere. First, let’s start by creating an empty folder in your external hard drive. This folder wil store all the data that Premier will generate when you are working on a project. It is important to keep all of that data together to avoid offline media errors. Then start Adobe Premiere, you’ll find the software in the Mac’s “Application’ folder or through OSX’s “LaunchPad.” Choose “New Project” in Premiere’s “Welcome” window:

Winkler, AD30400 digitizing/importing video in Premiere, p. 2

In the next screen you are asked to specify a location in which top save the project file. Navigate to the empty folder you have just created on your external hard drive and save your project in there.

You don’t need to worry about the scratch disk settings, as long as you have properly specified your project folder and the scratch disks are set to this folder (i.e. “Same as Project”).


The next window asks you to specify the settings for your first sequence. Since we’ll set the Sequence settings later in Premiere we do not have to worry about this dialog window and simply click “OK” to go to Premiere’s main user interface:

If your window arrangement does not look like this you can show and hide windows through the “Window” menu or go into a range of present windows configurations, called “Workspaces” (the one we are in right now is “Editing”).


If you ever need information about Premier that is not explained in this workshop (and there will be lots of it since this workshop series only covers the basics!) you can go to: Help > Adobe Premier Pro Help for an in-depth online handbook explaining every detail of the software. Digitizing miniDV-based footage

1. Connect your MiniDV camcorder to the computer using a Firewire cable (see the HD/DV camera workshop for a picture of a Firewire cable if you are unsure what it looks like). You might have to use a Firewire800 adapter to connect the camera to newer Macintosh computers. Make sure you are using the power adapter (you don’t want the batteries to die when you are transferring footage) with the camera. Finally turn on the camera (in the playback mode).

2. In Premiere, go to File > Capture. The capture window opens:

From this point on you can control the camcorder’s playback from within Premiere, using the playback controls at the bottom of the window.

3. Name the tape and the clip you would like to digitize.

Then cue the video to where you would like the capture to start, you can use the < > keys on your keyboard to go through the material frame by frame. Once you have found the starting point hit the “Set In” button. Then advance to the end of


the clip you would like to digitize and hit the “Set Out” button. This marks the IN and OUT points for your clip.

Finally, in order to capture the clip hit the “In/Out” button under “Capture.”

4. The computer and the camera are doing everything automatically from this point on. After the clip has been digitized, hit “OK” when the “Saved Clip” dialog appears.

You should now see the newly digitized clip in your Premiere Project window and you can preview it by double-clicking on it so that the clip opens in Premiere’s Source window.


Important things to know about digitizing from MiniDV tapes: • You cannot set in/out points in the very first 4-6 seconds of your tape. The

capturing process using in/out points requires a pre-roll time for cuing the tape to achieve frame precision. TO DO: As a rule of thumb don’t record important material in the first 10 seconds of your tape. Or, if you have already done so use the “Tape” button under “Capture.”

Then start and stop the tape manually and exit the recording in the Capture window by hitting the escape key. This method works but is less precise then the one described above.

• Beware of timecode breaks (i.e. having gaps of blank tape in between recordings). This will confuse Premiere when trying to find in and out points. TO DO: pre-record a continuous time code on your tape. The handout HD/DV camera workshop explains this procedure. Or, if it already happened use the capture “Tape” method as described above.

• If you would like to set in/out points for multiple clips you can do so but you

have to “log” each clip after setting the out point. Hit the “Log Clip” button in the capture window after defining each clip through in/out points. Then exit the Capture window and go to File > Batch Capture to start the capturing process. Each discretely logged file will be digitized and turned into its own file.

• All digitized clips will be saved in your project folder, given that you specified

the scratch disk location to be the “same as project” when setting up Premiere for this project.


Importing HD footage from SD cards or camcorders’ internal memory:

1. Connect your camcorder via its USB cable to the computer, also make sure that the camcorder is powered with its wall adapter (so you won’t run out of battery power during the transfer.

2. Turn on the camcorder. Usually, it detects the connection and asks for the

correct USB Selection. This mode varies from camera to camera but you should choose USB Connect, PC (or similar) instead of Disc Burn, Printer or other peripheral connections.

3. You should see your camera’s memory (either SD card or internal memory based)

as an external hard drive on your Mac’s desktop. Find the file called “AVCHD” and drag and drop it into an empty folder you created in your project folder (the one you setup at the beginning of the workshop).

4. You can now already eject the camcorder’s hard drive icons and then disconnect

the camera from the computer.

5. In Premiere, go to the Media Browser (tab in the Project window) and navigate to the folder in which you just copied the AVCHD file. Once you find it you see that what appeared as one file might have several videos that you can access. You can double-click on a file to preview it in your Source window.

6. After you found the file(s) you would like to import, select them in the Media Browser and drag them onto the window’s Project tab, then drop them in the Project folder after it has opened.

Now you can double click on the file and preview it in the Source window as part of your project.


Important things to know about importing SD/internal memory based footage:

• As much as possible use the camera to connect to the computer. Even if your footage is on a SD card it is better to import the footage through the camera (instead of a card reader).

• Do not use the SD card for anything else then shooting video with one

type/model of video cameras. Do not use it to backup any other data or the data in the AVCHD file might get corrupted.

• For best results use SDHC class 4 SD cards – format them in the camera you

are using to make sure it can digitize video on it at the highest possible speed.

You should now be able to start working with your footage in Premiere, setup a new sequence and start arranging (editing) your clips temporally. This will be the topic of the next workshop.

digitizing in premiere pro - purdue...

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