The Richter Scale^®

Living in the modern age we do, we become dependent on our technological tools working properly. And when they don’t work like we expect them to, we get annoyed. Case in point - Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and capturing HDV (high definition digital video) content with scene detections.

As part of my raft of technology investments last year, I bought a Sony HDR-HC3 Handycam - a very nice and compact HD camcorder. I also upgraded my years old copy of Adobe Premiere (a top of the line video editing tool) so that I could attempt to edit my high definition video content.

One key requirement of being able to edit video on a computer is getting it into the computer in the first place. And Premiere Pro 2.0 has a very nice Capture utility that allows one to connect a FireWire (IEEE 1384) cable to one’s camcorder, and digitally capture the video off the tape. Another nice feature Premiere Pro 2.0 has is something called “Scene Detect”, which looks at the time codes your camcorder records onto the tape and when it detects a time shift, it ends one clip and starts a new one. This is a lot easier that the old way, which was to manually figure out where each clip’s in and out (start and end) points are and manually feed them into the software. Scene detection is nothing very new, but it is very useful.

However, here’s where the annoyance part comes it - Premiere Pro 2.0’s scene detection doesn’t work with HDV input. After scouring the Web, I found two solutions:

1) Use an external program to do the capture, like the free HDVSplit (I tried that and it worked for about 10 minutes before crashing, but it did work, and I’m sure I could have tweaked some settings to make it not crash); or

2) Switch the camcorder into DV (non-HD) output mode, use Premier Pro in DV capture mode where scene detect works to capture all the scenes on the tape, export a batch list of all the start and stop times of the DV captures, switch the camera into HDV output mode and then import the batch list of clips to use for recapturing all the HDV content in HDV resolution and format (see here for details). This approach, which is really more than twice the work (and time) than being able to do the HDV scene detect capture normally, does work. However, I found that you need to leave a dummy clip at the front of your tape, and a dummy clip at the end (otherwise you have to manually capture the first and last clips, based at least on the two tapes I captured this way).

Now, I ask you… Does this make sense? That a multi-hundred dollar piece of software which offers this scene detect capability in one older (DV) mode of operation can’t do it in the current mode (HDV), but a free piece of software can? Damn, I’m annoyed.

I’ll be back soon with more recent Tech Annoyances.