Move over, Spielberg: Part II

I spent a couple of hours last evening preparing for the video editing work.

The first step was to make enough disk space available, since the raw video data from a camcorder takes a huge amount of disk space. As it happened my system was supplied with a 60Gb drive and I'd replaced that some time ago with a 160Gb. When I did that I disconnected the smaller unit but left it in place as an emergency backup. The bigger unit has worked fine all this time though, so I had no problem reconnecting and reformatting the 60Gb drive. That took about an hour.

The next step was to capture all the footage I took over the weekend. Since this happens at normal playback speed as the camera plays back the tapes and transfers the video over a USB cable, that took about another hour. I've made a mental note that when the time comes to upgrade the camera I'd like one that uses either mini disks or an exchangable hard drive. I also need to look into getting a FireWire card; the capture software won't do automatic scene recognition but Vegas will, but Vegas needs FireWire and won't capture through the USB. FireWire would make things easier all round and I think it's faster than USB too.

By the time I'd got all the video captured onto the hard drive it was getting pretty late so I spent a little while messing with some ideas for some background music (Vegas comes with Acid XMC in the box - a great little program that lets you create your own music. It's addictive... very easy to spend hours and hours playing around. Too easy, in fact).

Tonight the plan is to start into reviewing the footage and getting some ideas for some kind of storyboard for the documentary.