Preparing to Ingest from Tape

The first step in editing is capturing your tape or file-based footage elements. The basic steps of ingesting footage with the Capture tool is covered in the appendix of Media Composer 6, “Editing Essentials.”

This section reviews some of those steps and elaborates on professional features to help you become more efficient at ingesting footage. Before any capturing can take place a project has to be created to match the tape format, or the current project’s format has to be adjusted to match the tape format.

When you create a new project, you need to specify the format and raster of the project. By specifying the format, Media Composer will create either HD or SD media, such as HD1080p media or SD 720i media. The raster size is used to specify variations of the HD frame width, such as 1920 pixels for HDCAM SR media or 1440 pixels for HDV media. Lesson 12, “Wrapping Up a Project,” covers the project formats and raster in detail.