Power up
When you first launch Live Capture Plus, or if you use the File > Power Up command, it will attempt to connect to a DV camera or deck connected to your computer’s FireWire connector. You must have a suitable DV device in order to use Live Capture Plus.
Device control
When a DV camera or deck is connected and powered up you can seek to the portion of tape you want to capture using the tape transport controls. Once you start capturing the deck is controlled automatically until the capture completes. For example, if a dropped frame is detected the tape will rewind and retry, and the tape will automatically stop and/or rewind at the end of a capture.
Capturing
Enter a tape name, the type and format of capture you want, where to capture to, and what portion of the tape to capture, then press the Start Capture button to perform the requested capture fully automatically. Press Stop Capture if you want to stop the capture early.
Logging
While capturing, a separate movie file is normally created for each “scene” or “shot” (as determined by when you pressed the start and stop record button on your camera). At the same time, you also get a new clip record for each scene in which to enter log notes. The clip record has a thumbnail, and name and notes fields that you can type text into to describe the clip. You can go back and view the thumbnails of earlier clips to type in further comments while the tape continues to play and get captured in the background.
CatDV catalogs
Once you have finished capturing an entire tape a CatDV catalog file is saved. This contains the thumbnails and timecode of each clip, together with any logging notes you typed in while the tape was being captured. You can then use CatDV or CatDV Pro to process these catalogs further, such as building up a searchable database of all your video tapes, or exporting batch files of selected clips for use in your non-linear editing application.