Live Capture Plus

A separate application, but integrated into CatDV, Live Capture Plus lets you capture an entire DV tape to disk in one operation, either at full DV quality or compressing it to preview form.

In the settings dialog you can specify the capture format (either one of the presets or a customised setting), and options such as whether to write a separate file for each scene, whether to create a CatDV catalog as well as capturing the tape to disk, and how to handle errors - Live Capture Plus will automatically rewind and retry if it detects a dropped frame or other capture error.

Use the tape transport controls to find a particular portion of tape, or simply tell Live Capture Plus to capture the whole tape from beginning to end, and rewind it again afterwards, all without further intervention.

While the capture is progressing you can leave the tape playing unattended, but if you want you can also use that time to start logging by typing in a clip name or brief comments describing each clip.

The thumbnail and logging panel will normally update to show the scene that's currently being captured but once you start typing it stays on that clip until you are ready to go on. Live Capture Plus is fully multithreaded, so capturing, tape control and preview compression all continue uninterrupted in the background while you use the logging panel.

The status bar at the bottom shows what the different components of Live Capture Plus are doing so you can easily see what's going on, and clicking on the black triangle displays a history of recent messages.