Getting Media from the Camera to the Hard Drive

Capturing media from a camera is the first step in the video editing process. Vegas has a unique application that functions from within Vegas but can also function outside of Vegas as a separately accessible tool. A separate capture icon can be placed on the desktop if so desired. Browse for the VideoCap50.exe application or find it directly at C:\Program Files\Sony\Vegas 5\ for most installations. (You might need to search for the Vegas40.exe file if Vegas was not installed to the C:\ drive.) It is highly recommended that you launch the capture tool from within Vegas. If launched from Vegas, media captured in Video Capture is added automatically to the Media Pool in Vegas.

Transferring video from tape to a hard drive is called capturing. In the OHCI world, this process is different from the hardware-assisted capture card world as no compression or altering of the video takes place in the transfer. With M-JPEG cards or hardware-assisted cards, media is compressed or has header information that some editing applications can t read. Fortunately, while Vegas can t read every form of video file captured in the Microsoft Windows environments, it can read nearly every form of video file captured in the Windows environment if the proper video for Windows (VfW) codec is installed on the machine. For M-JPEG AVIs, you might need to download and install an M-JPEG codec. Matrox and Main Concept are good sources for these...