Record to tape

This short article will go into why and how to record back your edited movie to tape.

1. To digital tape

Recording back to tape your edited movie can be very useful. This is certainly the case when the original footage was digital. Storing your work as a DV-AVI on your hard drive is not a good option because it takes too much room (2GB for 9 minutes). Storing it on any other way, for example as DVD-Video will mean that you compress your material. Although it may not be visible, it will result in some loss of quality and it is always a good idea to archive your work with the maximum quality level. We therefore recommend to also record your final work back to Digital tape.

In order to record back to digital tape you will need to have the movie in DV compressed format. Of course your camcorder needs to have a DV-in connection which and not be nEutered. Usually you can record back to tape directly from the timeline. If you have a lot of unrendered edits, the program will first start rendering the edited sections before outputting the movie to tape. Nevertheless, if you have enough disk space we recommend that you first completely save the movie as a DV-AVI to the hard disk. Then start a new project in the video-editing program, import the final movie and place it on the timeline and export the timeline to tape. This method will limit the amount of workload of the processor during the recording as much as possible. You should also not perform any other activity on the PC. Some video editing program actually shut down all other activities and prevent you to start anything else during the recording. With a digital camcorder connected with Firewire you also have Device Control so that the camcorder can be told to automatically start recording when the video starts to be output through the Firewire.

2. To analog tape

Output to analog tape is not useful for high quality archiving. However, you may want to put it on VHS to be able to play it with a VCR. In order to export to an analog device, your PC of course needs to have an analog output connection. These are either Composite or S-Video connectors. Such outputs are commonly found on analog capture cards. If you have one installed on your PC, they will usually be identified by video-editing software so that you can export your final movie directly from the timeline. The same recommendations as mentioned above for digital output are valid for analog output. Another option is to use, if present, the TV-out of the video card (not the video-editing card). Depending on your card and the settings, the signal output through the TV-out is either identical to the image displayed on the PC monitor or an extension of the desktop. This means that you first have to save your video in a file and then play it in full screen mode. Most PC based players, including the Windows Media Player, do have a full screen mode. If you use this option, you will have to use a line out from the PC’s sound card to transfer the audio. Device Control is not available for analog devices, so you need to press the record button on the VCR yourself when you start outputting the video. A sensible thing to do is to have a couple of seconds of black video in front and at the end of your final movie.