I am about to begin a long overdue project to rip all of my 50ish DV tapes from the past several years. I picked up a 750GB external drive for $150 at Fry's and I can't wait to get started. The tapes are all personal stuff like vacations, children playing etc.

I have not done a large ripping project like this before and I need some advice about best practices and conventions that will make the process and the final product a little better.

I'm going to be using Sony's capture tool that comes with Vegas 8 to rip the DV tapes to hard disk. I'll then be adding them to the Media Manager that is part of Vegas 8.

Here is what I need help/advice with:

1. conventions for naming all of the DV tapes - any smart practices here?

2. how to name the captured clips - should I name them each with a description of the clip or is that crazy? Perhaps better to use a standard naming convention and then use the tags and comments in Media Manager to identify their content?

3. Should I use one big .vidcap file to do all of the capture or should I create separate .vidcap files for each tape? or something in between?

4. Where should I save the .vidcap files and the captured clips? Should they be on a separate physcial drive from the one that runs Vegas?

5. Any suggestions about how to organize the folder hierarchy that holds all of my clips?

6. Any advice on how to tag the clips in Media Manager? What is important to tag about video clips? Who, what, where, when, comments... what else?

7. Finally, are there any books anyone can recommend that address a lot of what I'm asking here?

I enthusiastically thank you for any help you can provide to any of the questions above.

THANK YOU!!

Jim Vetter

Jim, you ask a fascinating set of questions and I, too will be very interested in any responses you get. It's all about workflow and there are probably many approaches.

Unfortunately the only one I can give a definitive answer to is:

Most definitely YES. Always keep your media (whether stlls, music, stock or captured footage) on a drive that is separate from your system and Vegas.

And your questions prompt a further one from me - are the vidcap files actually ANY use. Can they be accessed from within Vegas/MM?

Personally I organise all my captured media by date. Usually by month within year and "event" (eg Fred's BBQ, Trip to Marwell Zoo etc) within that. The exception is if I've got stuff for a specific project that spans a few weeks (for example I'm workng on a comedy short with a local video club and we shot twice in October and once in December - it made sense to stick all that stuff in one folder
Who knows? Whatever you might want to search on. To add to your suggestions above I'd suggest type of shot (not mutually exclusive) - wide, establishing, close up, extreme close up, static, fast motion etc etc.
I would strongly advise you don't get bogged down in this until you have selected sonme footage for a project. Trying to catalog 50 hours of DV footage whilst trying to predict how you might use it may well put you off video for life!

Oh, and just to be pedantic, the process tends to be referred to as capturing rather than ripping

I look forward to other responses.

__________________
Tim