CatDV Live Capture Plus 1.0 automates video capture
updated 05:35 pm EDT, Thu June 23, 2005
CatDV Live Capture Plus
Square Box Systems today released , a new capture utility for transferring video images from Digital Video tape onto a computer. Live Capture Plus continuously monitors the signal being captured and automatically rewinds the tape and retries the capture if any errors are detected. The technology is designed to help solve the problem of dropped frames and similar errors. It can output to DV QuickTime movies (for use in FCP), as DV Streams (for use in iMovie), or compress them to any other QuickTime-supported format, including MPEG-4 and the new H.264 codec in QuickTime 7.
Live Capture Plus is designed to capture an entire DV tape unattended: files are automatically split on scene boundaries and FireWire device control is used to prevent compression errors and rewind the tape.
Live Capture Plus can be used as a standalone application or integrated with the CatDV 4.0 media database application. When used with CatDV it automatically builds a tape index, complete with thumbnails and preview movies (low resolution proxies), which the user can keep as a permanent record of a tape's contents. A one hour tape requires as little as 200MB of disk space in preview form.
CatDV Live Capture Plus 1.0 is available now for Mac OS X 10.3 or later. It requires a Macintosh with built-in FireWire and a DV deck or FireWire-based camcorder. It is $50. A free demo in which capture is limited to 5 minutes, is available for download from the web.
