Six features I wish Final Cut Pro’s log & capture window had

(Written while waiting for several MiniDV tapes to be captured)

1. Capture full tape in X segments

Sometimes, for a simple offline edit, I just want to capture a full tape. Why isn’t Final Cut smart enough to just capture the full tape in, say, ten minute chunks, finishing with a shortend if the full tape wasn’t used?

2. Pause capturing

This is pretty self explanatory, but seriously, why can’t you do this? And in a similar vein, wouldn’t it be cool if you could:

3. Auto-suspend capture when CPU usage exceeds, say, 80%

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a capture attempt that was almost done aborted because I was trying to do one too many things on my computer…

4. Ability to keep the good portion of an aborted capture attempt

5. Capture off a tape for X minutes, timecode breaks be damned!

A user should be able to tell FCP to capture the next X number of minutes of a tape, without aborting due to a timecode break without having to resort to using Capture Now.

6. Ability to toggle preview sound on and off midway through capture