Capturing to a library? (And FCStudio Q)

Question

I´ve tried searching the forum, but didn´t find anything on this. I haven´t bought video editing software yet, I´m wondering if I should go FC Express or FC Studio 2. I´ve done some editing in Premiere, used After Effects a bit, albeit a few versions ago. I´ll mostly do editing for home or internal corporate use, but want to get skills to eventually do bigger stuff.
When I capture, either DV or HDV, I don´t want to capture to a project. I want to capture it to a library of clips I can later use in various projects. For example, for space purposes, I´m thinking one disk for DV and one for HDV. (Got a 2 x 500GB external drive.)
Can I do this in FCP? Or even FCS2? Will such a library be searchable, across more than one disc? Anyone?

Answer 1

When you capture in FCE, the clips are written to your scratch disk location. The default location is a folder called +/Final Cut Express Documents/Capture Scratch.+ Depending on how you want to physically organize your clips on your hard drives, you might only need to set your 2 hard drives as successive FCE scratch disk locations. On the other hand, if you prefer to keep DV on one drive and HDV on the other, all you need to do is Copy your clips to the appropriate hard drive after you capture them.
You will have to have at least 1 FCE Project in order to capture and view clips. Once captured, the clip(s) can be used in ANY project. The Browser pane is quite useful for organizing all of your clips. One of the options in the Browser is to show a thumbnail image of each clip. With the Bin and Folder features in the Browser you have a good deal of power to organize your clips the way you want to.
Neither FCE nor FCStudio are cataloging apps, but you could use 1 Project as your catalog. You can always create more projects and use/reuse your clips in them.
It also might be worth your while to take at look at FootTrack and iDive. They are capture/cataloging applications and can be used in conjunction with FCE. At present both are strictly DV applications but FootTrack has announced they will support HDV in their next release.