Horizontal positioning of caption in sidecap figure

Question

I need to control the horizontal spacing between my figure and the related caption, which I am putting on the right of it by sidecap. How can I achieve it? Using floatrow instead of sidecap, is not an option for me due to some proprietary documentclass I need to work on which is not compatible with floatrow. I tried by setting skip in the caption package in the preamble, but it does not work apparently.

The MWE is:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
% Some basic caption settings 
\usepackage[style=base,skip=0pt]{caption}  %% `skip` here does not seem to have any effect 
\captionsetup{font=footnotesize,labelfont=bf,labelsep=period}
% caption on the top right
\usepackage[rightcaption]{sidecap}
\sidecaptionvpos{figure}{t}

\begin{document}
\begin{SCfigure}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{name}
\caption*{This is going to be a long caption, and I need to have it as much as possible within the figure space, so I want to control the horizontal space between figure and caption optimally...}
\end{SCfigure}

\end{document}

Answer 1

You could individually style it with your own caption style. This has only one main disadvantage: If you use a \parbox as I would suggest you have a fixed width of the caption for each figure (which is not very practical unless you typeset the caption into the margin).

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[demo]{graphicx}
% Some basic caption settings 
\usepackage[style=base]{caption}  %% `skip` here does not seem to have any effect 
\DeclareCaptionFormat{side}{\hspace*{1cm}\parbox{4cm}{#1#2#3}}
\captionsetup{format=side,font=footnotesize,labelfont=bf,labelsep=period}
% caption on the top right
\usepackage[rightcaption]{sidecap}
\sidecaptionvpos{figure}{t}

\begin{document}
\begin{SCfigure}
\includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{name}
\caption*{This is going to be a long caption, and I need to have it as much as possible within the figure space, so I want to control the horizontal space between figure and caption optimally...}
\end{SCfigure}

\end{document}