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Building Previews from a different program
I’m hoping someone has some experience with this…
We have a substantial amount of media that needs to have previews built and were hoping to use a 3rd party transcoder (such as Telestream Episode or Sorenson Squeeze). Was hoping someone might have some experience with taking these preview files and “attaching them” to existing catalogs in a database. We are using the Enterprise Server and have several terabytes of footage that were saved without previews. (Didn’t have the space at the time).
I know that CatDV likes to name these files a specific way and wasn’t sure if it was just a matter of naming conventions and file heirachy that would allow it to find them.
If this is the case, does the program allow for different file types for preview files? (from one catalog to another)
Any suggestions greatly appreciated.
Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv -
2 Replies
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We’ve been using Telestream Episode Engine to render proxies with good results. Our master clips are primarily XDCAM EX, with the filename extension .MP4. We use a Worker action to periodically query the database looking for new clips based on a user defined field called “proxies” with the values “to do” or “done”. The rendered proxies have the identical filename as the full-res clips except for the suffix, which in our case is .mov. Worker places the proxies in a separate directory on the media array, and we point to that directory in the Media Search Paths preference. CatDV then handles the linking automatically. Our experience is that matching filenames and correctly specified search path(s) are all that is required.
The only issues we’re having involve configuring the HTML Live Publisher to serve proxies, rather than original media, to the web client. Has anyone out there been using this feature successfully?
Charlie Langrall
Postproduction Supervisor
Found Films -
The “special file naming” that CatDV likes to use is for when you’re using tape-based previews, where the filename (eg. 2997,45,1424,64x.mov) encodes the timecode of the file. For tapeless workflows you’ll be using path-based previews however, in which case CatDV uses the filename (plus any enclosing folder names from the root you specify) to find the proxy. There shouldn’t be any issue using a third party transcoding tool as long as the resulting files are placed in the correct folder (and have the original filename plus .mov or .mp4 as the extension).
To configure paths in Live HTML Publisher, let’s assume you have a full-res file at
/Volumes/FullRes/Project/Folder/File.mov
and a proxy at
/Volumes/Proxies/Project/Folder/File.mov
then you’d set /Volumes/FullRes as your “Media root dir” and /Volumes/Proxies as your “Media equiv path”. Only files within that heirarchy will be accessible.
Alternatively, if the corresponding proxy is at
/Volumes/Proxies/Volumes/FullRes/Project/Folder/File.mov
then you’d set “Media root dir” to “/” and leave the “Media equiv path” as /Volumes/Proxies.
Finally, if you want to provide access to the original files instead of proxies, set Media root dir and equiv path to the same thing, or leave them both blank.
The “Preview root dir” field is only used for tape-based previews.
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