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  • Corrupted files from CatDV?

    Posted by Terry Burlison on June 27, 2014 at 8:02 pm

    I used CatDV Pro 8.1 a couple of years back to rip a bunch of videotapes to my PC. Life intervened, so I’m just now getting back to work on them. I have several hundred .MOV files that CatDV created (individual scenes from my DV tapes) but they all have some kind of problem wherein my editor(s) cannot determine the proper length of the clips (or on occasion, the frame rate). For example, I have a whole set of MOVs that my editor (Kdenlive under Linux) thinks are all 20 minutes 57 seconds in length. I can render them to an MP4, but the resulting duration is WAY off (hours, instead of minutes), making them impossible to navigate.

    VLC will play them fine. If I concat them using QuickTime, the resultant file plays correctly, but again, the duration is way off.

    Also, some other CatDV files play back at an incorrect frame rate in my editor, which also gives an incorrect duration. (For those files, QT reports the playback fps as 29.97, but the “movie fps” as 5.9.)

    I tried using Premiere (on 2 different Windows boxes) and both crashed. I tried using VideoStudio Pro to combine them into a single DV file, which worked, but the resulting quality was terrible. It’s apparently transcoding them rather than copying, and doing a crappy job of it. AVIDemux loads the file, reports what I think to be the correct duration, but shows only a green screen.

    Basically, it seems that CatDV recorded something wrong with the header or meta data in each file, which confuses my editors. Has anyone else encountered this? Any suggestions on fixing it, so I don’t have to re-rip four years of DV tapes?

    Terry Burlison replied 11 years, 10 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Bryson Jones

    June 28, 2014 at 2:19 am

    Could you be talking about Live Capture Plus? CatDV Pro doesn’t capture footage itself.

    Never really used the app but I’d try contacting support. I’m not sure if the app is in development anymore.

    If you have media issues with DV movs, (common in that format) there are a ton of ways to read and transcode the files. But CatDV Pro only plays and catalogs the files, it doesn’t create them.

    bryson

    bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com

    northshoreautomation.com

  • Terry Burlison

    June 28, 2014 at 4:52 pm

    Hmm, it’s been so long, I guess I don’t recall. Does CatDV take a DV stream and split it? Whatever program split the files into the scenes messed something up. I need some advice on what might be wrong with the header/meta data and a tool to fix them. Transcoding the files doesn’t fix them.

  • Dave Clack

    June 30, 2014 at 2:10 pm

    Hi that sounds like Live Capture plus. If you raise a support ticket to support@squarebox.com the guys will see if they can help.

  • Terry Burlison

    June 30, 2014 at 5:35 pm

    Probably so. The files are in a folder called “CatDV,” so I thought that program might be the culprit, but I bet it was LiveCapture. (I did it on my Mac, which is now long gone.) Thanks.

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