Expense surrounding CATDV

[Caspian Brand]

You can totally start with stand alone copies of CatDV Pro and start building catalogs that you can later publish to a CatDV Server installation. With stand alone copies you won’t be able to search across multiple catalogs or have group/role permissions like you do with an Enterprise installation. This is one of the many cool things about CatDV, that you can use it isolated in the field, and publish to your server when you’re back in the studio.

-Caspian

Product Specialist
Studio Network Solutions

[Robb Harriss]

We don’t pay nearly that much. But our needs are much less than very large facilities. It’s all scalable. Security and the Enterprise version, add-ons and the number of seats will cost more. We’re a small house, and while we share all the data, we don’t have security concerns sharing that information among ourselves. Large houses want to keep clients from seeing what other clients are doing and have all sorts of restrictions on who can do what and where with the systems. When push comes to shove just one copy of the basic version of CatDV does an awful lot. But each step upwards that you make gives you more versatility, features, sharing, power, control and security. The bigger you get the more attractive things like the workgroup server becomes to free up editing systems and personnel. We’re moving from FCP to Avid. Adding the MXF option is a necessity, and we’re gaining interactivity and capabilities that I tried to hang onto Final Cut, which were often more trouble than they were worth.
Start with where you are now, and look at where you want to end up and plan a path.

Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.

[Robb Harriss]

We did that, and then added the workgroup server and life got better. Lots better. And being able to export lists of any kind, from CatDV into a NLE saves so much time it save the cost of. . well a lot anyway, the first time you do it.

Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

If using AVID you will also need Calibrated MXF software because even with the AVID component, CATDV will not work with AVID files. Once Calibrated MFX is installed everything is smooth. Check out the CATDV site for more information on Calibrated MFX.

[Robb Harriss]

a single seat of the Calibrated Software plugin runs US $260. You can download and run it in demo mode. It works just fine but limits you to a maximum of 30 seconds on any clip. I’s forgotten and then “discovered” that fact when I made a set of 153 proxy files only to have a copy writer ask why all the files he wanted to review were only 30 seconds long.

Non-linear: all the time and nothing but.

[Dennis Lisonbee]

Robb is right about the trial version of Calibrated. It works well, but remember the trial version only plays 30 seconds. I had it on a classroom computer and was reviewing some AVID dailies in a class and asked why they cut in the middle of a scene.

This codec issue today is huge. Every camera manufacturer has their own wrappers and way with dealing with compression, making it very hard for any company dealing with codecs to deal with universal playback. That is why AVID has spent so much time with their codecs and wrappers. Calibrated solves most of the issues with CATDV and codecs. The only exception are some of the Sony F series cameras. Those camera codecs need to be repackaged or flipped. AVID will do it just fine but it takes more time as it is not take advantage yet of multi-core processors. Other compression software such as Sorenson Pro is written for multi threading but does not pass timecode. And not passing timecode is a deal breaker.