Image Sequences?

[Matthew Stamos]

Turn off the thumbnail generation in the preferences that will speed things up a bit. I would also give this a go with the Worker Node where you can set the pre-processing to import as an image sequence.

[Kevin Duggan]

Hi David
you are going in the right direction but you would probably want to set the prefs to make qtime ref movies. Then you only have to deal with a single object representing all of the image sequences. ie Pref > Image Sequences > Make Ref Movie … Basically works like Qtime Player > Export as Image sequence does.

Kevin Duggan
CatDV/MME

Kevin Duggan
CatDV/MME

[David Jahns]

No good news to report.

I’m still testing out this system, so I want to try it out as it would be used by an assistant editor in our shop. I don’t want to turn off thumbnail generation, as I don’t expect a real-world workflow to be, “If you have image sequences to catalog, contact the Administrator so that he can turn off thumbnail generation during that import, then let him know when you are through, so he can change it back.”

Creating the QT Ref movies sounded like a great idea, and if it would create the ref move and then import that instead of the TIFF frames, that would probably be great – but it doesn’t seem to create the QT Refs consistently. I have no idea what’s going on, but some folders will have a #ref.mov file added to it, but others won’t (most of them did not, it my test).

The catalog file size was still up to 150MB with only 97 clips – so it’s most likely still looking at each individual frame, not the REF movie.

Also – even when working locally, the app crashes all the time when dealing with Image Seqs. Importing savings, sorting, whatever – beachballs, or unexeptedly quitting happens WAY too often.

My next step is to manually create a few QT Refs, and tell CatDV to import those, but NOT the actual image sequences and see what happens and compare the catalog file sizes. Any other ideas to try?

Any CatDV users regularly work with Image Sequences?

David Jahns
Joint Editorial
Portland, OR

[David Jahns]

Did a test on 6 clips – roughly 1000 frames.

Manually created qt ref moves – catalogued those clips. Super fast, and super small file sizes for the catalog (70k), with just a few thumbnails per clip. Nice! Format says (QT Movie (TIFF Uncompressed).

Tried Matthew’s suggestion of not creating thumbnails – this certainly sped up the cataloging process (and only a 120k file size), but it’s not terribly useful to have a catalog without thumbnails. The whole point is that I want to take the media offline, but still be able to see which shots are which for retrieval if necessary. And we certainly can’t expect an admin to be changing those prefs back and forth all the time for each folder import.

When I have the prefs set to Create QT Ref, and create the thumbnails – it still appears to be creating thumbs for every frame and still recognizing it as an Image Sequence, not a REF movie. A catalog of those same 6 clips is 4MB, so obviously, it’s creating and storing thumbs for every frame.

So, what – if anything – does CatDV do with those QT refs it created?

It would be awesome if it created the QT Ref movie and then catalogued that instead of the TIFFs, but that’s not what it appears to be doing.

Any help would be greatly appreciated…

David Jahns
Joint Editorial
Portland, OR

[Matthew Stamos]

You can have a production group with unique preferences so having an ingest group with the thumbnails off would allow you to create these catalogs with out the thumbnail generation and there would be no need for changing prefs. You can easily create thumbnails in the UI with the set poster button or under the media menu. Also if you are getting persistent crashing checking the protected player option in the preferences should help relive much of the crashing.

[Bryson Jones]

Weird and simple question (forgive me if it’s obvious, but often things aren’t in asset management) but it may have not been clear from the docs. Are you using the tree and right-clicking to “import as image sequence?”

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[David Jahns]

Hi Bryson! I met you at NAB. I’m the guy in the Portland Ad Agency/Post house- still trying to do thorough testing and selling the idea to my team.

I was not doing that (right click import) – but I just did a few clips that way and it yields the same results. (I have the prefs set to detect image sequences in .tif format).

It imports slowly (2-3 frames per second), and a catalog of only 6 clips (but 1000 frames) is 4MB, probably because it’s thumbnailing each frame.

Matthew – tried your suggestion – not thumbnailing on import, but creating them later. That would work for me, I think. However, when I choose “build thumbnails”, it only seems to create poster frames, the filmstrip view still only shows QT icons. And then, most strangely, when I save and reopen the catalog, it says it is corrupted – 6 thumbnails missing, and then the Poster Frames have been lost, too. They revert back to quicktime icons.

Thanks for your help, guys!

Dave

David Jahns
Joint Editorial
Portland, OR

[Matthew Stamos]

The corruption I would send us a log and see what is going on? The thumbnail I recreated that behavior on my side and likely something the developer should take a look at…. might be exclusive behavior to image sequences.

[Bryson Jones]

Hey man, good to see you online. 😉

I definitely think you have something weird going on there.

Have you tried this on another machine, and if so, I think we need to check this with one of the new versions to see if we can duplicate the issue.

Let Matt pass it on to the Brits and keep us posted!

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[Matthew Stamos]

David can you send a CatDV log and or error log?