Marker Builder

[Allan White]

Hey John, I have to deal with this a lot. The markers-to-subclips features is priceless!

The quickest way to have complete control over that: after your markers are set, open the Tools > Verbatim Logger. You’ll see all your markers with timecodes and text.

Copy & paste into your favorite text editor. Find-and-replace to your hearts content. Paste back into Verbatim logger, then “update markers”.

Munging your clip names further after the subclips are made is, as you pointed out, much easier with the Bulk Edit tool. That’s what I do, and it’s usually pretty quick. It helps me keep my final filenames much more organized.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, MetaSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Feature request: I’d love to see Bulk Edit become more powerful, and rely on tokens or keywords for a powerful find-and-replace or string-building tool. As it is, I can do it but it takes 2-3 passes at the naming (pulling from other fields) to make it work.

Also: the Auto-numbering feature isn’t the smartest (file_2009_001 gets renamed file_2010_001, for example). Improving this feature catapults CatDV further ahead of the other video DAM solutions.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, MetaSAN, CatDV Server

[John Heagy]

Thanks for the Verbatim tip Allan. I Have yet to try the logger. Find and replace would work in some cases, or Bulk Edit as you mentioned. I agree that it takes multiple passes of Bulk Edit to get everything you need. A multi-step function like “A Better Finder Rename” https://www.publicspace.net/ABetterFinderRename/ would be great. The ability to save these steps as presets would be nice in addition.

I’d still like to see a Marker Builder because having a user choose a “builder” preset will be more reliable than excepting users to run a Bulk Edit on a selection of clips correctly every time.

Feature Request: Marker Builder w/presets

Feature Request: Multi-Step Bulk Edit w/presets

Thanks
John Heagy
NFL Films

[Rolf Howarth]

Thanks for all the suggestions on bulk edit and naming of markers which we’ll certainly consider. As Allan said, one possible alternative to multiple bulk edit steps is a regular expression based search and replace, but I can see that you might want something even more powerful than that in some situations.

[John Heagy]

Hi Rolf,

Thanks for considering my feature requests but power is not an issue at all. It’s really ease of use for less technical users. Regex is something I’m not fluent in, much less our loggers. Bulk Edit presets would allow me to give loggers regex power without them having to build an expression themselves. Of course marker and scene detection name builders would skip the post naming process all together. I could imagine a list of builder presets loggers could choose from depending on job. These builders could also be set in Worker so automatic scene detection would produce useful names based on file and/or folder criteria.

On a separate note: Version 8.0.8 seemed to speed up flattening via QT export. I was only getting 80MB/sec with version 8.0.6, I’m now getting 110MB/sec reading and writing from our Xsan. CatDV is one of the few apps that create QT movies that retain Reel and TC, with TC format and time scale of the original file.

The fastest QT flattener I’ve found is iStomp, which achieved 220Mb/sec due to it’s ability to spawn 6 concurrent jobs. Unfortunately, while it does retain Reel and TC, it resets timescale to the default 600 and does not have CatDv’s automatic folder creation based on reel or bin, with is super useful.

Thanks
John Heagy
NFL Films

[Rolf Howarth]

Ok, your comments on keeping it simple have been noted. Balancing complexity against flexibility is something we do take very seriously.

By the way, the next update of CatDV will fix Bulk Edit’s auto-increment feature so that it increments the last number in the pattern, not the first one, so 2009-001 increments to 2009-002 and not 2010-001, as that’s likely to be the desired behaviour in most situations.

I don’t really have any comments on the time to do flattening as we just use the standard QuickTime APIs for this functionality so it’s really down to Apple’s implementation.