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Poor man’s asset management
Hi all:
I’m researching asset management options for my company. We’re doing a weekly TV show on a low budget, with lots of features and reports shot “on the street”, and the plan is to digitize the tapes/P2 cards and store them either in a fileserver or a bunch of external drives, so that in the future the editors can access this or that interview (or this or that shot of the city) just by searching them.
Now, an obvious solution for this would be Final Cut Server, except for the problems that: 1) it isn’t shipping yet; 2) nobody has used it yet and reported on how good it is. As an alternative, the “poor man’s solution” that I had thought of was:1) Capture the clips in each tape as separate Quicktime files (“interview1.mov”, “traffic_lights2.mov”, etc.).
2) Have the interns add keywords to the QT clips themselves, using the metadata fields that Quicktime itself provides (see “Window/Show movie properties/Add annotation”).
3) Dump all the QT files in one (or several) external drives.
4) Whenever the editor needs one of them, just plug in the drive and search using Spotlight.I have tried the above in a small scale with some clips in my computer, and it definitely works; Spotlight indexes and finds the keywords that I add to my QT clips. Now, this scheme has the advantage of being infinitely scalable (if a drive fills, just buy another), but the problem is that the editor might end up searching through several drives for the clip she needs. Obviously, we still need a centralized database for metadata, with low-res proxies of the clips and the posibility of adding a field like “This clip is in the HD n
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5 Replies
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Well, if all you are relying on is the keywords, you could use a disk cataloge app like
https://www.tri-edre.com/english/tricatalog.html
or DiskCatalogeMaker
I use it on all my backup drives. It keeps an XML based file structure of the disk on my internal drive that I can search, and it will then tell me what disk the file is on, so I don’t have to have all the disks plugged in for it to work. Also really works well with DVD/CD media. Any type of storage really. Not sure if it would work for you, but it would definatly be easy to test.
Matt
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Thanks. Tri-Catalog does sound interesting… but it seems to be optimized for photos. It supports reading IPTC and EXIF fields from files, but they don’t say whether it can do the same with metadata embedded in Quicktime files. Guess I’ll have to ask them.
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You might take a look at CatDV Pro from Squarebox Software. It would give you the database power you need and allow for small preview files of the footage so your editors could take a look before accessing the originals.
https://www.squarebox.co.uk/professional.html
Regards,
David -
If you’ll be using QT’s standard Metadata then you need to look at Metadata Hootenanny. It’s like iTunes for QT and will list all of QT’s metadata. Uses a watch folder system so you don’t have to “check in” media it will find any QT movies added to folders it’s watching. It won’t “see” nested folders.
John
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