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Tips on faster or 3rd party ways to find tagged media for final cut
After shooting hundreds of hours of footage for a documentary and having it all tagged with markers like “birds fly away”, “John Smiles”, etc. I was frustrated to find how slow the latest version of final cut 6 was from the moment I would type ctrl-f, type “birds” to the moment my search results would appear.
We eventually put all media in a folder and added words to the file names of the mov files. So the files would look like “PR A 22-2 John Smiles 1:22 birds fly away 4:33 Oakland night christmas eve train station blue shirt smarijuana sdad.mov”, (this meant PR=Project code, A was the cam 22 was the reel and 2 was the clip, the s in front of dad and marijuana means dad nor marijuana were in the scene but it is a subject of discussion”
Then on a separate monitor, we would open an external finder window put it in video thumbnail mode and use the search bar in the folder containing all of the media. We could type “John sdad” and all clips with John talking about the subject of his dad would pop up, it was lightning fast, plus we could easily scroll through and see the footage in finder by just hitting space bar (Snow Leopard).
So my questions are, why is the in-software FCP ctrl-f search so painfully slow? or maybe it’s just my system?
(It would take at least several seconds, usually more than 8 seconds, to find things vs the lightning speed of finder.)And what is the best way to do a fast search that allows us to visually see and scroll our markered clips? I have seen lots of 3rd party software online for logging, but I’m more interested in knowing about the speed and search end of the user interface. I love the big “space bar” playable clips in finder. It would be awesome to have a search result tag cloud for the keywords as well, like this https://prblog.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/11/27/dugan_brand_cloud.jpg
I’m sure some 3rd party software has been created like this, right?
Let me know your favorite methods for speed,
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2 Replies
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Check out “CATdv”. THere’s even a forum for it right here on the cow.
Mark
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Thanks,
I watched the video, I might shoot them an email, sounds like a lot of things I don’t need, but still looks pretty slick. I really hope they have the ability to visually search through the frames that I have markered.
In other words, if I interview a class and ask every one their name and where they were from on a 1 hour tape. I’d love to go through the tape and throw a marker down on the “my name is”, the be able to search visually through the thumbnails of all the marked spots. I’d love to have these thumbnails mixed in with the master clip thumbnails to search visually. While I’m dreaming, I’d love the ability to search all master clips, then click a button to visually expand out showing the thumbnails of all the sub clips and/or markers in that clip.
Does anyone know if something like this exists?
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