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Two questions about CatDV Standard
I (one man operation) am the “media guy” for a department of a company. Just purchased CatDV (Just the standard edition) to help me get a handle on my growing collection of clips. I store the clips on external hard drives, so the ability to have a persistent database with proxies so I can find a clip without digging through hard drives is killer, for me.
Two questions:
1 – I just found out from reading in here that you want to keep the CatDV databases below or around 3,000 clips maximum. Wish I would have realized that before I bought into CatDV, especially since the standard edition cannot search across different databases. Does anybody have a solution or workaround, other than buying the professional edition? The professional edition is quite a bit more expensive; primarily for features that I just don’t need.
2 – Is there any way to work around the lack of custom export options in the standard edition? All of my media is 16:9 but the export presets are not. Consequently, all of my proxies are distorted. I can understand CatDV wanting people to upgrade to the Professional edition…but I hope they’d at least consider adding a set of presets that are the right size for 16:9 content.
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1 Reply
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Man,
I hate to say it, but you’ll see us here on the boards all the time talking about the fact that this is more of a system than an app.
The standard version is in fact pretty powerful, for what it is, but compared to the Enterprise version, it’s limited. A lot of confusion has come up around “CatDV” because all the reviews focus on the Enterprise Server edition, since that’s the most powerful version. (it’s like Final Cut Express, Final Cut Studio and iMovie, no one gripes about Express being limited unless you bought it thinking it does what Studio does for a fraction of the price, which people do of course.)
The Enterprise Server can catalog somewhere around 10 million clips, theoretically. And even Pro will give you the export options, but honestly, if you’ve shopped for asset management, there’s nothing under $50,000 that does anything near what this product/system does.
That said, you can cobble together a system, using the Pro version, that will serve a one-man shop really well, as long as you don’t need to search beyond catalogs and share metadata with another station. (this subject has been beaten to death on this board, so just take a look around.
Again, I don’t work for Squarebox, so take what I say with a grain of salt, but while I understand your frustration, it’s like saying a Ford Focus doesn’t go as fast and isn’t as nice as a tricked out Mustang. They are just different things.
The bottom line is that this field is some of the most expensive software in all of post, CatDV just happens to be the least expensive in the field. (Think of it as Lotus in a world of Ferrarri’s and Lamborghini’s to further the car idea) But for a small shop, asset management is still a relatively large expense, no way around it.
That said, Pro is still a pretty amazing app for the money.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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