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Verbatim Logger -> Big Notes Field Possible?
Thinking of using CatDV to store transcriptions, some which could be long. I notice the Verbatim Logger puts the text into the Log Notes (aka Notes) field. Since things like transcriptions could possible by more than 64K in length, the Big Notes field might be appropriate to store them. Can the verbatim logger store into a field other than the Notes field? Clips with text added to the notes field in CatDV, when brought into FCP, are put into the Log Note field. Is there a limit here?
I’ve done a little experimenting and it seems the Notes field can take large amounts of text, but it seems the perhaps the performance slows down when this field is overloaded. I also having checked the limits of the FCP Log Note field.
Thanks for any info here.
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4 Replies
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Keith, how big are you talking about?
We’ve got verbatim transcriptions in all of our reality shows in the Notes field and haven’t noticed a slowdown with 1600 hours plus of footage in the database.
Are you working tapeless or tape based? I only ask because in tape we tend to get TC breaks which let us have smaller clip sizes. I could see where a 1 hour or longer clip could get a huge transcription, but we do long interviews (half hour plus) all the time.
You can of course move data around between fields but that’s not automatic.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
hidefcowboy.com
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Hi Keith
the normal notes field like all of Catdv fields are good for 64k of text. As you have noted FCP and its ilk would most likely have trouble with more than that , so we have BIG NOTES .. for all of you who want to type War and Peace into Catdv. Seriously , you may want to just cut and paste stuff across to it as you use the Verbatim Logger . Tip of the day is that you can click into the timecode field in the player and paste or type a timecode into it , this will cause the player to locate to that time. If used in conjunction with BIG NOTES it may not be such a poor implementatiion, just not as elegant as say event markers . Their is of course a bigger picture . All of this text has to get saved somewhere and this is too the server. You could save a text file and make a metaclip ( TOOOLS > Make Metaclip ) and combine or nest the movie with the transcript but just display them as a single object.Hope this helps
Kevin Duggan
Catdv -
Thanks for the information, it’s very helpful. I was tape-based but now mostly flash memory-file based, the interviews could get up to 2 hours continuous. I guess I’ll cross that road when I get to it, but I just wanted to see what was possible.
Thanks again.
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By default the Notes field and user-defined fields have a limit of 64K on the server for efficiency. If you do need to copy and paste War and Peace into your logs, use the Big Notes field (which I believe will take up to 2GB, War and Peace is only 2MB!). We have an outstanding change request to use Big Notes instead of Notes for the verbatim logger, which may happen in a future release. In the meantime, if the 64K limit causes you problems, it is possible to reconfigure the database schema fairly easily with some SQL commands to change the data type of text fields (drop a line to support@squarebox.co.uk if you need the details) but this isn’t recommended for most users as it would slow down all access to the server.
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