What Ever Happened to Metadata?

[Simon Ubsdell]

I’ll tell you a little story.

I used to click around and about and drill down through folders to find my documents and images and music and everything else.

i used to click to create tabs in my browser and search for things.

I used to click to open applications.

I used to do a heck of a lot of clicking.

Then a few years back, one of my ridiculously talented editing friends asked me if I’d ever used Alfred.

These days, I practically never click to find/launch anything.

And, goodness me, have I got faster at using my computer.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[John Davidson]

KeyFlow is called a MAM but I feel that is misleading. Basically, it’s a database of media and media locations with a lot of functions built-in.

If you have a lot of old hard drives or archive drives that you don’t want to always have connected, KeyFlow will add those files to it’s ‘library’, create mp4 or H264 previews of every file you want a preview for, and then you can disconnect the drive and put it away. KeyFlow will let you ‘see’ the previews of your files and tell you where it’s lives.

You can add/edit/remove finder tags on the source files. Drag/drop into FCPX, Premiere, AE, etc. OR – export XML’s of groups of files for FCPX or Premiere.

You can annotate all video files. This means adding markers, keyword ranges, etc. We add markers for dialogue transcriptions of shoots, and then keyword range those SOTS later to limit our imported keywords to things like ‘SOT PAUL, SOT TALENT, etc’. You send the annotated files to FCPX and they all import as markers and keyword ranges.

You can send fcpxml files to KeyFlow with or without media that you’ve added Metadata to in FCPX. I didn’t even know about that until last week. This doesn’t include added keyword ranges or markers. I’m not sure how much function it adds at this point, but they know it needs to add more capabilities.

You can build watch folders to auto-import files into projects or groups within the app, and assign a storage location for that media to get moved to.

You can import files inside the library, leave them where you have them, or have them copied somewhere else on import.

You can share this library with anyone on a local network easily.

Networked users can connect and edit the metadata of your library. Annotations, markers, tags, rename, etc.

With a little clever port forwarding you can also share your library over the internet. This is more limited to the speed of your internet. Users can play and do everything that local users do – except they aren’t directly connected to your server that stores the media. They will play the preview files if you have those created. They CAN however download high res originals.
This is something that still needs to be worked out, but I stumbled across it the day after my presentation and wish I had found it early.

Right now, preview files can’t be used for offline/relinking in FCPX. This is being worked on.

You can build lots of workflows to auto tag media with specific names on import.

Lots of features are being worked on and many current ones are being refined. I met them at NAB and the whole team actually came to the office in LA after NAB.
They’re super nice and very eager to work out solutions.

End of the day – this app has so much potential. The implementation of remote users editing the server in the recent 1.5 release is absolutely the best thing to happen to the app. It’s opened up a huge window for bigger functions later on.

There are things that do still need work. Relinking has a confusing UI, menu structures need to be revisited, UI dialogues are a little confusing at times (this is being fixed) – basically everything every 1.* app encounters as it grows up.

That help?

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Simon Ubsdell]

Very helplful guide, thanks John.

Just one specific query in what you said.

“You can build lots of workflows to auto tag media with specific names on import.”

Could you elaborate on this?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[John Davidson]

Hah, I was hungry and typing fast. You can have automatic workflows – similar to automator actions – that can be triggered when files are added to specific projects or with a right click. Like ‘Create Proxy media’, etc.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Anders Utterstrom]

Thanks John,

Workflows for automatically adding tags/keywords in KFP. Just brilliant! I was adding keywords by copying/pasting/deleting last night for a test project and gave up. Very interesting thread. Thanks to all.

Anders Utterstrom
Chicago, Illinois

[Simon Ubsdell]

OK, cool – I see what you’re saying.

Those automator type functions are somewhat limited right now, though? Useful, but I guess I was holding out for something a bit more.

it certainly is a great product though, with lots of interesting depth.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[John Davidson]

Here are some of the parameters you can set. Transfer file means uploading via FTP.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Simon Ubsdell]

Ah, OK – I missed those. Intuitive UI misfire. But yes, those are useful.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

This place ain’t what it used to be.

I was hoping this would lure Walter S. out of his batcave and David L. down from his ivory tower and it would get very interesting very quickly.

Where are you, guys?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Bill Davis]

Am I misreading this, or is this approach constrained primarily to clip and camera based metadata? The real magic of the X approach, IMO is that it uniquely adds and manages range-based metadata as well. And I’m not sure how you can apply/manage that outside of the NLE itself.

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