[Allan White]

Elijah, this is the CatDV forum – try asking your question in the After Effects Basics forum.

Also, check the ‘raster quality’ box in the layer switches, it should be a fine line not a jaggy one.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Steve, I use both Flow and CatDV. Flow does track assets, but serves a different purpose.

When I have, say, an Illustrator file or Keynote document (with all kinds of linked/embedded assets inside), Flow will tell me the “ancestry” of all those files (what file made the logo, the photoshop file that made the background image, etc.). I do a lot of multimedia, motion graphics, and the like where answering questions like, “where is the file that built this file that I’m looking for at?”. It scans all my drives in the background, and even tracks when I move a file somewhere. It’s insanely deep on that front.

CatDV will track files as well, but its true purpose is managing video clips. Flow might tell you the name or that it’s associated with an FCP project, but doesn’t let you work with video in the same way. CatDV lets you see inside the files, with all kinds of logging and other metadata, across a variety of projects.

I use CatDV in preproduction, scanning tapes (with the Live Capture app) and generating proxies so my writer/producer can tag clips for capture later. This is HUGE if you have a lot of archival material, as we do (going back 30 years). It’s also useful for ‘pre-editing’ tasks, such as wrangling a bunch of various formats into one codec. I use it for batch file-naming (powerful field-mapping abilities help) before I send clips to FCP – organized and ready to edit.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

It seems to me that if not all the footage for all artists is required all the time, you could reduce the total amount of required shared (read: more expensive) storage by implementing some workflow strategies. For example, backing off projects as soon as they’re complete, and removing them from the SAN onto cheaper individual drives (which should each have its own clone for backup). We just buy bare drives and mount them using an eSATA dock.

I second Bob’s recommendation of CatDV (https://www.squarebox.co.uk) – amazing for the “10,000′ view” of all your projects. We use it as a “pre-editor” as well.

Gridiron Flow is also really handy for tracking what files go where – even if drives are offline. More useful for mixed-media projects, but great at tracking down that missing video clip across on- and offline storage.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Question: why do you feel the need to remove the entire backup storage every night? I cannot think of a scenario where this would be simple, fast, or cheap.

We use lower-cost eSata blades (I like the OWC Mercury 1U rack, up to 8TB), connect them via Firewire or eSATA, and have it mirrored nightly. It’s in the rack with the fibre channel RAID. This provides decent backup for everything on the SAN. Obviously triple-backed up, offsite backup is the ideal, but for an entire SAN… it seems impractical.

Anything over a few TB is just going to require a very large case.

We mirror our “footage drives” when they come in (or we consolidate to that) with an eSATA drive dock. We stock up on 1TB drives for the source footage and treat them like film mags. =) Each has its own clone.

That way, the footage (by far the biggest pile of data) is always backed up – cheaply. We have other strategies for backing up each editor’s work (graphic files, editor projects FCP’s, etc.) – those are small and easily backed up in a cloud like dropbox.com. Those are really the gems that need triple-protection – and fortunately are easy to back up & restore.

What do you think? We’re all into buying lots of drives now, there’s no way around that. The key, in my opinion, is to focus the money where it’s most effective.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Awesome! Sometimes it’s the file servers’ fault, also, though mostly I blame FCP’s ancient codebase (the remnants of Carbon development, not fully modern) for even caring about filename length.

Here’s hoping for FCP 8 this year…

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Greetings Mark,

I wanted to clarify something you wrote – I’m not sure you mean an “HTML” consultant, unless you’re talking about a web app developer to make some kind of custom web interface for these systems. That’s more of an engineering challenge.

Did you mean, “integrator” (someone like Bryson@hidefcowboy.com)? I definitely see the need for that.

Organization is the key to creativity. If you can’t find it, you can’t edit with it. So, start with a sensible organization structure and you’ll have plenty of time to work on the creative.

Could not agree more! That’s a mantra I’ve used many times to persuade the “creatives” (of which I am one) to add organizational systems… so they can be creative!

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Erica, Bryson mentioned the danger of non-standard filenames, but I’ve also see long filenames cause problems. Keep ’em under 32 characters if you can!

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Bryson, love the YouTube channel! Keep it coming, I’m happy to retweet ’em or share. Good stuff.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Re: bulk tagging: You know, it’s not until you mention, “FCS can’t do that as well”, that I realize how much I take that for granted. It’s super fast and extremely useful, doing manipulations on metadata that just aren’t conceivable in FCP. It helps me manage file-naming conventions and generally keep things organized.

Where it gets crazy powerful is when you’re doing it with the Server product and running queries. Then you can find and sort clips across ALL your projects, make a metadata or filename batch change, and save it back to the database. Boom!

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Agreed – I think CatDV has many superior advantages over FCS, but this list is clearly biased and ill-worded. Post pros are smarter than that, and can smell this for what it is. FCS does have some nice FCP integration and clip-searching capabilities, if that’s what you need. CatDV does more.

Distilling these two systems into a checklist totally oversimplifies these complex questions.

“GUI Ease of use, intuitive” – LOL! 1: Not a sentence. 2: Saying CatDV has a great interface is, well, false. It’s “functional”. We can all thank Java Swing’s UI widgets for that. But hey, it’s like an ugly baby, you still love it, right? =)

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server