Bryson Jones
Forum Replies Created
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I’d just drag and drop it.
Works as well or better than drilling down.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Good news, this is the most basic and fundamental feature of CatDV. Check out the demos online (there’s a long one at catdvexperts.com) or have JB&A or your dealer show you how this works.
You can move subclips or markers to FCP from CatDV. You can choose which (or both) to create in CatDV. That said, other than just CatDV there are a lot of considerations in this type of project.
Markers and subclips have very different behaviors and impact editorial workflows in different ways so you should also consider your editing project style and footage use-cases before you choose to subclip or mark.
If you have a tape library program with metadata in it, you might want those records imported into CatDV before you start so that you don’t have to type everything again.
Finally, give some serious thought as to how you are going to secure these files long term. The good thing about tape is that it’s far more stable than hard disks, as we all know.
Get your dealer to demo this workflow for you and have it planned and scoped before-hand as you’re about to commit several hundred to thousand hours of labor to this operation.
Welcome to the brave new future!
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Automation of any job generally requires CatDV Server and a Worker Node. From there, there are several ways to manage this:
1 – Have the Worker create proxy based on a server query or watch folder. (Server Queries are far better for this for many reasons.)
2 – Have the Worker Node send the job to an outside application. (Compressor, Episode or other command line script-able trans-coding app.)
Barring that, you could, in theory, automate proxy creation with some shell scripting but it would likely be more trouble (and money) than it’s worth unless you are really handy with shell scripts.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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CatDV creates thumbnails when it analyzes media and adds them to the catalog.
When you’re browsing, generally the preferred behavior is to not have to wait for thumbnails to be generated. (On a small file count it’s fine but if you browse a folder with several thousand images you’ll see what I mean. I’m in a folder with 2000 files and as I type this, the last images are far from being parsed.
I’d assume this was changed to speed things up and improve stability. I’ve never noticed this as I don’t use CatDV to browse a lot but I confirm the same behavior.
Interesting.
As I finish this post CatDV 9.0.6 is less than half the way through this one folder I was casually “browsing”. Maybe the change is best as it really taxed my system while it did that temporary job.
Squarebox or JB&A guys can this be turned on and off?
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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There is not a direct link from a sequence to a subclip, that I’m personally aware of. Perhaps the Squarebox folks can speak to this better than I.
I tend to avoid working in subclips editorially much because of this. (Just had a conversation this am about this with a client.) Also notice that any metadata tagged into a subclip does not flow “up” to the master clip. For this reason alone I avoid it as it can be a waste of time to tag metadata that isn’t being pushed up the chain. (And it confuses users, as well. “I swear I tagged that!”)
Editorial workflows are the most difficult part of CatDV or any MAM, in my opinion.
From what I can see, subclips seem to be in CatDV for more temporary use and more from the Asset Management side rather than Production. (Treat them as permanent assets and use them as clips and things work really well) But editing with them is not really like a true NLE where relationships are preserved as, from what I know, that is a pretty deep database relationship best left to the NLE boys. CatDV is a MAM at its core after all.
Again, I’d love to hear from Squarebox officially on this.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Update:
From talking to our Filemaker dev guys for the average user, a one-time tab-separated text export is the way to go for manual data exports.
XML out of Filemaker is possible for a savvy developer but it’s beyond most folks skill set unless you already have a good background in Filemaker and XML.
We’re working on some php to speak between CatDV and Filemaker Pro. I’ll update this board as that becomes available. That should make things a bit easier and more interactive.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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I don’t think there’s a bulk delete for catalogs. Probably for good reason. Anyone else know?
I try not to think about what could happen with that button…
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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I gotta put in a pitch for placing and never moving your files, if possible. We try to get a place for them on the shared storage and not muck with them much.
The Worker is more reliable about moves as well.
Keep us posted but what’s the purpose of the Copy vs. Move? If you’re worried about data loss, make a non-CatDV backup copy and then just move them.
All of your storage is backed up nightly, right? 😉 (I shudder to think of all of the non-secured video data in the world.)
I agree about Caspian, it’s good to have you piping up and nice to hear Xtarget on the board!
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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If there are paths in your filemaker this is do-able with an XML export and some translation. (Technically you can do with with Excel too but it’s a little more work, depending on your skills.) You probably wouldn’t be posting here if you had paths in the db. 😉
If there are no paths, you may need something fancier. There are a few ways to go.
If you have a folder structure with any connection to the db records you can generate paths with a little scripting. (We’ve done this when clients have folders by category for instance.) A script to generate these makes life easier as well. If the file called filename.mov has the “category” listed as “sports” and you have all of those sports files in a folder at /Volumes/media_drive/sports” then you can concatenate the filename and generated path and write that to the media path field. “/Volumes/media_drive/sports/filename.mov”.
Finally we have what Robb is talking about. If you have filenames in the db and then bring the media in separately you can also script the metadata re-link by reading the filename of the imported media file, searching the db for the metadata record that matches and then writing the path from the imported media to the metadata import.
These last 2 require the Worker Node and the command line interface though some resellers will do these operations for you and deliver catalogs back to you.
We do an ingest workflow for tape conversion projects where we take all of the records from the tape vault, import them into CatDV, apply a path in the imported records and then have CatDV Worker link the clip when the tape is ingested to a file. (The capture system (its name is often Joe.) or Episode drops the file out to Worker and Worker moves the files to match the path.) So you have 10,000 tape records imported and unlinked and as the files are ingested the clips come “on-line” and are linked with no human intervention. We add automation flags into the empty records on the front end import so that as the files link they automatically fire actions to create proxy, archive the hires to tape and separate the clips into catalogs. You put the tapes in and make files, the system adds your old metadata and puts the files away for you.
A lot is possible if you need to avoid weeks of mind-numbing work. That is a prime motivator. CatDV rocks but you gotta get that data in there first, right? Hope these start you on the path.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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This is something you should contact tech support with. It’s not the usual behavior.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com