Bryson Jones
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That was my point. The size of the catalog is key as the larger they get, the more trouble they are, so you may not care now… but you will.
CatDV is not a drive scanning program (you can do that with $75 shareware, by the way.) It’s best when implemented as the client of the CatDV Server which allows hundreds of thousands of assets (millions?) to be cataloged, tagged and managed.
“Browsing” is fine, to a point and then it fails. Case in point. If “BigCompany” is truly big, then there are multiple campaigns, maybe years of footage, perhaps several locations or campuses that need to share data and metadata. This is what CatDV is made to do. Do I put the July 2011 company retreat from Los Angeles in the “July 11” folder? In the “West Coast” folder? In the “Retreats and Events” folder? The answer is none… and all… by tagging those assets with metadata and then bringing it up in a search. Then I can find things pertinent to any type of project. (how would a new user know that there were 15 retreats over the years if they only browsed by date or by location in a folder structure? You would know that, of course, you are the person who shot it. But in a large enterprise, (and God forbid you not be around when BigCompany needs their footage) we have to prepare for dozens of people who have no prior knowledge of the media to be able to find things.
“Jones, make us a show reel of all the retreats over the last 10 years!” the boss says, and you could, without knowing how many there were or what folders to look in, if someone tagged them as “retreats”.
Now, after a breath… back to your question. If you know the client name and the date, if you just used catalog sets by client, by date (BigCompany-1-thru-6-2011) then you could easily find anything and once you’d seen that the footage was what you wanted, you simply right click to “reveal in finder” or check the path in the metadata that you would have mapped into a convenient view for your workflow and go get your assets. There are like half a dozen ways to set that up and do that.
The benefit of this over the browse folder method is that you could immediately filter by any metadata field inside that catalog. If you needed the Widget Maker Convention footage, and you knew it was in that catalog, you’d simply open the catalog, filter by that data and those assets would be in the Main window. (again, if you had server, you could simply search for the convention and all those assets from any catalog, from any drive, from any date, would appear magically) “Widget Maker 2009, coming right up.”
So often CatDV is seen as “Lightroom for video” and it’s simply not. You can set it up for workflows that emulate that in some ways, but in the end, in it’s best implementation, & in my opinion ONLY, it’s part of a larger system that in most cases is priced beyond what a single user would want to pay. Standalone CatDV is amazing, but limited, as it’s simply a client to a larger system that can stand on it’s own for some uses. Its power is in networked search and asset management.
I hope that helps some, and I hope that if you dig deeper, you can engage a reseller to help you integrate the system. It’s truly amazing, but may not be exactly right for your situation if you are looking to scan drives and browse a file system virtually. Indeed, we are here to replace the file system once things become too deep to manage that way. It’s what we do.
Good Lord, it’s Friday night, I have to get going.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Hey there,
There are tons of discussions on here about this. I’m going to offer a catalog per project, just to keep the size down. (Go back and search the “catalog size” threads.)
As we state often, CatDV standalone handles data very differently than CatDV client. It really depends on how many assets are on a single drive, as to whether you can have one catalog per drive. But play around and see how it runs with the various settings set up different ways and I’m sure you’ll find a layout that works for you.
Keep us posted.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Worker Node is a single instance license. If you bought one, it’s one copy. If you want to run it on all your machines, you need copies for them all. But I’ve never seen anyone do that.
It is really meant to automate CatDV and Server processes more than a raw transcode machine so you may want to actually set up some other form of transcoding if you don’t want to overload your server/worker machine.
It’s demo’d showing transcodes because it can do them and is awesome at it, but in most large shops you will either want to have several Workers or off load the big jobs to allow the Worker to handle more jobs.
It’s serial in nature meaning that if you have a “job” in progress like a 1 hour transcode, you will not have another job fire off until that one is done. So that’s another good reason to get the heavy lifting off to an outside process like Compressor, Episode, Sorenson etc.
Whoever is designing your system should be able to help you lay out your automated workflows to maximize your software. Distributed processing is most likely your best bet if you’re doing tons of transcodes. Planning Worker Node usage is an often overlooked thing due to the lack of understanding of what Worker does. It does a ton of things, but like your assistant editor, it can get overloaded, it’s only one man. 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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One LA Apple dealer I just spoke to has 200 copies they just got.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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I’m checking my “sources” on this one to see if there’s a new run of disks. My local dealers all bought all they could when it was EOL’d so I’m having them check the Enterprise reps for “depth”.
While they can’t “buy” it wholesale, we’re seeing if the quantities are restricted from Apple’s store. As I knew it, there was no “old stock” as of a few weeks ago, the channel was drained.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Rolf, I’m thrilled to be wrong! New stuff. 😉
But to clarify, you have to enter them as such, yes? As in, we can’t have a db full of cities with country lookups. But if they are manually entered, the fields “filter” in a sense. Yes?
If so, I think we need to all get started pitching in on City/State/Country layouts for import. 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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CatDV doesn’t have the capability of creating “relationships” in that way. Besides, if you did, you’d need to import a list of cities and then their related countries. (Yes, of course many db programs have this) but since it’s a Production Asset Manager, CatDV hasn’t really had to deal with this sort of thing much, from what I can see.
These lookups have been requested and I’m sure someday might even find their way into the product but that’s generally a feature for a larger MAM system. (read more expensive and complex).
I do some autofills on certain rigs by using the Worker to automate them but it’s tedious work and certainly not for large data sets like a city/country field set.
Short answer, those lookups are harder than they look to create.
Besides, will it really know the difference between Rome GA, Rome AR and Rome Italy? 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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zzzzzzzz…. what? Hey? Where am I?
Hey guys, there’s been a SAN storm here in LA… that and the small matter of a wedding to plan! What did I miss? Oh, you got it. 😉
Sounds like someone was “filtering” instead of searching. Maybe that’s a better name for that field up top since it reduces instead of adds?
Rolf, guys? What say? Queries and Filters?
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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On 9.0.0 and server 6.6 it’s working here. OSX 10.6.8 with current Java.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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I know you know that you need a networked environment to use the web so I’ll assume that that’s probably not what you meant. 😉
I’ll see if I can answer what I think you meant. Enough teasing.
You do need CatDV Server since both HTML Publisher and the WebClient are add-ons to the Server itself. Managing multiple users is the purpose of the Server system, to let metadata be shared, updated, viewed and searched.
For a small shop, I’d not recommend the HTML Publisher unless you have a jsp web programmer who can customize it for you. It’s really a toolkit to build a site on that’s fed by CatDV dynamically. If you don’t have a relationship with a programmer, I’d go Web Client. There’s a new 2 seat server that you can get for small shops that will do a lot. (the Web Client is concurrent users so unlimited people can use it, just 2 at a time)
The only other way to share metadata is to export it into some sort of web system but that’s hard to update/manage and can be expensive to build so Server and it’s add-ons generally work out to be cheaper and way easier to manage. (your CatDV edits update instantly)
Again, let’s all remember that we’re talking about an interactive Web server system that’s custom to your shop and will save the average organization thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars in time and shipping costs over a single year.
It’s not going to be $100.
Price that out from a web company and Server starts to look like the bargain it truly is.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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