Bryson Jones
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A good compromise might be an LTO-3, if you could find one.
I have to agree that USB plus slower smaller tape, is a bad idea.
bryson
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Sorry about forgetting the second half.
There is something coming that’s pretty amazing. I can’t talk about it myself but maybe some of the other guys here can speak directly to this?
bryson
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You are singing my song…I work a ton in reality TV and we’ve cried for multicam for years.
The short answer is, “it’s harder than it looks”. Apparently the code to keep it all together is pretty heavy or it’d be done by now. (we are years into the dev cycle of CatDV )
I would say, from my time around this thing, that it’s not likely to be added anytime soon but I’d like to hear it from Rolf et al.
The good news is that both Avid and FCP are cheap enough now that you can give your producers a copy and have them work that way. That’s what we do in our TV clients. CatDV is for logging and search and then they go into the Avid to create the multicam sequences to pass to the editors.
The last system that I heard of that did multicam was as expensive as buying Avids for everyone. Ouch.
bryson
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Let’s take that panasonic example.
They aren’t lying. If you use their format, all the way through, you will have that metadata. So for news shops who just shoot edit and archive P2, they have that metadata, ready to go, all the time. Now, to see that metadata and search it, you will need a tool like CatDV but it’s there.
Adobe would like everyone to use their standards, right? Flash, XMP, PDF, they love making those. But the choice to standardize is seldom up to one company. Remember, even QT is Apple and Microsoft and others are not thrilled to use it.
If you stay in one company’s product line, it all kind of works, but most folks can’t (panasonic doesn’t make editors and Adobe doesn’t make cameras) so we need translation tools.
CatDV (and other programs like it) are sort of the best we have, for now. A way to read these competing company’s metadata, translate it, and keep it in a transferable and search-able format.
At least until we go back to the days when everything you had in your workflow was one company. 😉 Sony Camera, Deck, Editor, Monitors, Mixers and Speakers, anyone? ($$$)
But remember, even if this is difficult, it doesn’t mean impossible and there are more great tools coming everyday to handle these issues. The growth in CatDV alone over the last year has been amazing to watch.
But yeah, sometimes marketing materials are less than truthful. Can you guys believe it?! 😉
bryson
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In the shops I’ve worked in, mostly the windows clients are playing back proxy. But then again, I’m in Apple country.
Not sure about other places but due to the FCP integration I see a lot of shops that start on Macs at hires and then hand off proxy to producers on PC’s for logging and tagging. That’s a pretty common workflow due to the sheer numbers of FCP editing systems out there.
I’d love to hear from some Win shops too as to what their experiences have been dealing with hires footage in CatDV on Win boxes.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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One note also to finally rid yourself of QT X once and for all. (this is noob stuff but we all miss things from time to time.)
“Get info” on a .mov file.
Scroll down and click to open the triangle for “open with”.
Choose QT 7 from the list of apps.
Hit the button marked “Change All…”
And you will forever open .mov files in QT7 when you double click.
You can do this for all affected file types (mp4, mp3, etc..)
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Another side effect of that would be that any data transmitted would contain your metadata. I’m betting that there are some government agencies that would not like that very much.
“Data about the data” is often very sensitive and specific to the shop using it. So all metadata needn’t travel.
That said, certain files allow certain fields to be written into the files.
Finally,if you could just write metadata into a file and then search in the OS, everyone on the planet would have an amazing asset management system built into their computers and this forum (or even the product perhaps) wouldn’t need to exist. The reality is, we are years from that sort of system working just due to computing power alone, nevermind the privacy complications of a never-ending path of metadata.
The good news is that there’s an amazing amount of good that can be gained from current asset management systems like CatDV. We can now implement, relatively inexpensively, a pretty amazing workflow for most areas of the industry.
bryson
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Hey there Bryan,
1 – Yes, you’ll need Calibrated or MXF4MAC. It’s a question of codec.
3 – 4 & 5 sound correct.
2 – If you are linking to the MXF via AMA, then yes, you’d see it. Which brings me to a question for Mr. Duggan.
Sorry to hijack your thread, but I think these are pertinent questions.
Kevin, there are two things here, one, if you have a clip named 0001 by the P2 camera and it’s been scanned into Avid via AMA, are you saying that if we do a log in CatDV and bring it in via MME, the Avid will see that as the same media and relink to it along with the new metadata even though it technically was imported in 2 separate operations (one Avid, and one catdv?)
What if the client adds to the name, as is often the case, (say “entrance-0001”)? Would it still relink?
Second, “what if”, is that we mostly import via AMA and then transcode to Avid MXF for stability. If we’re doing that, should we wait til after the MME data comes in from the logging, or can we create Avid MXF and then relink to that? I’m assuming no, since at this point we’d lose the “path” but that’s not a bad thing because we could hold at the AMA stage for the initial stuff and then transcode when the logging is done.
Third, are we going to be able to do this with XDCAM?
To recap:
1 – can we change a name and still relink?
2 – can we relink after the avid transcodes or rewraps the P2?
3 – Do you play nicely with Sony?
And yes, I’m about to start my own tests. 😉
bryson
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Rolf,
I still can’t stop telling clients I’m going to “customise” a system for them. What do y’all have against Z’s?
😉
bryson
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Let me speak to the big gotcha.
First, yes, the server makes life much easier. That’s all there is to it.
Now, onto the info.
The big one is that the layout doesn’t travel with the catalog. Think about it… it’s a big deal.
The “User Fields” are programmable and usually are kept with the production group so that when I log in my system sets up the fields and views that I need. So if I have user field #1 (USER1) as my “shoot location” and it’s in the first panel of my details panel, it’ll show up there, labeled as such. The server manages this so that every one’s metadata maps to the same place.
If the other guy has “Shoot Date” in his rig as USER1, and it’s on the third page of his layout, when I send him my catalogs and he opens them, he’s going to see my “shoot locations” on his third page of details and they will be labeled “Shoot Date” because that what he calls field “USER1”.
Let’s say, that he now sets Shoot Location as USER5. and you call USER5 “City”
If he adds some locations to some clips and you add some locations to clips on your end and then you merge them, the data will be mixed and really jacked up in that catalog. City will mix with Shoot Location and Shoot Date and Shoot Location will get mixed and it will make a mess of your neat metadata.
Basically, you have to make sure that no one edits their settings on one side unless you both do it the same way. Add a couple more systems and a great thing that saved you time is suddenly a huge pain in the butt. You have to edit each machine’s settings by hand and make sure they all match.
There’s a clear path and use for both versions. CatDV, when used multi-user has a server to manage users and settings. It works like a charm when used as intended. That’s the supported multi-user config.
If you use it as standalone it is a troublesome thing to run multiple CatDV seats without the server sharing catalogs. Hence the name “Standalone”. One seat.
However, you can do it. You can also run naked through a cactus farm.
In both cases, be very careful. 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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