Bryson Jones
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Hey guys, I’m testing some of this footage. (for the Brit’s, Annalee got a new T2i) What metadata can I expect from the .THM files? I’m not really seeing it in my “other” columns.
I’ll do some tests between what I get from FCP and CatDV but John, what is the main data that you’re using?
bryson
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I have been able to view AVCHD using the ffmpeg implementation in CatDV however, it’s a hack and not ready for “primetime” as they say.
Greg… we’re all waiting. 😉
bryson
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I’m looking into the Sony front end. (I made a call today to scare up someone on the Sony team) but Kevin Duggan may be your man for this.
He’s got Front Porch working with CatDV and I’m betting it’s a similar setup.
bryson
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I have clients hiring “asset managers” these days, at least where they manage archives and libraries.
Assistant editors handle the CatDV in most TV shops, and then the tape librarian/vault manager will get to keep their job for a few more years if they can figure out CatDV. 😉
bryson
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The concept that Kevin just dropped on you is the biggest thing in CatDV, it’s the moment when you “get over” the obsession with catalogs.
I take partial blame for that obsession. In demo’s we tend to work with small amounts of footage and so opening a catalog is the obvious thing to do to show clips. Running a query with a small amount of footage quickly gathered isn’t “sexy”. Also, in the standalone, you always start from that so it’s ingrained. In the field, it’s great to have a container, but once a clip belongs to more than one container, i.e. used in multiple shows for example, or that container gets too big, there are problems. What Duggan shows above is usually a 15 second item that goes by in a flash, without being noticed really.
As you said, the minute you have catalogs that are per tape or per episode, things get hard to manage in some people’s mind. Kevin has laid out the solution.
I also find that people who are trained mostly to search from the start have less trouble “getting” this. If you start in a shop that has several thousand catalogs you really don’t try to scroll down through the browse window to catalog #3789. Whereas if you are the guy starting the system, at first you simply open catalog 5 or 50 to look at clips as it slowly grows.
Naming is a huge deal as you start to do this, as EP1 will be returned in general searches for EP1, EP101 and EP1001 so think ahead. (lets hope you all get a 1000 episode order for a show!) That said, if you use the grouping or tree to browse and “query” that isn’t an issue. Also, if you do make a naming mistake, you can easily “bulk edit” things to change them after the fact. This is also eased by Kevin’s “narrow it down” method of stepping into a catalog set.
To paraphrase Kevin’s tape quote, “The catalog is dead, long live the catalog”.
But once again, CatDV proves to be many products in one, with many ways to manage and view. It’s all about how you use it.
bryson
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This is an excellent post. Thanks for taking the time to lay this out man. This kind of sharing is exactly what forums are about.
bryson
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Jiggy,
Good luck out there. Regardless of how you capture (I’m a fan of running tape as a backup no matter what) I’d treat each catalog as a tape in that situation, either that or if it’s not too much footage, you could divide by day. That way it’s easy to find what you need as you can usually know what day something was shot. (in the standalone version, you can’t search over all the catalogs, only within one of them.)
Then later, you can log and start to gather “topical” catalogs for pre-editing as you log and create a longer term archive.
If you have questions, please email and if you get in a bind, I’d be happy to donate a screen share or Skype to help on that project.
bryson
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As of 7/12/10
CatDV is at 8.1.4
Server is at 6.1.6
Worker is at 3.1.0
MySQL is supported in any version above 5.0
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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I agree, you are raising some great questions.
One thing that you will see on this board is the workflow whereby the Canon files are used as the “proxy” and then the rendered ProRes is the full res. This gets you around one of the worst workflow problems.
As to the others, I find that a ton of folks are archiving the camera master as a last resort and actually treating pro res as the master since it’s relatively transportable and a solid editing format.
As to archiving to hard drives, note that you can right click on clips and move them and CatDV will update their location. That’s a pretty good way to note what went where and make a searchable record of your drives.
The final thing is yes, a small shop has it tough in this world since you are really only splitting costs of large purchases over 2 systems. Asset Management used to be only for the big boys and at a certain level, it still is, but the standalone client of CatDV helps small shops bring some sanity to their workflows.
Perhaps you can check with your dealer about having them help you develop some workflows or maybe purchase some traning from them? The tools are all there, but like any app, it’s all about who’s using them and how.
Stay in touch on here and as you run into things, bring them to the forum, we’re jsut all getting started here and every question builds the knowledgebase.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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If I may add…
The server stores the views/layouts and loads them as part of the login process. This allows you to show or hide fields and even whole details panels from specific groups. (it asks if you’d like to “load the settings” for the group you are logging into.
The catalog only stores the metadata, which is actually good, because if it stored the layout, you’d be overwriting someone’s layout whenever you sent them a catalog; annoying at best, disastrous for untrained users.
This was why we were saying that Standalone is best for small setups where you can manage the user layouts manually and also why I spoke up about Standalone not being the entire picture of CatDV. Those “missing features” are in the Server so that it can manage the users, views and access.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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