Bryson Jones
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Man, it sounds like you’ve got it licked for now. Keep us posted as to how it rolls out over time. So cool to see a new shop come on line.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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You made my day…Welcome to the crew.
I love that the Squarebox guys listen as well. That’s what’s neat. We in the field know what we need. The Dev crew never assumes that they know better than the users. That “bottom up” approach is key to innovation that matches the needs of the “real world”.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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In the Preferences, got to “Media Search Paths. There you can define the path based preview path. That tells the app where to look for the proxies.
Done!
As to the server, yeah, the way you’re working is fine until someone edits a clip in the home system. Then the catalogs are out of sync.
Additionally, you can only search within a single catalog without the server so as long as someone knows what catalog to look in, you’re good but deeper searches and more functionality come from the server.
The final item is that your “layout” of your fields and details panels (and that proxy path) can all be stored as a production group in the server so that when someone logs in, it loads your “look” and layout and access privileges. That’s not a problem in a small rig, but you can imagine that in a larger system it’s a big deal. As it stands, if someone on the client end edits a clip in your setup, there’s no notification and their copy is simply wrong. So be careful of that. A silly user could really wreck things. (what? a silly user? there are no such things in production!!!)
I think that with some careful management, and a good backup, you can get this running. The reason I lay all this out is not to “sell” you on Server, I just want to be ahead of the problems a bit so CatDV doesn’t get blamed for being a “bad” system. We have fixes for all of the above items and more but as you said, you have to get them used to the idea.
Good luck and stay tuned!
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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You’ve stumped me. I’ve actually never seen or tried this.
That said, it depends on what you mean by “work” and also by your edit format. I have clients who use CatDV with Avid workflows and they never go back to the Avid. They use CatDV for cataloging, proxy creation, search and library management and it works fine, as long as you have QT based media or can generate that with an export.
The fancy XML based import and export is all mostly for FCP workflows but there are so many other things that are done in CatDV that you may or may not be able to use it in your shop.
What kinds of uses are you proposing? If you give us your needs, maybe we can suggest some ideas for you. Oh, and welcome to the forum!
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Hey there guys, Happy Monday. Vince, Bob is correct, you can absolutely do what you are laying out.
For a multi location setup, you may want to use the Enterprise version of CatDV but what you are wanting to do is not too hard of a workflow to set up. The main issue I see is more infrastructure than CatDV, as far as your server setup and delivery of the proxy. (although that can be done by shipping drives too). Also, who is the master location or if there are multiples etc, has to be hashed out, but the software setup is fairly basic to a trained tech.
If you like, I, or the Squarebox guys, (or probably any dealer local to you) could give you a demo of how it all works in a server environment, and lay out the differences in the types of server licenses. I have a few locations who do exactly what you’re talking about.
Also, as you’ve already seen, it works quickly without a ton of development on your part.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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No LTO-5 Prime Cache yet, and you seem to have a good handle on the limitations of your solution. I’m betting it’ll work fine.
There’s a great white paper on the cache-a site that lays out some of this stuff as well.
Man, in the end, if you buy the self built and work it out, you can always sell it and upgrade. I just wanted to point out some of the differences on here.
Note to the LA guys out there. I will soon have a Prime Cache LTO-4 for rental here in town. (hell, I guess if we have a credit card deposit, we can ship it too.)
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Exactly, John, lengthening the media, of course, is not possible, lol. Although I’d love to have it for those times the camera wasn’t running. 😉
However, there’s a situation in certain editing systems where they set up their own “handles” that are not true to the actual media length, so, to match their length when importing into CatDV, you need to shorten the CatDV clips to match what the editing system is reading.
Yes, this seems insane that they would read the media duration “wrong” but it seems that they do it to avoid effect and transition problems… or maybe it’s just sloppy code. 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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One other thought…
tar – BRU requires BRU to restore. tar, which cache-a uses, is open source.
Maybe not a big deal if you just keep your archives, but a lot of networks and studios ask for tar. Check your client delivery specs before you decide as well.
I know I sound like a Cache-A wh%$e but it’s pretty nice to use. And who knows what we will be able to do once the API comes out and we can actually tie into the database. As it is now, searching all your archives with a web interface (built into the cache-a) is pretty compelling.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Man, the LTO5 cache-A is $10,995 list, but a good dealer can help you a bit on that.
If you can go LTO-4, the prime cache is a cool deal for under $7k and you don’t have to use a computer to run it.
That’s pretty hard to beat. Are you seriously getting an LTO-5 and card and BRU for under $3k? That’s a pretty good deal.
My vote, just having seen folks suffer with archive software, is the smaller cache-a, multiple machines can back up with no training. Literally, “put it on the vtape” and it’s backed up and then you can scan it later, if you like. I like the idea that no one has to call me on my day off to do a backup lol… but the BRU will give you job security. 😉
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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Questions –
change file extension from MP4 to MOV –
First, sorry guys, I was off on a vacation – (what are those??!!)The answer is “all in Worker”. The CatDV Worker node can perform all of the mentioned actions, no outside scripting needed for this one. It’s got a QT based transcode/export engine, the ability to change file extension and names and the ability to copy, move or delete files.
This is really where the package gets powerful, all these things in an app that can also update the server info for each clip it touches. For instance, at the end, we changed a field to “proxied” (yeah, I know that’s not a word lol) so that we could quickly sort for the clips that were ready to view/edit by the producers.
I’ll gather more info on the Compressor stuff, I just heard this from the client, it wasn’t one of my setups. We’re just testing CatDV for them.
As to the Canon stuff, I’m not familiar with it, as I’m just starting to look into the canon stuff, for now, we just transcode with QT since we don’t use camera metadata in the shows I’m doing now.
Again, sorry for the lag but a weekend away from the screen was amazing.
bryson
bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com
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