[Fred Hafer jr]

I downloaded the free trial and spent a fair amount of time playing around with the software. I think its going to be exactly what I need. I plan on buying the software and cataloging all of my tapes (50+) but I’ve been distracted by other projects.

The software has some very cool features. It’s compatible with FCP and allows you to drag (reference) clips from iDive directly into a FCP project. It also has the abilty to choose the thumbnail frames you want to see for each clip and you can assign a bunch of different attributes (date, location, people, etc.) to each clip for organization.

Since storage has gotten so cheap, my plan is to capture all of my tapes to hard drives then catalog the clips using iDive. This way I’ll have immediate access to all of my footage. The only thing I haven’t decided is whether to capture the clips using FCP, then catalog them using iDive or do it all from iDive. Initially I was thinking of the FCP/iDive method because I thought that the quality of the captured clips would be better (using ProRes, etc.). However, I think iDive has access to the same codecs, hence the quality would be the same. I need to research this further.

I encourage you to download the trial and play around with it a little. If you do, please post your experiences. I’ll do the same.

Fred

Fred

[Fred Hafer jr]

Thanks for your help guys. I’ve discovered that iDive can catalog my existing video clips (rather than having to use iDive to capture) and it has the ability to export an EDL. It’s also pretty cheap and has a nice interface. So…I downloaded a trial copy (it even comes with a demo library) and I’m going to give it a test drive.

I’ll add to this post after I have some feedback.

Thanks again for eveyone’s help.

Fred

Fred