[Keith Moreau]

OK, since it seems that there isn’t a good way to fake CatDV into looking at native AVCHD files yet because of the dependancy on Quicktime, does anybody have a good workflow for getting AVCHD and good metadata into CatDV? There are some obvious and some not so obvious choices, seems like most of them involve some additional manual work or scripting.

My choices so far are:

• Using FCP Log and Transfer to create Prores files and some fairly minimal metadata
• Using Clipwrap to convert to Prores and practically no metadata
• Using FFMpeg + scripts to wrap the MTS files and with appropriate metadata (a lot of work unless there is a pre-build script out there)

The problem I have with any of these solutions is basically the prores files will be the masters, with no linkage (as far as I know) to the original AVCHD files and no way to get to the masters within CatDV. Has anybody tackled this issue yet with AVCHD and has a good reliable and as efficient as possible workflow?

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the great detail, Bryson. My situation is that I’m just starting to use CatDV Pro, and I have a lot of hours of tapes, cards, clips over the years, all belonging to the same documentary ‘project’ so to add each tape or card as a separate catalog at this point is a lot of repetitive importing. I take it the client you talked about did the same thing initially, imported large number of clips to one catalog, but then now imports one ‘reel’ at a time as they acquire new footage.

I’m also wondering if there is something that the ‘worker node’ thread can do to automatically import a new ‘reel’, and ‘publish’ that reel to the database, so I don’t have to think about it. I assume that’s possible.

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks Rolf, so I’m not crazy 🙂

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Rolf

Thanks for the response and the help, here and elsewhere.

Regarding the always connect to server, I don’t think I’m choosing not to connect to the server, unless I’m missing something pretty basic I’m choosing to connect as that’s the first thing CatDV shows me, the small login window with the last IP address of the server that I’ve entered previously filled into the login window, if I click OK then the user preferences window comes up, and if I hit cancel or ok on that window, CatDV will quit.

If I don’t have the ‘Always connect to Server’ pref set, and manually connect to the server and login, it works fine and I can login to the server, load catalogs that are in the server database, and everything is fine. I’d just like to bypass the manually selected menu item ‘login to server’ step, which I thought was the point of the preference setting.

Basically, if I have this option set, I can’t get CatDV NOT to quit. I’ve tried several times with the same result.

Thanks again for any advice.

Regards,

-Keith

[Keith Moreau]

Thanks for the info Bryson. Regarding your clients with the huge number of clips, how are they grouping them into catalogs? By shoot, project, etc and what have you found to be an optimum number of clips per catalog, working on the premise the they are using the workgroup server version and accessing them after the initial populating via SQL?

[Keith Moreau]

Hi Kevin

Thanks for the quick reply and the great info. I actually got a full trial from CatDV directly via a specific email request and response from Rolf the other day, so I do have the ability to save catalogs, etc, so I don’t think that is the issue.

The problem is also intermittent, for example I’ve had my large catalog open overnight and didn’t get the message again. Maybe it has to do with processor usage or perhaps having Final Cut Pro open at the same time, the processors have been relatively idle and I’m not concurrently running FCP right now.

I’m studying this forum now, as well as reading through your documentation and playing with it to get a feel of it. I have a pretty fast Mac 8 Core with a fast startup disk, have allocated 2GB to CatDV to try to maximize the performance. For me having one big catalog is more efficient for initially populating the catalog, as well as eventually being able to search. I realize the server version is probably better suited to being able to search through massive numbers of clips, I wanted to see how well the standalone Pro version fared. I haven’t yet tried the server yet, but I plan to. Hopefully the trial license I received will work for this evaluation.

Thanks again, I think you have a great product and your support, particularly here in this forum is really a bonus!

-Keith