Rolf Howarth
Forum Replies Created
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It should work if your tab separated text has a column called either Media File or Media Filename.
There are other ways also:
One way is to create a CatDV XML batch file, as that way it will import the media you specify at the same time.
If the clips are named the same as the file and the files are all in the same folder you should be able to bulk attach media by locating the first one and have it do the others automatically (certainly that’s how Update Media Location works, which updates the path of clips that already have media attached, I’m not 100% sure offhand whether Attach Media does the same thing).
Finally, another approach (if each entry in the text file matches precisely one file) is to import all the files in one window and import your tab-separated text file containing the metadata in the other, then copy and paste the metadata from the second window onto the clips in the first. This relies on the two windows having the same clips in the same order.
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Should be no problem at all. You could also rename them to something like Archived/Poland with a forward slash in it, that way all the archived catalogs will be displayed in a folder.
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The quickest codec to encode TO is PhotoJPEG; H264 is quite a bit slower. If it’s taking a long time regardless of the codec you use the problem may well lie with decoding the format you’re converting FROM, in which case there isn’t much you can do. Are you creating full size proxies? Reducing the size by an exact factor of two (which is an option in Worker 5 and CatDV 10) might help slightly.
If you have a single worker it won’t encode any faster than CatDV as it uses exaclty the same engine internally (unless you use the worker to control an external encoder such as Episode or Rhozet). However, you can have multiple worker instances running on the same machine. Each individual file will take just as long but you can be processing several files in parallel for faster throughput.
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No, that’s an older beta. You want CatDV 10.0.1 which is available now at
https://www.squarebox.com/download/CatDVPro10.0.1.dmg
https://www.squarebox.com/download/CatDVPro10.0.1.exe -
I’m glad you mentioned that because this is an issue we fixed just last week I seem to remember. It will be included in the 10.0.1 update, due at the end of this week hopefully.
(If you’re curious, the issue is that there are two possible viewers for still images. CatDV has its own built in viewer for many RAW types, while QuickTime can also display some of these formats. Some work better in one, some in the other, and for NEF files we’re obviously using the wrong one at the moment.)
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That fits. We added support for reading thumbnails (if present) from Adobe Illustrator and InDesign and MS Office X documents in CatDV 10, so if you use CatDV 9 you won’t be using that feature.
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Ah yes, / and : are handled specially on the Mac.
Mac OS X uses the same / separator between directory names as Unix and Linux, whereas Mac OS 9 Classic used a colon. I guess to support old Classic filenames which could include a / (for example a date) Mac OS automatically converts a slash in the name to a : (so it’s stored as a colon but displayed as a slash by the Finder).
CatDV doesn’t do that sort of weird munging and so displays file names as they’re stored.
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Long boring explanation: the IP address that the control panel uses is stored separately (using a built-in Java preferences mechanism) from the /usr/local/catdv/catdv.properties setting which the CatDV Server uses. (Theoretically you could use the control panel to administer a server on a different machine, though this has never been fully implemented.) Normally they are both the same but it sounds like in your case they’ve got out of synch.
Go into the Installation panel (not the normal Server Config window) and enter the IP address there and that should resolve the issue.
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The ability to use the CatDV Serer as a license server is designed to make deployment on a network easier so you don’t need to configure each client separately. There’s some flexibiity built in and licenses are freed automatically (after 12 hours I think), so as the network configuration use of machines evolves over time you can use the license on the new machines without having to manually clear it from the old ones (or use a dongle or enter MAC addresses or anything fiddly like that), but the basic license terms are unaltered.
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Kyle is absolutely right, if you’re at all unsure whether CatDV is suitable for your needs download a trial. In unregistered form there are some limitations but most of the basic functionality is there, but if you send an email to sales@squarebox.com we can send you a fully functional temporary license for the software (including networked products such as the Worker Node and Enterprise Server, if you need those).
In the case of HDV, CatDV will directly import and extract metadata from .m2t files. However, QuickTime can’t play the raw files and so playback in CatDV is a bit limited. There are several options, the question to ask to determine which is more appropriate is what your overall workflow is and how will you be working with the files in your editing software:
- If you install Xuggle you can get very basic jerky playback, suitable for previewing the .m2t files only, but can work with the raw files.
- If you’re going to transcode or rewrap the files as .mov’s or similar (eg. using a utility like ClipWrap) then you can play those in CatDV.
- If you want to catalog the HDV tapes and capture proxies only, going back to the tape to edit them at hidef, then you can use our older Live Capture Plus product and set your deck to downconvert HDV to DV, then convert the DV to a proxy format such as H264 or Photo JPEG/OfflineRT.