Rolf Howarth
Forum Replies Created
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The regular web client gives you the ability to specify a named field definition set which specifies the names and types of your user defined fields. The web customisation option provides additional flexibility if you need it, such as the ability to specify a custom logo and title, automatically pick up different user field definitions for different production groups, and customise which tabs and fields are shown in the web client or CatDV client. See https://www.squarebox.co.uk/webclient.html for more details.
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That’s also a reflection of the modern agile way of development, with continuous refinement. Lots of small releases rather than one big release that risks breaking things. If a major feature is new in a particular release that might have some minor problems in the first version, but everything else in the application should be very stable, even if it still says “beta” (though for the record we’re now onto release candidate 2).
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Do you have a small example file that shows the error that you could send to support@squarebox.com? It might be the file is corrupted but if you have quite a few files that show the same error then it could be an problem in our AVI metadata extraction code.
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This is something we very much hope to add in future if or when Apple adds support for it.
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That message shouldn’t indicate a crash (abnormal program termination) so much as the helper process not responding. That would be consistent with it being unbearably slow if you don’t use the helper process – some sort of problem with the .mov that causes QT to freeze when it opens it.
The main situation I know of where that can occur is when opening QT reference movies where the media is missing, in which case QT can spend a long time searching your drives for the media. That’s controlled by the advanced media option whether to resolve data references but I don’t think FFmpeg creates reference movies, so perhaps something else is going on.
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Oh dear! That sounds like a mismatch between the server software and the database schema and certainly shouldn’t happen in normal operation. It might be a schema update that failed, the result of reverting from a later to an earlier version of the server software, or perhaps a problem relating to restoring the database from a backup.
I would suggest you mail a copy of your server log file to support@squarebox.com and we’ll try to sort you out. We may need to remote dial into your system to patch the database.
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Probably the easiest way to do this is to standardise your user fields across all your production groups. If some fields are used in one group and some in another simply don’t show them when customing your details panel and view layouts if they’re not relevant.
Having said that, if a user field has different meanings in different production groups, the worker doesn’t care. If you set User 21 to “Done” in the worker it doesn’t matter that in Group 1 that field’s label is “Transcode Status” and in Group 2 it’s called “Customer Number”. The fact that the worker displays helpful labels is only a convenience when writing the scripts.
If the two groups have very different user field mappings then it may be easier not to enter any field set name at all in the worker and simply refer to it as “User 21”. You will have to consult your mapping spreadsheet when first developing your worker script, but writing the worker script is something you hopefully only have to do once (and is done by the administrator, rather than day to day users) and won’t affect the regular operation of the script.
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Unfortunately that’s really down to limitations in the FCP X metadata model. Although FCPX has range markers and a clip notes field, it doesn’t really have general clip metadata fields in the way that FCP7 does. If Apple add them at some point (and expose them via the FCPX XML file) then we’d be very happy to add support for those in CatDV.
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The main difference between CatDV 8 and CatDV 9/10 is that we use the Cache-A API to restore files. When we first developed the archive integration the archive API wasn’t available which is why we use the vtape watch folder, but obviously that is supposed to work – the fact that you can just copy files to the Cache-A disk, secure in the knowledge that they will be archived, is Cache-A’s selling point.
If you’re worried about fragementation (in the sense of lots of separate sessions on the tape) you can create another folder on the Cache-A drive and choose that as the Archive Location (and select Other rather than Cache-A for the Archive System when you configure the archiving in CatDV). Then it will use the folder name as the “tape name” and you can manually drag the contents of that folder onto the vtape to archive it. Better yet, you can follow Tom’s suggestion of ejecting the tape without erasing the vtape, though I haven’t personally tried that myself.
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We don’t plan on going away 🙂
But rest assured, there are plenty of ways to get the data out of CatDV and into other systems if you need to.
The underlying database (assuming you’re using the server version) is normally MySQL, but it also works with other databases such as Oracle, MS SQL Server, and PostgreSQL, so you’re tied in to one particuar database. We don’t make use of specific database features and it’s easy to use standard tools SQL tools to generate reports or extract data if necessary.
You can also export the data in lots of ways for import into import into other systems, including XML and tab-separated text etc.