Rolf Howarth
Forum Replies Created
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Strange, I’m sure I replied to this, but I don’t see my post.
You can’t downgrade the schema, but we usually make sure that we’ve got at least one version of backward and forward compatibilty between client and server. Most schema changes involve adding new tables or columns, so if your client doesn’t support them they’re simply not used. If necessary we could easily provide a script to manually downgrade a schema again but there has never been any particular need to do so.
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What version of FCP are you using, and what version of CatDV? If you’re using CatDV 9 and FCP 6, go to Preferences and uncheck the “use latest fcp xml version” option.
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You have a number of options, you can import an .m2t file and have the basic file cataloged with metadata but without thumbnails and without being playable, or you can import a ClipWrapped or FCP-captured HDV movie but without the metadata, as it’s been thrown away by that stage. The best way to import files and preserve metadata is using Live Capture Plus to create proxies by downconverting an entire tape to DV, then send those to FCP and batch recapture just those clips you want to edit with there. Alternatively, if your clips and ClipWrapped files are named the same way, you may be able to bulk attach them to the HDV files but that could get a bit fiddly.
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If you have CatDV Pro (not standard edition) and can do some very simple programming in Java then yes, you can write your own plugin that adds commands to the menus to do what you want, including running an external command if necessary. You can drop an email to support@squarebox.com requesting a copy of the API if you want to learn more about plugins.
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It will work with the old server, though some features (Enterprise Edition roles, saving ratings and events) require the new 6.6b2 server.
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Hi Chris,
Sorry to hear about your continuing problems. All I can say again is that the issues you mention (eg. an excessively long time to save catalogs) seem quite untypical, so it could be something specific about your system that CatDV doesn’t like. If you can provide details of your system configuration to support@squarebox.co.uk we’ll be happy to try and help you further any way we can.
Best regards,
-Rolf -
You can copy a preferences file from one machine to another but will need to re-enter your license code (from the original email) after doing so. This method is appropriate for propagating an initial setup to other machines but isn’t suitable for automatically keeping preferences in sync that different users might be updating – for that you need the Enterprise server.
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It’s difficult to tell just from the screenshots. If you mail a copy of your catalog to support@squarebox.co.uk we’d be happy to answer specific questions, but some initial feedback:
No, the green film strip icon isn’t a sequence (that’s a red diagonal film strip) but corresponds to a movie file. Other icons represent audio only clips, still images, and subclips. (Of course, there’s no saying what the contents of that movie file it is – it might be a rendered sequence out of Avid, but as far as CatDV is concerned it’s just a single movie file).
The other icon you’re seeing is a blue folder icon for an MXF metaclip, which corresponds to separate video and audio files bundled together and treated as a single clip (for Avid, P2 and XDCAM clips). The Format description for a metaclip tries to summarise the contents of that metaclip. I’m not sure why the P2 clips are showing as MPEG-2, I’d need to check your catalog to know for sure. Ditto for why some clips don’t play. It could be that you don’t have the requisite Calibrated components or codecs installed. Depending on the format you may need a codec in addition to the MXF import component.
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The limit isn’t really on the number of clips but on the number and size of thumbails (and other metadata in the catalog) and also how you use CatDV. Thumbnails are the main use of memory (unless you’re in the habit of regularly pasting megabytes of text into the Big Notes field!), not just the stored thumbnail data but also scaled representations depending on what view you’ve selected.
If you’re having problems opening a large catalog, quitting and relaunching CatDV and switching to the ‘Concise’ view will help. Conversely, if you maximise your window on a large monitor, then cycle through the views with different thumbnail sizes at the same time as rapidly scrolling through your catalog then you’ll rapidly eat up memory because of the all the scaled thumbnails it’s caching. I regularly work with catalogs with 10,000 clips or more without problems, but it all depends on what you’re doing.
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Are you saying the wrong thumbnails are shown (thumbnails from a different clip) or that only one thumbnail from each clip is shown?
If the wrong thumbnail is shown that’s bceause you are sharing thumbnails based on tape and timecode but the tape name isn’t unique. There’s a preference option to turn that off.
I think you’re complaining that only the poster thumbnail is shown after performing a query. That’s an optimisation to speed up showing query results in some situations (if you have a lot of thumbnails it can take a while to copy them all across the network, which isn’t necessary if you’re using a grid view for example). If you click the advanced checkbox in the query window there’s an option there to “Return additional thumbnails”. That should be done automatically if you open a catalog for editing, but isn’t always in other situations.