[Rolf Howarth]

Excessive long paths
When you add your path-based previews there are two parts, original path and preview location. It’s a good idea to fill in both as I suggested previously. That way you’re telling the system how much of the long path is irrelevant and to ignore. You don’t need to do this, but it makes things more efficient.

Mixing tape and path previews
These are quite different so as a general suggestion I would recommend using separate folders for these. It’s not a big problem if you have them in the same place but it could cause a bit of confusion.

RAID Set and RAID Set-1
That is a concern. When you mount a volume on Mac OS X it “magically” appears as a special directory in /Volumes, eg. /Volumes/RAIDSet. If some software has accidentally created a normal directory with that name then when you mount the volume it picks a new name, ie. /Volumes/RAIDSet-1 and so on. This is bad, as you could end up with files that are actually on your startup volume even though the path looks like it’s on the RAID. In the Finder, do Go > Go To Folder and type in /Volumes. It should only contain disk icons with a little arrow in the corner, not normal folders. If there are any normal folders there, move the files out of them and delete the folder.

Update: I’ve just read your final message which makes things a little clearer. I’ll follow up with another post…

[Rolf Howarth]

What path would you have liked it to use? You can certainly get CatDV to use shorter paths by configuring your media search paths appropriately, in particular by fillling in the Original Location.

If all your media is in the Capture Scratch folder then you could set up a preview path mapping that says

/Volumes/Raid Set/Final Cut Pro Documents/Capture Scratch => /Volumes/Video01/CATDV Previews

If you do that, your preview would end up being called

/Volumes/Video01/CATDV Previews/FFS interviews/original_clip_name.mov

[Rolf Howarth]

In Advanced preferences check the “Export FCP XML files: Preserve Bin name” option.

[Rolf Howarth]

If you use tape-based previews be aware that you could have several different preview files that cover one clip, for example one preview generated for the whole tape and another just for one subclip. Also, CatDV will automagically assemble fragments from separate files as required when it wants to play a clip. For example, if you have a preview file for 0:00:00:00 to 0:01:00:00 from a given tape, and another for 0:01:00:00 to 0:02:00:00, and you play a 30-second clip that’s from 0:00:40:00 to 0:01:10:00 it will create an in-memory reference movie on the fly that refers to parts of both files. Because there is no file on disk for that clip you can’t send that as a proxy to Final Cut without exporting it first.

For reasons such as these and more you should avoid directly using CatDV’s tape-based previews outside of CatDV. They have obscure filenames precisely to discourage such use. Instead, you should probably use path-based previews, as they tend to behave in a much more obvious way.

[Rolf Howarth]

To avoid repeatedly checking whether the same files exists CatDV “caches” the presence or absence of a particular proxy file. If you manually move or delete any preview files behind CatDV’s back it’s safest to quit and relaunch the application. If you enable Advanced Menus via Preferences you can also use the Manage Preview Movies command to locate and delete specific preview files.

[Rolf Howarth]

Is this on Mac or Windows, or something else like Linux? There are installers for Mac and Windows (admittedly the Windows installer is just a simple batch file, but it should still work). The only other thing is that you have to install MySQL first, but that is described in the server release notes.

[Rolf Howarth]

You can also do manual exports from time to time for extra peace of mind, using the Export button in the server control panel or doing FIle > Local Catalogs > Save As Catalog from the CatDV client.

[Rolf Howarth]

For dealing with P2 (and related formats such as XDCAM) within CatDV there are two distinct aspects involved:

a) Media playback: CatDV uses the QuickTime APIs to play media, so to play MXF files you need a suitable QuickTime MXF decode component and/or codecs installed. These are available from a couple of 3rd part companies, Calibrated and MXF4Mac (in both cases for a fee, though free demo versions are available also)

b) Metadata support: if you have the CatDV MXF Option, CatDV has built-in support for reading metadata from MXF files, including P2 camera metadata, technical information such as codec, timecode, and duration, plus the ability to automatically sync up video and audio information that is commonly stored in separate files, but you still need a 3rd party decode component installed to be able to play the files.

To fully support P2 files you might require a number of additional components therefore:
– MXF import component, to open MXF files from within a QuickTime application
– video codecs for specific formats such as AVC Intra, DV100, IMX, etc.
– the CatDV MXF Option to properly “understand” MXF files and folder structures, including reading metadata and synching up video and audio

[Rolf Howarth]

You could use that for renaming the file according to the date, but not for setting the timestamp.

This will be fixed in Worker Node 4.0 so it uses the first available date when setting the timestamp.

[Rolf Howarth]

What the “set timestamp” option does is set the file modification timestamp of the generated file to the camera date-time information of the recording, if that information is available at the time of import (as it typically is for DV and MXF and DSLR movies, for example). I’m not sure if it uses the original file modification time if there’s no camera record date available but I agree that would be a useful feature, so we’ll make a note to investigate that.