Rolf Howarth
Forum Replies Created
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There are quite a few ways of importing data from another system into CatDV, for example as tab-separated text, by creating an XML “sidecar” file with each media asset, by creating a CatDV XML batch file and so on. They’re all relatively straightforward, but you’ll probably still want to talk to a systems integrator if you don’t have some programming skills in house.
Although the CatDV server uses an SQL database internally, the database schema isn’t directly extensible in the way I think you’re describing. Again, the schema is all pretty straightforward, and even though it isn’t officially sanctioned or supported, you shouldn’t have too many problems using third party reporting tools to directly get data out of the database. I wouldn’t suggest you attempt to directly MODIFY the data, however, because there’s too much scope for corrupting things if you make a mistake. We’re not that keen on support queries saying “we thought we’d tweak the ‘clip’ table slightly and now we keep getting database errors when we try to log on, can you fix it?” 🙂
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Thanks for the feedback, it’s on the list of possible enhancements for a future version.
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Thanks for the feedback John.
CatDV Pro 8.1.10 has the option to apply a time of day timecode when importing media which has no other timecode information (it’s an option in Advanced Media Preferences). (This has the effect of setting the IN point of the clip in CatDV to something other than 0:00:00:00, it doesn’t automatically add a timecode track, which in any case would only be relevant to QuickTime movies).
You can add a timecode track when exporting QuickTime reference movies by checking the option under Other Tracks.
I’m not sure offhand why the apply contiguous timecode offset doesn’t let you set the tape but we’ll investigate.
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Thanks for the kind words, and enjoy the rest of your holiday weekend!
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There could be any one of a number of (mostly QuickTime-related) causes for conversion failures, so I’ve emailed Vladimir asking for a copy of the log files that should shed some more light on what’s happening.
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Hi Geir,
Sorry, it’s not currently possible to do that I’m afraid, but it’s something we’ll look at in a future version.
-Rolf -
The “special file naming” that CatDV likes to use is for when you’re using tape-based previews, where the filename (eg. 2997,45,1424,64x.mov) encodes the timecode of the file. For tapeless workflows you’ll be using path-based previews however, in which case CatDV uses the filename (plus any enclosing folder names from the root you specify) to find the proxy. There shouldn’t be any issue using a third party transcoding tool as long as the resulting files are placed in the correct folder (and have the original filename plus .mov or .mp4 as the extension).
To configure paths in Live HTML Publisher, let’s assume you have a full-res file at
/Volumes/FullRes/Project/Folder/File.mov
and a proxy at
/Volumes/Proxies/Project/Folder/File.mov
then you’d set /Volumes/FullRes as your “Media root dir” and /Volumes/Proxies as your “Media equiv path”. Only files within that heirarchy will be accessible.
Alternatively, if the corresponding proxy is at
/Volumes/Proxies/Volumes/FullRes/Project/Folder/File.mov
then you’d set “Media root dir” to “/” and leave the “Media equiv path” as /Volumes/Proxies.
Finally, if you want to provide access to the original files instead of proxies, set Media root dir and equiv path to the same thing, or leave them both blank.
The “Preview root dir” field is only used for tape-based previews.
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When you use the Export As HTML command, choose “Single page for all selected clips” (the other option is for use with the older tape-based previews, which aren’t relevant to most people these days). It will then export an index.html and stylesheet.css file, plus a thumbnails directory containing the poster thumbnails for the selected clips you’re exporting. Which columns are displayed is taken from the view you select from the drop down. You can select any view but it ignores the view type (grid, filmstrip etc.) and only uses the columns from that view. Most likely therefore, the view you chose doesn’t include the “Poster” column.
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Hi Carsten,
First off, if you’re experiencing problems please make sure you’re using the latest version of CatDV (currently 8.1.8, see https://www.squarebox.co.uk/download1.html). We’re constanly improving the XML support and recently made some changes to handle some specific situations, such as multi-track sequences with certain kinds of dissolve transition.
Secondly, you have to remember that Final Cut Pro and CatDV are there for different purposes. CatDV is a primarily a logging and cataloging tool and only has limited editing capabilities. Things like transitions, effects and filters have no representation within CatDV, for example.
Finally, you should be aware that all the main editing applications CatDV integrates with (FCP, Avid, and Premiere Pro) all have their own idiosynchracies and bugs. For example, you can export XML from FCP and reimport it again and find that the duration of some your clips are now out by one frame, or create an XML file and send it to Premiere (which can read FCP XML files) and find it crashes if a particular tag is missing, but that Final Cut does the wrong thing if that same tag is present! We work very hard to support all these idiosynchracies, and by and large the integration is very successful.
If you’re using an older version of CatDV then getting the latest update will almost certainly fix the problem with sequences that you’re seeing, but if not, please mail a copy of the XML file that doesn’t work to support@squarebox.co.uk and we’ll investigate for you.
-Rolf
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The “Browse Catalog” dialog is basically a glorified file chooser with some searching functionality built in, so if you use it to open a catalog that’s already open it will tell you it’s already open (and bring that window to the front), exactly the same as if you tried reopening the catalog using the Open Catalog… chooser.