[Rolf Howarth]

CatDV Standard and Professional Edition share the same basic catalog format but there are features in the professional edition that are missing in the standard edition, such as event markers, the ability to define more than 3 user-defined fields, sequence editing, MXF metaclips etc. that mean you could lose information if you mix your versions.

In general catalogs are upwardly compatible (from standard to professional to workgroup to enterprise editions, and also from CatDV 7 to CatDV 8 etc.) but not the other way round. It may work in certain circumstances, but isn’t something that’s tested or recommended.

[Rolf Howarth]

What you’re describing is importing a clip into the CatDV catalog. At that point it isn’t in your FCP project yet, to send it from CatDV to FCP you have to drag it to the FCP project. Go back to the Other tab but don’t click on the project name (if you do that CatDV assumes you want to peek inside the project and see what clips it contains). Instead, drag the new clip imported from the main window onto the FCP project in the tree to send it over to Final Cut.

Bryson is right about the “import as proxy” option. In the case of 5D/7D you want to tell CatDV to treat the H264 mov as a proxy and the Pro Res rendered version as “original full res media”, even though it’s actually the wrong way round. You can do that by configuring the paths where you’ll keep the H264 and ProRes versions respectively and checking the “Allow import of preview files before full res version” option, then you can import the H264 versions and they’ll appear under the Preview rather than Movie tab in CatDV. Once you create the Pro Res proxy that will appear under Movie tab if the paths are right, and if you drag a clip from CatDV to FCP it will then send over a reference to the Pro Res version rather than the H264.

For example, let’s say you have:

/Media/CanonH264/Project1/MOV12345.MOV
/Media/CanonH264/Project1/MOV12345.THM
/Media/ProResVersions/Project1/MOV12345.MOV

then under Media Search Path preferences in CatDV you’d click the Add (+) button alongside “Path-based previews” and enter “/Media/ProResVersions” as the “Original location” and “/Media/CanonH264” as the “Preview path”.

You would then copy files from from your SD card to /Media/CanonH264 and import them into CatDV from there. (Keep the THM files because CatDV will read useful metadata from those files.)

[Rolf Howarth]

To get markers and notes to FCP you can’t just drag the clip straight into Final Cut, as that just drags a reference to the media file (just as if you dragged it straight from the Finder) without any metadata. Instead, you have to go via FCP XML.

There’s a really easy way to do this however. If you go to the Final Cut Projects section of the tree navigator in CatDV you’ll see a list of your FCP projects. You can drag clips straight onto the project you’re using and they’ll be sent over “by magic”, complete with metadata (including subclips, sequences, markers etc.), using XML behind the scenes.

[Rolf Howarth]

This was a fairly technical thread about how to recover from misformatted data, which was entered while CatDV wasn’t configured properly. Normally you don’t have to worry about commas or semicolons!

It relates to user-defined “multi-grouping” fields, which can be used used to enter keywords:

In a normal “grouping” field (perhaps one called “Weather”) you can define picklist values such as “Sunny”, “Overcast”, “Rain”, “Stormy”, “Windy”, “Night” and then when you’re logging you can choose one of these values from a drop down. You can also type a few letters and have it auto-complete, or press the up and down arrows to step through matching values until you see the one you want.

If you want the field to be able to take multiple values instead of a single value make it a multi-grouping field. To edit a multi-grouping field click on the ‘*’ alongside the field and it will bring up a chooser where you can see all the available keyword values and the ones which have been selected. If you tag a clip with both “Rain” and “Stormy” that will be shown as “Rain; Stormy” but the semicolon is just displated as a shortcut so they can be shown on one line, it’s not part of the data.

The problem was what happens if the field was originally defined as a plain text field and someone enters a semicolon, then changes the definition so it’s multi-grouping and needs to fix the data so CatDV knows that they are really separate values.

[Rolf Howarth]

That issue doesn’t sound familiar. Presumably the one catalog you’re seeing is one of yours and it’s just that the others are missing? Is it possible you restored an old database dump file by mistake?

If you still have problems it may be worth emailing support@squarebox.co.uk and setting up some sort of remote access so we can dial in to your system to see what’s going on. (Just so you know though, it’s a long holiday weekend in the UK, so we may not be able to respond immediately.)

[Rolf Howarth]

Ah, that makes sense. Remember how I said the different values of a multi-field are stored internally separated with a new line character but displayed with a semicolon when they’re shown one line? Because of that, it would be very confusing if any of the values themselves contained a semicolon, so any semicolons are turned into commas before they are displayed.

[Rolf Howarth]

Hmm, difficult to know what’s going on then, as it worked in my tests. Maybe your current delimiter isn’t a comma followed by a space (it could be some other non-printing character). Try copying and pasting the delimiter from the field into the search and replace dialog, and make sure there are no spurious extra characters in your ‘search for’ field. You could also try doing some simpler search-and-replace commands as a test, eg. replacing one word or one letter with another one to see if that works.

[Rolf Howarth]

You can’t currently change the font size (the settings in Preferences are for when you print the current view, not for HTML formatted printouts).

We should probably put the style sheet that we use for printouts in a resource file that you can override so I’ll make a note for us to consider that as an update for the next version.

[Rolf Howarth]

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been a bit behind on my emails and posts!

The CatDV Server should work with pretty much any version of MySQL from 5.0 onwards. We’re deliberately conservative about relying on new features to maximise compatibility and don’t force you to upgrade your system software just for the sake of it. We did stop supporting Mac OS 9 a version or two back though 🙂

[Rolf Howarth]

Are you seeing this like 40s/n50s/nfeminine?

You need \n not /n