[Simon Ubsdell]

What a fascinating and important article.

“Once we have metadata everywhere, everyone will look around in shock and awe and ask each other, “How did we ever make movies without this stuff?”

And then I looked at the date again and somehow after all this time we’re still not collecting all the metadata, we’re still not preserving it, and in many cases we’re not even using it when it’s there.

And of course we’re no nearer anything resembling open standards.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Jeremy Garchow] “There’s a different style of cataloging software currently in beta called Kyno. It sits on top of the Finder so there’s no library file. It sends to X, 7, and Pr, exports XMLs for all of those, and is worth checking out: https://lesspain.software/kyno“

Kyno looks very interesting and I’m certainly going to see how that works out for me. I think from the point of view of this discussion though it’s not the kind of thing I was looking for. If one is going to be tagging outside the NLE, I’d want it to be super simple and dedicated to media tagging. Kyno and KeyFlow Pro do too much else, if that makes sense. By which I mean that they’re not simple and fast enough to justify using for media tagging alone.

EDIT: Kyno exports a FCP X Event, which again is not really what I’d be looking for here.

The Apple Finder tagging is so close to what I’d ideally want that I’m hoping to see an option that’s very close to that – or better still that we get a more dedicated, slightly more expanded (but not too much) tagging interface in the next OS …

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Jeremy Garchow] ” I should add that FCPx’s containers aren’t necessarily containers, they are more like saved searches.”

Very interesting way of looking at it.

But in a sense every container in any application is a saved search, isn’t it? Or do you have a more specific idea in mind?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

I’m thinking more of how tags now work in OSX – they’re readable across the OS in many Apple applications, and of course are very useful for use with FCP X. (Not readable in Motion though as far as I know …)

Once you’ve tagged your files in the Finder with single or multiple tags each, importing them automatically creates keyword collections from any and every tag. Notice the difference here in that I don’t have to create keyword collections and add the files to each of them separately. I could have a Boston tag, a date tag, a camera lens tag, an ISO tag, etc., etc. all applied to the same file or files, and each would create a keyword collection automatically on import. It then becomes easy to filter for those keyword collections.

What would probably work for me would be an extended version of the Finder tagging option with a dedicated interface that made it much easier to add and edit the tag metadata. In other words, what I would be looking for in terms of external metadata management is very easily achievable by Apple. All it would take is for the developers of non-Apple applications to provide the option to read the tag metadata in the same way the Apple applications can.

[Simon Ubsdell]

I’m only vaguely aware of what KeyFlow Pro can do so I’m hoping someone will explain how it may or may not be useful in this context.

EDIT: Way too cumbersome, would be my instant verdict … I’d need something a lot faster and leaner. Great product for its designated purpose though.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Thinking about the second part of your post, there’s presumably then a market for a product (or products) that can externally embed many more kinds of metadata than is currently possible … metadata that travels with the file rather than lives solely inside the editing (or other) application.

EDIT: And most importantly do this as an intelligent batch operation.

Would you agree?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Agreed. It should all be a lot better implemented by now, especially after all this time. So in many ways we are hampered from using filtering methods to access our media because development of metadata whether in our cameras or elsewhere hasn’t kept pace.

Really though, my question is not so much about what we can do now, which clearly has limitations, but what would we like to happen in the (near) future?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Thanks, Bill. I’m really pleased that you like the idea 🙂 I was pretty hopeful that you of all people would get it!

Please feel free to share the link wherever you’d like to. It’s a pretty basic video given that I tried to aim it a my YT audience, but it might be interesting to professionals too.

EDIT: I meant to add that this is much more a “proof of concept” than an idea that will work perfectly right now. Ideally Apple will see the potential of this and develop the extra options that will make it really fly – and then we really will be seeing “next gen” editing.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

Thanks, Steve. This is very much a tutorial for the average to novice user so it’s mostly way below the level of you guys, but I do think some of the concepts are quite interesting …

e.g. why use “containers” when metadata can do the work for you much more effectively?

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki

[Simon Ubsdell]

[David Mathis] “I do have a question about the text filter. What does it specifically look for?”

The Text filter searches for any text string within the filename and is not case sensitive, which means it’s a really quick way of finding things. You don’t have to type the first letters of the filename – you can use any sequence of characters within the filename to report a result, as in the example I gave where I searched for the date that I had appended to the filename. Most importantly, you only need to enter a very few characters for the Filter to bring up useful results.

Simon Ubsdell
tokyo productions
hawaiki