[Steve Braker]

Thanks, David. CatDV happens to be the one out of three suppliers who didn’t respond to a direct query. In any case, I have since found Frameline to be more suited to the particulars of this project (more on that in this thread).

I do appreciate the followup on an aging thread!

– Steve

[Steve Braker]

Thanks, Paul. I briefly looked at Server for this project, but the impression is that it’s both wildly overqualified and poorly matched to our large but finite archive project.

It seems to be limited to media that already exist within FCP projects, where products like CatDV, Mac File Server, and Frameline will do the capture for us as well as cataloging any existing digital media we need. Not to mention that, for a project involving the capture from tape of many thousands of clips, FCP would be an inefficient and complicated bear (remember, we have inexperienced young loggers).

This isn’t to say it isn’t a great app for the apparent target audience: large interactive ever-changing production libraries. I’ll keep my eye on it anyway.

I’m sorry, Paul. I had missed something in your post. I can’t see anything in Apple sales lit about Server handling capture and logging. If it’s there it’s worth more attention….

[Steve Braker]

That’s great, Paul. How are you using it? Any caveats?

(Apparently I just asked you to be my Cow “Friend” but I don’t know what that means.)

[Steve Braker]

Shane, I might be from the future but if I told you for sure we’d… never mind.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-7 – I’d never heard of it either but it’s been in development for 10 years. Beautiful things:

– it isn’t a compression scheme, it’s a way of attaching metadata to media files of any format. So you get your DV Quicktime file, add MPEG-7 data into it, and it’s still original DV and still a Quicktime. Same for your JPEG still picture and I believe audio files. That’s my current understanding anyway,

– many levels of data, from the file level to clips within that file to “edited” groups of clips to identification of specific events in time to timed transcription…

– since the data is in the file, there are no complicated schemes of keeping the data synced with and accessible from an external database. Copy or send some files and the data is just there. Delete media and it’s gone from the database.

The only difficult thing for me: it’s “new”.

https://www.frameline.tv is the logging product in question. It seems pretty well thought out and the documentation is beautiful but hard to grasp (the entire manual consists of an alphabetized glossary).

An extension of this for use with proxy media they are calling “MPEG-47”, which is MPEG-4 compression and MPEG-7 metadata.

I’m definitely not here to be a salesperson, but it intrigues me greatly. No0body out there using this?

[Steve Braker]

Hey, that sounds great. Does it read actual source time code, or just start at 0 like the “generator”?

[Steve Braker]

Well, I guess if you look in your Applications folder either it’s there or it isn’t…

[Steve Braker]

LiveType certainly installed here from FCS2 discs. Along with GBs of media I’ll never use. Have you tried the install yet?

[Steve Braker]

I think people – especially those with longer video experience – get confused by these “generators”.

FCP has two “filters” (which of course don’t resemble filters) which will burn a time code into the image. Pretty much like the old-timey “window burn” function on some TCRGs.

“Time Code Generator” doesn’t generate any time code at all. What it does by default is to start a window burn with TC 0 on the first frame of the clip or it’s applied to. It has no relationship to any existing time code.

“Time code Reader” creates a window burn from the file- or clip-based time code of the clip it’s applied to. If there is no time code then it acts the same as Time Code Generator. It doesn’t read or deal with LTC, although Bouke has something that will.

[Steve Braker]

That wouldn’t surprise me, but it has nothing to do with delivery formats. If you need to know what the deliverable is you need to ask your contact at a specific outlet. Or poke around their websites. BBC and PBS put out loads of info, I imagine that’s less common in the commercial world.

[Steve Braker]

Technically having them there (i.e. not blacked out) shouldn’t be a problem – speaking from NTSC experience. As mentioned above, there’s the possibility that a lack thereof might be a technical infringement.

And it should have little to do with the editing system but more to do with how it was used. If they use a DV format, those lines are stripped out – they aren’t available in those formats. Also stripped out is other potentially important information such as VITC and (in the US) closed captioning.

The Beeb is not only well known for their standards, but for their well-written white papers on what is and isn’t acceptable – in technical, content, and grey areas. I’d suggest looking around BBC website.