CatDV 12

CatDV 12.1 includes a number of user interface and other improvements over 12.0:

• Ability to show new Pegasus social media chat channels via the server tree. This allows you to have live discussions about a project with other users (using either the desktop or web interface) and include links to specific clips by dragging them in to the chat window.
• Improved player technology, including use of FFmpeg 3.2 and integration with optional third party Tin Man player from Calibrated.
• Improvements to the FFmpeg exporter (including ‘smart stereo’ option to automatically combine two mono tracks into a stereo track now working with a wider range of audio configurations, a new option to force an intermediate transcode, and adding support for transcoding a sequence containing stills)
• New option on the Export As Movie command to automatically reimport the resulting file and create a mezzanine clip
• Support for reading XAVC-S camera card structure
• Improved R3D metadata extraction
• New three column view (showing the tree navigator or catalog list, then the clip list, then the clip details and player panel, in three columns from left to right, like the iOS apps and Premiere panel)
• Ability to turn off the tool bar buttons to make maximum use of the available screen real estate (using View > Show Tool Bar Buttons)
• Improved grid and film strip view layouts (optionally use a darker background to distinguish cells and thus allow grid spacing to be reduced)
• New calendar chooser widget for user-defined date fields
• New select buttons user-defined field type for easy tagging of clips
• The preference dialog has a new search box to help you quickly find the desired preference option
• Improvements to javascript and variable expression syntax (allowing regular expression and array notation such to be combined, for example “$f[0]{s/.mp4$//}”, and supporting REST-like syntax eg. “js:clip.name” or “js:media[‘FNumber’]”).
• New option to use “widescreen” thumbnails if you mostly work with video and rarely use still images or other formats. This will avoid letterboxing in grid and film strip views and so make better use of the screen space.
• Improved sequence editing, including continuous thumbnail display and the ability to lock specific tracks from being edited when editing multiple tracks by clicking on the checkbox alongside the track name.

New features in CatDV 12.0

These changes are in addition to the changes made in CatDV 12:

• CatDV 12 is 64-bit only (32-bit legacy version is no longer available) for improved performance and memory handling
• CatDV no longer requires QuickTime to be installed and can instead use FFmpeg as the primary playback engine (though if QuickTime is available it will still be used, as it provides access to third party codecs such as those from Calibrated and Avid)
• More modern, simpler and flatter user interface
• A simplified toolbar, with buttons that control the view being moved to the bottom of the main window, and most preexisting toolbar buttons moving to a pull down menu. (The old toolbar appearance can be restored via user interface preferences if required.)
• A new graphical workspace editor to allow items in the toolbar and other common options to be easily customised (including tool tip text in the preferences dialog to identify the internal preference item id to allow other less commonly used settings to be overridden too if necessary)
• The ability to have collapsible subsections in the clip details panel by defining new panels for each section with a colon in the name (for example Technical, Technical:Video and Technical:Audio will add separate video and audio subsections to the Technical tab). You can also append ‘*’ to the panel name if you don’t want the section to be collapsible.
• Other improvements to the clip details panel, including the ability to turn the media panel on and off independently of clip details, automatically switching between one and two columns depending on horizontal space, and the ability to make particular fields read only.
• The media player now supports an audio level (VU meter) display, and displays an audio wave form when viewing audio only clips
• Hold down the Ctrl key (Mac) or Alt key (Windows) to scrub through movies (and audio wave forms) or to zoom in and pan around still images (hold down the Shift key to increase zoom from 3x to 16x)
• Hold down Ctrl or Alt to show the clip popup details as you move round a grid view. This replaces the old ‘i’ icon in the corner, though you can re-enable that in Preferences if you prefer.
• New simpler clip type icons showing the basic clip type (video, audio, still image, subclip, sequence, and ‘other’ non-media clips), plus a badge in the corner to indicate if this is a metaclip consisting of multiple underlying files. (The older clip type icons are still available and can be added if required by customising a view layout.)
• Greatly improved Final Cut Pro X integration, including: the tree now lists events under each library and you can drag clips straight to the required event (without creating a new timestamped event each time); you can drag and drop clips straight from CatDV to a Final Cut window and vice versa while preserving metadata; you can now import and export MXF metaclips (with video and audio in separate files) as a single clip; you can set up an FCPX Keywords field in Preferences and automatically map Final Cut keywords that span the whole clip to and from a CatDV field. Some of these features require Final Cut Pro 10.3 and fcpxml 1.6 (selected in the Final Cut & Sequences section of Preferences).
• Support for new Server 7 metadata schema, including ability to perform queries on arbitrary media metadata fields and to fully customise media metadata fields including changing their type and display label
• Editing user defined fields and pick lists is more consistent between Enterprise Server and standalone operation by always using the Field Definitions panel in Preferences
• The ability to define calculated fields and smart labels, plus new field types to perform arbitrary validation of entered text, including a new tool to preview and test variable expressions
• Updated view layouts to make them more consistent and less cluttered (by slightly increasing spacing, removing the legacy ‘Tape’ field, and including new ‘File Extension/Type’ and ‘Format’ fields to display key technical metadata).
• More consistent field naming (‘Clip ID’ becomes ‘Clip Ref’, ‘QT Tracks’ becomes ‘Tracks’, ‘Format’ becomes ‘Format & Codec’), also ‘Other fields’ becomes ‘All fields’, ‘Refine View’ becomes ‘Filters’, ‘Automatic Grouping’ becomes ‘Automatic Filters’, and so on.
• New coloured indicators to show whether the original file and/or proxy version is available online, and a new “Movie File” field that shows the current file path if it’s online taking into account any path mapping.
• Other user interface fixes and improvements, including more consistent use of background colours and focus indication, better mouse wheel scrolling, etc.
• Improvements to custom actions so that they don’t require an existing clip selection but can import files from a watch folder or select clips according to filter criteria. Custom actions can now be configured to appear in the toolbar as well as the tree. (Pegasus only)
• Ability to configure a metadata extraction rules file to automatically populate metadata fields based on the file path when a strict filenaming convention is used. The format of these rules is documented in the Worker Node release notes. The rules are applied automatically when a file is imported and manually using the command in the Tools menu. (Pegasus only)
• A new Consolidate Media command that will export those portions of media that are used in a sequence or project as new self contained files and relinks the clips to the new files. Note that this feature is primarily designed to work with QuickTime files and with QuickTime installed. (Pegasus only)
• A new Create Audio Slideshow command that will take an audio only file with timecode event markers and a list of still images and combine them into a sequence, where the still images are automatically positioned and have their duration set to line up with the markers. (Pegasus only)
• Improvements to the sequence editor, including more consistent colouring and ordering of tracks, the ability to edit sequences even if the files are offline, the ability to easily edit the duration of still images in a sequence by dragging the out point just as you would when trimming a movie in the sequence, plus the ability to display timecode markers in the timeline.
• Improved support for transcoding sequences containing multiple video tracks using both QuickTime and FFmpeg exporters.
• New sequence player engine to enable editing sequences using the FFmpeg and RED playback engines (for example, if QuickTime is unavailable)
• Improved metadata extraction (eg. read iXML metadata from Broadcast WAV files, color space from JPEG files, chapter markers from MP4 files, etc.)
• Extract audio waveform thumbnails when importing audio only files
• Improvements to the Import and Export Preferences commands to allow specific preference sections to be exported (to back them up, or copy settings between systems)
• When building proxies from a still image the FFmpeg exporter will automatically create a .jpg file rather than a movie
• Moving media files will preserve relative folder structure, also move any corresponding proxy files
• Support for full screen windows on Mac OS X
• Improved support for two monitors, including new media playback option to automatically play movies full screen on second monitor when Cmd/Ctrl-P is used
• Support for version 3 of the CatDV Server Plugin API (to allow CatDV’s functionality to be extended by 3rd party integrators, for example by providing archive integrations)
• Many other fixes and improvements.

If you are upgrading from CatDV 10 or earlier, be sure to review the extensive changes made in CatDV 11, including new player and transcoding technology, user interface changes including the use of customisable workspaces, 64-bit operation, and much more.