CatDV's Core Capabilities
These core features are common to all members of the CatDV product family, including CatDV 10.0 Standard Edition and Professional Edition.
- Maintain a catalog of clip data and other media assets, including the source of the clip and where it’s used, together with a wide variety of other clip properties that are helpful to the editor
- Automatically build up thumbnail preview images of each clip or image file and maintain these in its catalog even if the original media goes off-line
- Create and manage low resolution preview movies, which are available for use even when the original movies are offline
- Let the user choose how clips are displayed, in a spreadsheet-like table, a grid with thumbnails, or both
- Collect clip data across multiple projects and then group them by source tape, bin, or any other attribute
- Import and export clips and logging data in virtually any format.
Importing media
- Import any QuickTime-supported media file format (DV, MPEG, AVI, JPEG, GIF, MP3, PNG, AIFF, BMP, PSD, etc.)
- Import Windows Media files (WMV, WMA, ASF)
- Create thumbnail images for first or mid frame of each scene, or manually from user-specified frames
- Customisable thumbnail sizes (from 24×16 to 256×192)
- Extract standard file and movie attributes (file name, size and date, video and audio compression formats, data rate, etc.)
- Analyse a captured DV-format movie to extract the date & time of recording, camera exposure details and scene boundary information
- Warn about any corrupted movies which may cause audio synch or other errors
- Extract Exif data for digital camera stills, album and artist tags from MP3 files, and other metadata such as author and copyright from movies
User interface
- Intuitive, easy to use, user interface with customisable toolbar, choice of look and feels, and tooltip help
- Spreadsheet-like list view, with fully customisable columns
- Storyboard-like grid view, with customisable icon size and attribute display
- New tree-based navigator, with a unified interface to organise your catalog and browse the file system.
- Powerful filtering and searching options to restrict a view to a particular project or type of clip
- Consolidation of duplicate and overlapping clips into summary views to produce a concise description of the contents of a tape
- Allow multiple catalogs to be open simultaneously, and multiple views open on the same catalog
- Includes a general purpose timecode calculator
Logging
- Automatically identify scene boundaries, based on DV data or image content
- Allow user to enter comments, good/no good status, and other user-defined attributes for each clip
- Logging window allows clips to be previewed and categorised, comments to be entered, in/out selections made, new secondaries created, etc.
Media management
- Consolidate footage (trim unused material; split large files into separate scenes; merge separate capture files that belong to the same scene)
- When renaming or deleting clips optionally rename or delete corresponding media file from disk
- Automatically create and manage low resolution preview movies to describe offline tapes. A one hour tape requires as little as a few hundred megabytes, allowing you to keep your entire library online at all times.
- Analyse media files to extact media metadata and displayed detailed format description of individual tracks.
Integration
- Integrates with virtually any non-linear editing application
- Import and export a wide variety of file formats containing clip logging information.
- Import Cinestream projects; import and export CMX edit decision lists, and tab separated text; export batch capture logs for Adobe Premiere, EditDV, Canopus Raptor
- Create whole tape capture logs for use with the batch capture facility of your non-linear editing application
- Achieve the repeatability of batch recapture for use with NLEs that don’t support this feature
Exporting and printing
- Export clips as self contained or reference movies, keeping original settings or recompressing with a new codec, with either one movie concatenating all the selected clips or a separate movie for each clip
- Add a security video-style display of recording date/time to exported movies (burnt in or as a separate text track)
- Export catalogs as HTML
- Print detailed reports containing all or selected clips according to your chosen view, either with or without thumbnails
- Print a single page index print or “contact sheet” containing a summary of the contents of a tape, with the name, timecode, recording date and a thumbnail of each scene
- Print selected images (any number per page)
Presenting media
- Present images in a slide show
- Present movies and slide shows windowed or full screen, with keyboard control of looping, playback size, speaker volume, and logging commands.
- Perform rough cut editing by rearranging clips within a storyboard view
- View the contents of a tape or program using a timeline sequence view
Additional Features
You can find out about the additional features that come with our different versions of CatDV here.