BROWSE CATDV SUPPORT MANUALS

CatDV stores details about your clips (including any notes or keywords you enter and the clips’ thumbnails) in a catalog:

  • Use the New Catalog command to create an empty catalog window.
  • Use the Open Catalog or Open Recent commands to open an existing catalog.
  • Use Save As Catalog to choose a file location and save your catalog to disk.
  • Use the Always create backup checkbox in Preferences to automatically make a backup copy of the catalog file when saving.
  • Use Catalog Details (in the Edit menu) to enter a short description of the catalog.

Catalogs are normally saved in a file with extension .cdv. You can open more than one catalog at the same time and copy and paste clips between them. Catalogs are portable between Macintosh and Windows.

The trial version of CatDV will not normally let you save catalogs (or export or print data).

With the optional CatDV Server, CatDV users can store clips in a central shared database rather than in files on the local file system. Even then, however, CatDV still uses the concept of catalogs as a way to group related clips.

Regardless of whether you are using the single-user or the networked version of CatDV, to keep catalogs a manageable size it’s a good idea to have a separate catalog for each tape, or perhaps each project, rather than storing all your clips in one huge catalog. See managing multiple catalogs for hints on how to manage a large clip library.