BROWSE CATDV SUPPORT MANUALS

A number of commands which were originally provided to cope with DV tape workflows and limited disk space are no longer relevant to modern workflows and have been removed from this edition.

If necessary, you can re-enable these commands by entering feature code ‘OBS’ in the advanced Preferences panel:

  • Use Whole Tape Capture Log to create clip definitions of equal size spanning a tape. These can be exported as a capture log to capture an entire tape unattended if your NLE editing software has batch capture but no command to capture a whole tape.
  • To split a large DV capture file into separate files for each scene, or to trim unwanted material from the capture files, first create clips for each scene you want and make selections within them. Then select the clips you want to keep and use Consolidate Footage. This will write a separate self contained movie file for each clip before deleting the original capture files.
  • Use Consolidate Footage to trim unused material from the source media by saving a self-contained (flattened) movie of the selection (in2/out2) within each clip and then deleting the original source movies. (This only applies to DV movies. The assumption is that DV footage can always be batch recaptured based on the original timecode and it is therefore safe to delete the source media.) You can achieve similar results with more control by exporting flattened movies of the clips you want to keep and then deleting the original files if required.
  • Use Convert To Text to concatenate all the Name and Notes fields of selected clips. Convert To Text is the “opposite” of Verbatim Logger. With this command you can convert the name, notes and timecode values of selected clips to a textual list which you can copy and paste into a word processor, for example, to create a transcript or for further editing. When you are finished in your word processor, you can copy and paste this text back into the Verbatim Logger to create separate clips again.

If you capture a tape as a series of regular sized files (using Live Capture Plus or the Whole tape capture log for example) it’s very unlikely that all the file boundaries will fall on an exact scene change boundary. Some scenes will end up spanning more than one imported clip therefore. There are different ways to combine these broken clip segments and join them into a single clip for each scene:

  • Display a Clip Summaries summary view.
  • Use the Auto-join DV clips if scenes are split across files Preference option to automatically join clip segments at the time of importing a DV movie
  • Use the Join DV Scene Fragments tool to clean up selected DV clips by automatically merging any start & end segments that come from separate media files but are known to belong to the same scene. This command also tidies the catalog by removing the original long capture clips from the catalog (leaving just the detected scenes).
  • Use the Merge command to manually merge two or more contiguous clips into one.

Some of these commands only work on DV clips because DV files contain the timecode encoded in each frame and also include start and end of scene boundary information.

Self-contained archives

A normal catalog file doesn’t include your proxy movies but refers to previews in the shared Proxy directory. If you prefer, you can save the catalog and tape-based proxy movies together as a self-contained proxy archive. Use Save As Catalog or Save As Archive to change the way the catalog is saved.

In a self-contained archive the catalog is combined with the proxy files for that catalog in a single directory (Windows) or directory bundle (Mac OS X). The archive can be saved to an external drive or copied to CD/DVD and when the archive is opened the corresponding proxies are immediately accessible. With self-contained archives it is not necessary to keep all the proxy files in one place. Archives have the file extension .cdvp.

You can use the Manage Proxy Movies command to check which proxy files are contained in an archive.

Note: Self-contained proxy archives only work with tape-based proxies, and can result in multiple copies of your proxy movies, so for most purposes normal catalog files are recommended. The Save As Archive command only appears in the menu if you enable advanced menus and tape-based proxies in your Preferences, and uncheck the “prefer based-based proxies” option.