BROWSE CATDV SUPPORT MANUALS

There are several web client settings that can be configured in the Server Control Panel, by pressing the Server Config button.

Creating web proxies

To play videos through the web interface you need to create low data-rate web versions of your media and make sure these files are accessible on the web server machine. (For testing purposes it is possible to configure the web server to use the original full resolution versions of your movies by setting both the “Full-res root dir” and “Proxy root dir” fields to ‘/’, but this is not recommended for normal use as the format and size of most files designed for video editing is not suitable for use on the web).

Using the CatDV Pro client, the Worker Node, or an external conversion tool, you should create movies with a lower data rate and/or smaller frame size. H264 wrapped in an MPEG4 or QuickTime .mov wrapper with Internet Fast Start enabled is usually the best format. It is also possible to use JPEG proxies for other types of file such as audio only clips or Office documents.

The Web Client uses CatDV “path-based previews”, so you should configure the name and path of the proxy movies you create to match that of the original files, relative to a particular root directory. For example, if an original full-res file is

/Volumes/XSAN/MyProject/Folder/File1.mxf

and the corresponding low-res proxy is in

/Volumes/Proxy/MyProject/Folder/File1.mp4

then you would configure “Full-res root dir” to “/Volumes/XSAN” and “Proxy root dir” to “/Volumes/Proxy”. The proxy file should either have the same extension as the original file or .mp4 or .mov.

Leave “Alternative URL” blank to use the built-in CatDV media server within the web server to serve up media files over HTTP. Alternatively, it is possible to use a separate dedicated web server or even an external content delivery network, by entering the corresponding root URL that corresponds to the proxy root dir.

Customising the web client

If you have purchased the web client customisation option then  you can set up the Web 2 interface so it automatically displays tab layouts and user fields to match the client. If you have different user fields and different tab layouts in different production groups the layout will automatically change to match the group that the current clip belongs to. Use the Customise Details Panel function when editing group settings from within the CatDV Pro client application to customise the tab layouts.

If you want to show different tabs in the CatDV Pro client and the Web Client you can do so using the Tabs To Show: Include and Exclude fields in the server control panel. When editing the details panel layouts in CatDV Pro you can choose whether to make these tabs visible or not in the CatDV Pro client. The same tabs will be visible in the Web Client unless you override them here by specifying a comma-separated list of names of tabs you always want to show (even though they’re not shown in the CatDV client) or want to hide (even though they are shown in the CatDV client).

If you don’t have the customisation option then you can still customise the names of user defined fields so they are displayed correctly by creating a named field definition set (when editing the group settings in CatDV Pro) and then entering the name of the field set here. Note that only a single field set name can be specified, even if you have multiple production groups with different fields.

Note that the although similar functionality is provided, the web client doesn’t provide exactly the same layout capabilities as the CatDV Pro client. For example, multi grouping and hierarchical fields and the Rating field appear differently, the event marker table appears on a tab on its own, two column layouts aren’t supported, and so on.

You can also choose whether to show a list of catalogs or a list of shared smart folders in the tree navigator. If both of these options are unchecked the tree is not shown and the only way to display clips is to perform a query.