CatDV 7.0 (Overview)

Thank you for your interest in the CatDV product family.

CatDV 7.0 is a platform-independent utility for keeping track of all your video tapes and digital media files.

You can import files in many common formats, including:

• video files (QuickTime, DV, MPEG, MPEG-4, AVI)
• audio files (MP3, AU, AIFF, etc.)
• still images (JPEG, GIF, PSD, etc.)
• video editing project files (edit decision lists, batch capture logs)

When you import a media file, metadata describing the file (such as date and time of recording, image format, camera exposure settings, or audio sample rate) is automatically extracted from the file. This is combined with keywords or comments that you can enter yourself and the information is then stored in a catalog [index, database], allowing you to easily search for and find any file that you need.

Unlike most other media catalog programs, CatDV understands timecode and has features designed specifically for video. It will analyse a video file to detect scene changes and create a new clip entry for each separate scene within the file, not just the whole file.

Scene changes are detected by two methods. For DV material it is based on when the camera started or stopped recording and is accurate to the frame. For analog video material it compares image content of two frames looking for changes in brightness and colour.

Video files are very large and it is not normally possible to keep all your tapes stored on disk at full resolution. CatDV will automatically create low resolution "preview" files (approx. 200MB/hour) which are small enough to keep as a permanent record of your library. Use these to identify the clips you want to use, then export a batch capture log and recapture the full quality clips from tape when you want to edit them.

CatDV 7.0 is available for Windows and Macintosh. It comes in two versions, a low cost Standard Edition, and the Professional Edition, which has more powerful search commands, support for additional file formats such as Final Cut Pro XML files and Avid OMF files, and other improvements.

If you work in a team, the CatDV Workgroup Server lets you store your clips in a central MySQL or Oracle database and share them between all the team members. With Live HTML Publisher you can search and access the clips from a web browser.

With Live Capture Plus (available for Mac OS X only) you can easily capture a whole DV tape either at full quality or compressed to another codec such as MPEG-4 and H.264. Live Capture Plus monitors the signal being recorded and uses FireWire device control to automatically rewind and retry the capture if any errors (eg. dropped frames) are detected, guaranteeing perfect captures. You can use Live Capture Plus either on its own or with CatDV (it will scan a DV tape and build up a CatDV catalog of your tape while it's playing).

A more limited form of Live Capture is built in to CatDV and is available for Windows, though it requires an extra third party product (the VDIG from Abstract Plane).

You can download a free trial of all our programs from the download page. In the unregistered version of Live Capture Plus captures are limited to 5 minutes, and the unregistered version of CatDV does not let you save catalogs, but otherwise they are the same as the full version of application. To use CatDV under Windows you may first need to install Java from Sun and QuickTime from Apple. Both of these are free downloads.

Unfortunately the CatDV and Live Capture Plus applications are currently only available in English, but we hope you will find the user interface to be straightforward and simple to use.

Please visit the secure online store of our web reseller Kagi Inc if you would like to purchase any of our products.