Sales and Support FAQ

Question

Answer

Because thumbnails take up memory, and previews take up disk space, CatDV is designed to automatically share these between clips as much as possible.

For clips that were originally shot on tape, the tape name (or reel number) and timecode taken together are supposed to uniquely identify any particular frame of video, so if CatDV already has one thumbnail with that tape and timecode then it shouldn't need to create another one.

This logic works well as long as the tape name and timecode really are unique. As well as saving memory and increasing performance it means you can do things like import an EDL text file and automatically play the resulting sequence without having to link the media, for example.

There are several situations where this logic could break down, however, and if that happens it's likely that the wrong thumbnail will be shown as a result:

• If you don't enter a unique tape name. For example, when capturing in Final Cut Pro the reel name defaults to "001" so if you don't change this you can have multiple clips with the same name.
• If a tape has timecode resets you can end up with several segments of the same tape which all start at 0:00:00:00. To work around this, if you capture a tape with Live Capture Plus it will automatically create "virtual" tape identifiers such as Tape 123-1, Tape 123-2 etc., or you can manually edit the tape names. Best of all though is to change your shooting habits to avoid timecode resets in the first place.
• Finally, if a movie clip doesn't have a tape name set but you are still using tape-based previews then CatDV will use the media file name as the key instead of the tape name for those clips. If you have two files with the same name (eg. "Clip 1.mov") but no tape name then the previews might get mixed up (though the thumbnails should be OK in this case).

• In the advanced functionality section of Preferences simply uncheck the "Automatically link media based on tape name" option if you don't require this linking behaviour.
• Alternatively, if you do want to share thumbnails and previews based on tape name then you need to make sure the tape name is correctly set (apply a virtual tape suffix to make it unique if necessary).
• When looking up previews (low-res proxy movies) you can choose to base these on the original file path, rather than tape name and timecode, by setting the corresponding option in Preferences.

24/11/08