CatDV Core Features

These core features are common to all members of the CatDV product family, including CatDV 8.0 Standard Edition and Professional Edition.

Maintain a catalog of clip data and other media assets, including the source of the clip and where it's used, together with a wide variety of other clip properties that are helpful to the editor
Automatically build up thumbnail preview images of each clip or image file and maintain these in its catalog even if the original media goes off-line
Create and manage low resolution preview movies, which are available for use even when the original movies are offline
Let the user choose how clips are displayed, in a spreadsheet-like table, a grid with thumbnails, or both
Collect clip data across multiple projects and then group them by source tape, bin, or any other attribute
Import and export clips and logging data in virtually any format.

Importing media

Import any QuickTime-supported media file format (DV, MPEG, AVI, JPEG, GIF, MP3, PNG, AIFF, BMP, PSD, etc.)
Import Windows Media files (WMV, WMA, ASF)
Create thumbnail images for first or mid frame of each scene, or manually from user-specified frames
Customisable thumbnail sizes (from 24x16 to 256x192)
Extract standard file and movie attributes (file name, size and date, video and audio compression formats, data rate, etc.)
Analyse a captured DV-format movie to extract the date & time of recording, camera exposure details and scene boundary information
Warn about any corrupted movies which may cause audio synch or other errors
Extract Exif data for digital camera stills, album and artist tags from MP3 files, and other metadata such as author and copyright from movies

User interface

Intuitive, easy to use, user interface with customisable toolbar, choice of look and feels, and tooltip help
Spreadsheet-like list view, with fully customisable columns
Storyboard-like grid view, with customisable icon size and attribute display
New tree-based navigator, with a unified interface to organise your catalog and browse the file system.
Powerful filtering and searching options to restrict a view to a particular project or type of clip
Consolidation of duplicate and overlapping clips into summary views to produce a concise description of the contents of a tape
Allow multiple catalogs to be open simultaneously, and multiple views open on the same catalog
Includes a general purpose timecode calculator

Logging
Automatically identify scene boundaries, based on DV data or image content Allow user to enter comments, good/no good status, and other user-defined attributes for each clip Logging window allows clips to be previewed and categorised, comments to be entered, in/out selections made, new secondaries created, etc.

Media management

Consolidate footage (trim unused material; split large files into separate scenes; merge separate capture files that belong to the same scene)
When renaming or deleting clips optionally rename or delete corresponding media file from disk
Automatically create and manage low resolution preview movies to describe offline tapes. A one hour tape requires as little as a few hundred megabytes, allowing you to keep your entire library online at all times.
Analyse media files to extact media metadata and displayed detailed format description of individual tracks.

Integration

Integrates with virtually any non-linear editing application
Import and export a wide variety of file formats containing clip logging information.
Import Cinestream projects; import and export CMX edit decision lists, and tab separated text; export batch capture logs for Adobe Premiere, EditDV, Canopus Raptor
Create whole tape capture logs for use with the batch capture facility of your non-linear editing application
Achieve the repeatability of batch recapture for use with NLEs that don't support this feature

Exporting and printing

Export clips as self contained or reference movies, keeping original settings or recompressing with a new codec, with either one movie concatenating all the selected clips or a separate movie for each clip
Add a security video-style display of recording date/time to exported movies (burnt in or as a separate text track)
Export catalogs as HTML
Print detailed reports containing all or selected clips according to your chosen view, either with or without thumbnails
Print a single page index print or "contact sheet" containing a summary of the contents of a tape, with the name, timecode, recording date and a thumbnail of each scene
Print selected images (any number per page)

Presenting media
Present images in a slide show Present movies and slide shows windowed or full screen, with keyboard control of looping, playback size, speaker volume, and logging commands. Perform rough cut editing by rearranging clips within a storyboard view View the contents of a tape or program using a timeline sequence view

See what additional features the Professional Edition gives you.

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