Video catelog

Hello all,

Now that I am gaining more and more footage. What do others do to catelog your video files. I would like to be able search by key words, as well as rate them. I was thinking adobe Lightroom would work well, but it bothers me that it doesn't integrate with premiere.

What are others out there using? Anyone doing Lightroom and how does it work? I am curious to know.

Thanks in advance,

Dustin

I use Sony Vegas Pro's Media Manager. Horribly half-baked, unfinished piece of software, but I can't live without it now and I've found absolutely nothing else to do the job. There's a gaping hole in the market for a proper, standalone media manager, and for a programmer who is good with databases it's probably not that tall an order to develop one.

I use Sony Vegas Pro's Media Manager. Horribly half-baked, unfinished piece of software, but I can't live without it now and I've found absolutely nothing else to do the job. There's a gaping hole in the market for a proper, standalone media manager, and for a programmer who is good with databases it's probably not that tall an order to develop one.

thanks Nick. what are your thoughts on using Lightroom for the video clips? Do you have experience with that?

Dustin

I am trying to use Lightroom for this purpose. True, it doesn't integrate with Premiere at all, but I think can work around that through Finder. I might even consider writing a plugin to help with that.

But... I am having an issue with Lightroom and video that is pretty much a showstopper for me right now. With a few videos, this does not happen, so when you do a quick test, all seems fine. But, when you have 50, or 100 videos in a view, and you start working going through them, one of Lightroom's helper processes (dynamiclinkmediaserver) goes crazy and starts using all of the available CPU on machine, i.e. I see it pegged at about 750% CPU utilization on my iMac i7. Of course when this happens, Lightroom can't play the video and becomes pretty much non-responsive. Sometimes if I wait long enough, it will finish whatever it was doing and I can keep working, but often times I have to kill the runaway process and restart Lightroom.

I think this might be limited to certain cameras, but I have seen it with 5DIII, GH3, 1DC, and 70D now. Note that it happens on both Windows and Mac, and I have found examples of people seeing it back to Lightroom 4.

I've opened a case # with Adobe about this, having fought my way through the various tech support people. As of yet, they have not really acknowledged the problem much less told me when it would be fixed. Lame, and frustrating.

Regards,

Cp

Few years ago I dreamed of Lightroom being a real DAM (Digital Asset Management) software...

http://www.lightroomforums.net/showthread.php?7446-Lightroom-as-DAM-%28Digital-Assets-Management%29-program

They partially add support for video files with scarce results...

Recently Red Giant come out with this:

http://www.redgiant.com/products/all/bulletproof/

Few codecs (Canon, it's really strange...) and only for Mac right now. Maybe it will be different in the future. It has a lot of potentialities. I think it's what you are looking for.

PS

They say that a Windoze version is behind the door.

http://www.redgiant.com/support/faq/product-specific/bulletproof/380/

I tried Bulletproof. It is interesting, but is really designed more for workflow. It is pretty similar to Adobe Prelude, really focused on getting the clips off of the card, doing rough cuts, etc., It is not an asset manager or stock footage manager. I spoke with Red Giant about this to see if they had plans to move at all in the direction and it sounds like that is not what they are aiming Bulletproof for. I think I could make Bulletproof or Prelude work for me if they just had a few more "features"... like being able to rename or delete a clip, for example.

Thanks for your clarification. I didn't know it. I use windows, gh2/avchd and Edius so I'm at 180 degrees from them I read their articles and I thought that a catalog was the basic function.

So beside lightroom which choices do we have?

Out there someone suggested to try this free program for windows

http://www.veehive.x10.mx

formerly known as videophile II

What NLE are you using now and how much do you want to spend on the program? Adobe's Cloud service is trying to push an asset management. I've only seen it in a bigger production house. I personally use Portfolio Server, but that's an expensive piece of bloatware nowadays for small houses.

You may want to look at Phase One Media Pro. Works with several filetypes, but not RAW formats like .r3D or .ari. I've not tried importing codecs like .mts files either, but apparently it can do so with a quick .txt edit. It also works well with still RAW formats and is the old iView Media Pro/ MS Expressions reincarnated. The nice thing about this program is that it creates the preview files @ the file locations under a folder, so the catalog can be copied to different computers with access to the server.

Adobe's Cloud service is trying to push an asset management. I've only seen it in a bigger production house.

What is it called?

Adobe CQ under the Express banner.

CatDV. You can download a free trial. It is very powerfully with a lot of add on modules and plugins for Premier Avid and FinalCut to be able to access your footage strait into your NLE. The down side is it is pricy.

Yes. CatDV is a great piece of software as a server for production houses. I didn't mention it because it's more aimed at bigger houses (or growing ones like Atlantic ). Portofolio standalone and Phase One Media Pro are under $200 (I think!). CatDV also acts as a server, like Cantemo Portal and Portfolio Server, which is great for multi-location productions and even stock sales.

Without knowing too much of the OP desired features, making suggestions it's a difficult task. From what I see under the "digital catalog/asset" umbrella falls very different products.

I'm a holiday shooter and right now I have 6TB of clips on 3 disks. About 40k files, mostly AVCHD, MOV and HQX. (BTW I have another 1TB of photos managed via LR4 but phisically organized pretty the same as video. The concept is that if you lose your LR database, you have to be able to navigate through your archive manually).

I organized them in folder and subfolders with date and name it's easy to understand what's inside. Until now I was not using a digital catalog program for video. I was simply using some Edius features like consolidate project and so on.

Yesterday I gave a try a that free program I suggested above: http://videophile.freeforums.org/index.php

Of course it's a long hard work cataloging and tagging thousand of files but it seems to be a great tool. Just the GUI is a little bit naive. From their site:

• Auto-create a Library, including thumbnail generation
• Browse your Library via multiple layouts
• Perform advanced Tagging, using hierarchies, links and synonyms (tag your tags!)
• Perform complex, compound searches (combine anything with anything!)
• Browse and filter via an interactive Tag Cloud
• Create and playback ‘highlight’ segments from your files
• Interact with other programs through customisable menus
• Create dynamic playlists
• Generate Story Board images
• View and manage your Library from your armchair via its HTPC mode
• Use your preferred Media Player

The pro version costs 15$. the basic version it's free.

In this page some basic concepts behind this program:

http://videophile.freeforums.org/videophile-concepts-t11.html

PS

Another topic of interest about managing huge archives is the backup or actually synchronization of different assets on several drives. For Windows users the best option it's the free Microsoft SyncToy program. It' was designed to mantain huge digital photo assets.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=15155

For those of us with an Apple bent, one option that I have played with is using Aperture in "reference" mode for cataloguing archived video clips. FCP X does have a way to keyword clips but it is a bit clumsy. Working with more than one event open can be quite slow if you are using HQ media. Aperture might be better for the catalog role.

If you use a FCP X work flow, after you have done your edit and decided which clips to keep, copy them into your "keeper" disk, then drag them into Aperture. If you use the FCP X event name as the "project" name in the import, you have an easy path back to the original clip. If you use "reference" mode, only the thumbnail and metadata are stored in the Aperture library, referencing the original media in the FCP X event.

You can use the caption or keyword capability in Aperture to tag the images. Aperture provides a nice environment to browse, search and view the clips. When you find what you are looking for, to do any video editing, you will have to go back to FCP X and open the event and search for the clip name. NB. The metadata (e.g. keywords) do not get written to the original media - just stored in the reference library.

It'd be nice if there was tighter integration between Aperture and FCP X but maybe that'll come when Apple realise the synergies between these two apps.

Having spent the last few months, cataloguing and key wording thousands of my photos, I am not yet ready to embark on the cataloguing and key-wording of my "keeper" video clips. But, once I do, I will try this Aperture approach, simply because the key-wording is so fast.

Regards

Peter

 

Another topic of interest about managing huge archives is the backup or actually synchronization of different assets on several drives. For Windows users the best option it's the free Microsoft SyncToy program. It' was designed to mantain huge digital photo assets.

 

Sooner rather than later, you all need to bite the bullet and put a proper disk backup system in place. Having worked in IT all my career, I've seen what can happen when proper back-up strategies are not followed. One project spent 2 million dollars building a new system with one source-code master and just one backup. A head-crash wiped out the master. Someone loaded the backup onto the same drive that had just destroyed the master. Bye bye $2M.

Rule of thumb is that you are not safe unless you have the original and 3 copies, one of which is somewhere a long way from your computer.

I keep all my images on a 4Tb internal drive and all my "keeper" video clips on an external 12Tb Raid drive.

These are both backed up "daily" to identical drives. Best quality drives.

Then I have two sets of cheaper external fire-wire drives (set A and B). One set is here and one set is at my brother's place. I rotate them about every 2 months.

Sounds expensive but not as expensive as the psychiatry fees to help cure you of the mental trauma of losing your lifelong creative legacy...

Ansel Adams lost half his life work in a fire. In this day and age, we can prevent that happening to us.

Regards

Peter

Hi guys, particularly Davide...

I am the author of the program with the naive GUI to which Davide refers ;-)

Don't worry - I didn't create an account here because I'm offended! I actually love underwater footage as I am a big fan of wildlife documentaries in general and stuff related to the ocean depths in particular. I find it odd that we are trying to conquer space before we can get to the bottom of our oceans! But even that is not why I created my account....

No, I am actually interested in the potential size of the Library that Davide is creating. I have created a Library of around 17 thousand videos for testing purposes but his will be the largest real-life library that I am aware of, using Vee-Hive. Because of that, I'm quite keen with helping him with the classification side, sharing my knowledge with speeding up the process and getting feedback on the performance side.

Interested?

PS Half-way through typing this it occurred to me that it might have been more appropriate to PM Davide so sorry if I've side-tracked your chat!

Hi Vee-Hive, Great to see you here on the forum!

Just to side-track a little, I've been looking at alternatives to Sony Vegas Pro's bundled Media Manager. It's a product that I use all the time and rely on, and I have several thousand items in it. Are you familiar with it? Unfortunately it was written a few years ago, not really finished, and has been neglected since. I looked at the screenshots of Vee-Hive and noticed that it's similar enough that Vee-Hive would probably be my preferred choice of program if I were to switch. There really doesn't seem to be much serious competition for you. I think there is a big potential market for your type of software, but I think many potential users just haven't heard of Vee-Hive.

I wrote a wish-list of improvements for Sony's Media Manager in the 3rd post here. We also had discussion about getting data out of Media Manager and into another program in this thread.

If Vee-Hive can do what Media Manager does, and doesn't have some of its annoying drawbacks, I think Sony software users (and more) would be very interested. If you could actually write a translator to get data out of Media Manager and into Vee-HIve, I think you'd have a real winner (not sure I could face re-tagging tens of thousands of items!).

Here are a couple of links to screenshots from my Media Manager to show how I use it: MM1, MM2. I have a separate audio library in it too, for my production music.

No side-track at all, Nick Your links were very interesting....

With regard to your wish-list, I scanned it rather quickly and, presumably, you are aware that Vee-HIve has no functionality that permits it to integrate into a NLE package(?) so I won't dwell on those aspects. However, the program does support custom context-menus that could, I suppose, assist with such functionality (assuming that the NLE supports appropriate command-line functions). At the end of the day, the program was developed as a general, stand-alone media manager so is not ultra-strong in that area....

The ease-of-use elements of your wish-list are, I believe, largely already present in Vee-Hive but it is yours (and others) opinion in this regard that matters, of course. All feedback and suggestions are welcome, particularly from those managing very large collections as you guys here appear to be....

As far as market presence is concerned, I am all-to-aware that Vee-Hive isn't widely known about; I didn't originally develop it as a commercial application and have no budget for advertising and so forth. I'm also aware that it is very cheap. Part of the reason for this is that I have yet to write a proper user manual and I also lack the ability to guarantee its usability across a myriad of operating systems and machine configurations. Being a sole developer, I lack the hardware for such testing, I'm afraid. I do believe, however, that there is no comparable application with the search power of Vee-Hive. In many respects it's a sledge-hammer for cracking nuts, at least that is what it is to the vast majority of my users whose Libraries are pretty tiny. To you guys, it may be the sledge hammer you need to crack an, erm, giant nut!

As far as your migration question is concerned, I observe from your thread that MM stores its data in an MS SQL Server database. That being the case, I see no reason why an 'Import to Vee-Hive' function cannot be developed. As a matter of fact, your screenshots allayed one of my concerns that the tag structure in MM might not be compatible; it turns out that the structure in Vee-Hive could acommodate a translation quite easily. I would add to that Vee-Hive can further enhance that structure since it supports the concept of 'tagging tags' via links and synonyms. Perhaps you could make an MM file available to me via a file host and I can take a look at it?

Sony's Media Manager doesn't really integrate with Vegas at all. It uses the video preview window but that's it. It doesn't even use the transport controls (play, pause etc.), and it certainly has no knowledge of the usage of files in Vegas projects. Which is why one of my wishes is that they allow MM to run standalone outside of Vegas. If Sony were to drop access to Media Manager completely in, say, version 13, which I think is quite possible, I'd have to run a whole 2nd instance of Vegas (probably version 8), just so I can run MM. FYI media can be dragged from MM to other programs such as NLEs or players, just as if one was dragging from Windows Explorer. As long as that functionality is there in another DAM program, that makes it as good as MM in that respect. And I think it's fine that Vee-Hive uses a user-selectable media player for preview and not necessarily the NLE's own preview.

Here's a zip with 3 MM library files: The default (small and unused or barely-used), my current audio file, and my current video library file:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/21489814/MediaManagerLibraries.zip

If a Vegas>Vee-Hive translator were possible, and Vee-Hive improves on MM, I'd certainly help to get the word out to Vegas users via the forums etc..

Out of interest, what database software underpins Vee-HIve? MM never got past MS SQL Server 2005. I don't know if that's necessarily a problem in itself.

Let me know if you need any more info..