Source media management

A clip in CatDV can represent either a complete media file on disk or a particular clip or scene within a movie or on a tape. This means that not all clips will refer to a media file, and sometimes you may have more than one clip referring to different parts of the same media file (if you have created subclips with the Detect Scenes command for example). You can switch to View>Summary Mode>Source Media View to temporarily consolidate your view and show precisely one clip for each source media file.

Locating media files

A source media file need not remain online on disk once it has been imported into a catalog (though obviously you won't be able to play the media file if it no longer exists or can't be found). CatDV stores the last known location of the media file. The following commands affect the media path:

If a directory or volume has been renamed or moved then CatDV remembers this. It keeps a list of original and current locations (under the Media Search Paths tab in Preferences) which it can use in future to automatically locate a file that has moved. Knowing that two paths are equivalent is particular useful if you work in mixed environments, where S:\Media and /Volumes/Shared/Media for example might actually refer to same folder. This enables CatDV to automatically locate and play the media file even if the catalog stores the old location.

Managing media files

A number of commands in the Media menu can be used to manipulate the media file referred to by a clip:

Previews and thumbnails

If a media file is not currently available CatDV normally falls back automatically to play a low-res preview version of the file instead.

Manipulating QuickTime movies

While CatDV can catalog and play back many types of media file, including MPEG, AVI and MP4, some features are specific to QuickTime .MOV files.

The commands above will directly modify the QuickTime movie itself to affect how they play in other applications (they don't re-render the media however, just change some movie settings).

You can also affect how media files are displayed within CatDV using the Rotate Left, Rotate Right and Toggle Widescreen commands, and by editing the Aspect ratio field for a clip. This information is stored in the CatDV catalog and doesn't alter the media file.


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