CatDV Pro

From Square Box Systems Ltd.:

CatDV 5.0 is a cross-platform cataloging application for media files of any kind, but particularly aimed at users who do video editing. It's designed to solve the problem once and for all of having a large number of files and video clips on many tapes and never being able to find the one you want! The key concept is metadata: maintaining an index of clips with thumbnails, timecode, recording date and other information, that you can use to search for and group your clips and media files.

To simplify creating the catalog, wherever possible, this metadata is extracted automatically from the files concerned. For example, automatic scene detection is used to split a movie file into separate shots or scenes. When importing digital still images the Exif metadata is extracted, likewise for MP3 audio files the album and artist information is read. To complement the automatically extracted technical data you can of course add virtually unlimited annotations and comments of your own.

CatDV is a complete, scalable, family of products, available for both Mac and PC. Use it at home to keep track of your family videos, or use the professional edition with the optional workgroup server to store your clips and catalogs on a central data server and share your media with other members of your team. All with a clean and consistent, easy to use, interface.

Key features include:

• Automatically build up a thumbnail catalog of clips within a DV tape
• Create and manage video thumbnails as a permanent online record of your entire library (requires just 200MB/hour)
• Import most common media file formats, including QuickTime, DV, MPEG-1/2/4, WMV, OMF, PDFs, etc.
• Convert files using any QuickTime-compatible movie exporter, optionally adding text or timecode tracks and subtitles (including H.264 and MPEG-4)
• Import and export batch logs and EDLs
• Add a burnt-in security camera style date and time display to DV movies
• Create real-time sequences based on time of day of recording
• Powerful searching, sorting, filtering and grouping capabilities
• Print a "contact sheet" as an index of your tapes
• Analysis of dropped frames and other technical metadata for troubleshooting
• Plus much, much more.

(Not all the features and file formats above are available in all editions of CatDV, please download a free trial to confirm the correct operation of the features you require prior to purchase.)