Catalog and Edit

HaraldE

Morning,

I have recently started to move a lot of old film (mainly 16 mm) over to a hard drive. Now I need some tools and hope someone can suggest a few, for PC.

INVENTORY
There are quite many film files and I need an inventory of all the scenes. My hope is to find a tool that will scan through a film-file and tell me the scenes and then I will add some attributes (like adding keywords) to each scene. These keywords could be DATE and PLACE and PERSON and EVENT and similar.

NEW FILM
When the inventory is done I somehow need to use these keyword to specify a new film. I want to be able to say:
"Give me all scenes where PLACE = LEKSAND and EVENT= WEDDING and then sequence on DATE"
Whatever comes out will then be the scenes used to build a new film.

Does anyone know of any tools that can do what I described above?

Regards, Harald

Rob Pauza

We use Final Cut Server, but unfortunately Apple isn't supporting it anymore. We have a "Production Assistant" (glorified gopher) do all our tape logging. When he's not playing on his damn phone, he basically skims all the footage and logs the relevant scene info, tape ID, and time code. I'm not sure there's a great automated way of doing the "Inventory/Logging" part.

For the "Searchability" aspect (other than via FCS).... you could use any database program if the fields are setup properly. (FileMaker Pro, Excel, Numbers, etc.) That's not quite as elegant solution in terms of workflow, but it should work.

Maybe someone else will have some other suggestions, but that's how we do it. Hope that helped somewhat.

-Rob

ziggy53

Rob Pauza wrote: »

We use Final Cut Server, but unfortunately Apple isn't supporting it anymore. We have a "Production Assistant" (glorified gopher) do all our tape logging. When he's not playing on his damn phone, he basically skims all the footage and logs the relevant scene info, tape ID, and time code. I'm not sure there's a great automated way of doing the "Inventory/Logging" part. ...

Correct. With tape based video acquisition, "auto-logging" software works pretty well when you have either a camera start-stop signal or time code interruption.

Scene based auto-detect, auto-logging software largely does not work. By the time you set sensitivity high enough to detect actual scene changes, any camera movement or scene interruption (like someone or something moving through the scene, etc.) also logs as a new scene.

Humans are much better suited to this task.

Rob Pauza wrote: »

... For the "Searchability" aspect (other than via FCS).... you could use any database program if the fields are setup properly. (FileMaker Pro, Excel, Numbers, etc.) That's not quite as elegant solution in terms of workflow, but it should work. ...

EditShare has some interesting solutions that are said to work fairly well with Lightworks editing.

Also see:
http://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=155&Itemid=203
http://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61&Itemid=91
http://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=67&Itemid=106

HaraldE

Thanks Rob and Ziggy,

It may well be that I have to see a manual part in the CATALOGing. Given I have a decent software that splits the film into scenes I may then have to use something like a spreadsheet to manually store info in. This would give me the basic needs like Filter and Sequence of the scenes.

This may then be a question of which software to use to automatically divide the large scanned files over into scenes. Maybe this is the Film Editor I will need. Is Adobe Premiere good for this?

Regards, Harald

ziggy53

HaraldE wrote: »

... This may then be a question of which software to use to automatically divide the large scanned files over into scenes. Maybe this is the Film Editor I will need. Is Adobe Premiere good for this?

"Cutting" video, from the original big files into individual scene files, can be accomplished by a wide variety of software.

I use Corel VideoStudio Pro X4 (latest version is x5, but should not matter for your purposes) and it has a rather handy "Multi-Trim" function which allows both cutting and trimming, and which also has a mouse-driven virtual jog-shuttle to speed the process.

Once the file is divided into the individual segments, you just choose a segment with the mouse and then save into a new filename, optionally transcoding during the save.

See this video tutorial for an example of the basic Multi-Trim process:

http://youtu.be/E4iSbuuMtck

Also see page 69 of the User Guide, to see where the Jog control is located:

http://www.corel.com/content/pdf/vsx5/vsx5_user_guide_en.pdf

HaraldE

Thanks Ziggy,

Will do some further reading after Easter

Regards, Harald