CatDV provides detailed information about virtually any kind of media file that you import into a catalog, including stills, audio files, and other formats, not just DV movies.
All the metadata (ie. information about the file, as opposed to the media content of the file itself) that is stored with the file is extracted at the time of import and displayed in special columns against each clip. (Depending on the file being read, not all the fields will be set).
This information can be very useful when searching for clips, when grouping similar clips together, or when diagnosing problems with particular files.
The following fields are potentially applicable to any type of media file:
| Video | A summary of the format of the visual track, including the codec, frame size and frame rate. (If there are several video tracks the overall frame size of the movie is shown.) |
| Audio | A summary of the format of the audio track, including codec and sample rate. |
| Importer | Details of which QuickTime importer is used to read the file, ie. whether it's a QuickTime .MOV file or another format that needs to be imported into QuickTime. |
| Format | A concise summary of the format, based on the Importer, Video and Audio fields. In the case of stills the approximate size of the image in megapixels is shown. |
| QT Tracks | A list of all the tracks in the file, as reported by QuickTime. The 4 character type and subtype codes are shown, eg. "vide/jpeg" is a JPEG video track, while "soun/musi" is a MIDI music track. The size in pixels (Width x Height), the number of samples, and the duration of the track is shown. If a track has a name or is disabled this is indicated also. |
| Meta data | Any QuickTime user data, such as movie title or copyright annotations, that might be stored in the file is shown here. This field also shows metadata such as JPEG comments, ID3 tags from MP3 files such as artist and track, and Exif tags (but see also below). Wherever possible the data is decoded to a readable form but sometimes the raw hexadecimal codes are shown. |
| Type | The clip type icon indicates whether a clip is a DV clip, a still, an audio clip, an interactive file (eg. Flash or QuickTime VR), or other movie. |
| The aspect ratio of the visual frame. In the case of DV the intended display size (4:3 or 16:9) is shown, taking into account the non-square pixel size, even though this won't match the ratio of the frame size. | |
| Frame rate | The frame rate of the visual track, if known, or an indication if this file is a still. |
| Frame size | The normal display size of the movie in pixels, after any transformation matrix has been applied. (By contrast, the unscaled size of each track is shown in QT Tracks.) |
| Audio Rate | The audio sample rate (this is extracted from the Audio column and made available separately so it can be used for grouping). |
| Import Notes | If anything unusual about the file is detected, such as audio and video tracks that differ in length or don't seem to relate correctly to the number of media samples, or if there are problems with the timecode, then a warning message may be displayed here. |
| Duration | The duration of the media file. The timecode format used depends on the file. |
| In (and Out) | If the file has a timecode track then the in and out points use this timecode information, otherwise each media file is assumed to start at 0:00:00 |
| Media path | The last known location on disk of the source media file. |
| Media date | The modification time of the source media file (typically the time the file was captured or digitized, as opposed to the original record date.) |
| Media size | The physical size of the source media file in kilobytes or MB. (This is the size of the media file as a whole, not the size for a particular scene.) |
| Data rate | The average data rate of the media. |
The following fields have special meaning for DV clips:
| Aux T/C | Additional user-settable or time of day timecode supported by some cameras. (Professional Edition only) |
| DV T/C | The timecode value at the start of each clip as stored in the DV data itself (this may be different from the QuickTime timecode track). |
| Exposure | Camera exposure details recorded in the DV data at the time of recording by some camera models. |
| Format | A summary of the format, such as whether PAL or NTSC, widescreen or normal, and locked or unlocked audio. In the case of DV this field is based on the DV data itself, not on what QuickTime reports. For example, if a captured movie file has been conformed by rendering a new audio track then the Format field might report that the original recording was at 32kHz even though the Audio field reports that the movie has a 48kHz audio track. |
| The original date and time of recording, stored in the DV data (assuming the clock on the camera was set correctly at the time of recroding). |
The following fields have special meaning for JPEG and TIFF files with Exif metadata:
| Exposure | A summary of the Exif exposure details (if present). The EV (exposure value) number combines the aperture and exposure times and gives an approximate indication of the overall light intensity in the scene, assuming the shot was exposed correctly and the camera has equivalent sensitivity to ISO100 film. (Typically EV0 would correspond to almost complete darkness, while EV18 might be a pure white object in very bright sunshine.) |
| Meta data | This lists all the Exif tags commonly recorded by a digital camera, such as camera make and model, exposure time, whether flash was used, etc. You can copy these tags out to their own separate columns by defining approriately named user defined columns. |
| If the Exif data has a DateTimeOriginal or CreationDate tag then this value is extracted and stored in the Rec Date field. |