Previews and thumbnails

A clip can have different types of media representation: small thumbnail images, the original movie or media file, and a low-resolution preview movie. All these types of media can be shared by more than one clip.

Thumbnails

• Thumbnails are stored in the catalog along with the clips.
• Thumbnail images are created when you import a movie or still image into a catalog, usually for the first, last and middle frame of each movie or scene.
• You can create another thumbnail and set that as the poster for a clip by going to the frame you want in the "movie" tab and pressing the set poster button.
• You can select different sizes of thumbnails in Preferences. (Note that larger thumbnails increase the size of catalog files and the time to open them.)
• Use the Rebuild thumbnails command to rebuild the poster thumbnails of selected clips after changing the thumbnail size.
• All the thumbnails in a catalog with the same tape name and whose timecode lies between the "in" and "out" point of a clip are available for display with that clip.

Original movies

• The original movie or source media files can be played if they are on-line (i.e. accessible on the computer's hard drive). In the case of DV movies, however, CatDV makes the assumption that the source media will typically be deleted from disk at the end of a project (to make space for the next one), and that batch capture can be used to recapture the original files if they are needed again, without loss of quality, given the tape name and timecode values.
• Use the Attach Media command if you have recaptured the source media. Use Update Media Location if you have simply renamed or moved the source media files to a new location (usually you only need to select the new location for one file - other files in the same directory are reattached automatically if they still have the same name and file size).

Previews

• Use the Build Preview Movies command to build a low-resolution preview movie of the selected clips.
• Preview movies are stored on disk in a common preview directory and are shared between catalogs. Once created they are available even when the original source movie is deleted.
• Specify the directory for previews, and choose their size and quality, in Preferences.
• There are different settings for for Live Capture previews because these need to be generated in real time.
• Preview movies are 'private' to CatDV but can be exported with Export As Movies if you want to use them in another applciation.