We changed the default way thumbnails are scaled. Don’t worry; you can still switch to explicit scaling as in the earlier versions with a simple check-in box.
The why and what on autofit of thumbnails?
We had a bunch of similar feature requests from several users explaining a challenge in their everyday use of Fast Video Cataloger and it goes something like this. Sometimes or quite often when browsing your video catalog you need to look through the inside multiple video clips in a fast manner. This can be time-consuming, depending on your setup of monitors, layout, and video catalog structure, as you might find yourself scrolling a lot in the Video scenes window to make sure you cover everything in all your videos. Since this is a hinder that slows down a common use case we wanted to find a way to speed it up.
The idea of the Fit feature for thumbnails in Fast Video Cataloger 8.1 is to make this as easy as possible. You can switch it on by checking the Fit feature, situated to the far right, in the View menu.
When the Fit is checked the program will do its best to fit all of the thumbnails for the selected video in your window. The goal is to do so without you needing to scroll at all making a browse through of videos much faster. It comes in very handy when you are working on larger screens or multiple screens.
To help the program to fit the thumbnails in the best way for you we have added a setting in the new Interface tab in Preferences(ctrl+p). You can decide between which scaling you allow the Fit feature to function by using the Min scale(20%,25%,50%,75%,100%) and Max scale (100%, 125%, 150%, 175%, 200%)
There will always be cases when this approach can not work, for videos with many thumbnails or setups with a small thumbnail window. But, for the cases that do match, this will be a good improvement to speed up general browsing.
A new version of Fast video cataloger is now available for download. This version has quite a few improvements, and I think it is worth the time to update.
Scale to fit
We changed the default way thumbnails are scaled. Don’t worry; you can still switch to use the same explicit scaling as in the earlier version from the view menu.
When you click on a video, the thumbnails of that video are displayed. The new “Fit” mode looks at the size of the thumbnail window and tries to set the scale of thumbnails so that all thumbnails are visible without scrolling.
The idea is that you should view the entire video without doing any scrolling, even when you switch between videos having few and many thumbnails.
In Preferences, you can limit the max and min scaling allowed. You find these settings on the new Interface tab.
There will always be cases when this approach can not work, for videos with many thumbnails or setups with a small thumbnail window.
But, I hope that this will be a good improvement in most cases and speed up general browsing.
Exclude keywords
There is now a section in the search window to pick excluded keywords. All videos tagged with the excluded keyword are excluded from the search results.
Performance
Performance has been important since the first version of this software, and I think you will be pleased with the improvements we have made in this version. Thumbnails should be significantly faster to load, especially when you have large catalogs containing thousands of videos.
Keyword manager
The keyword manager got a pass of improvements. You can now import keywords from a comma-separated text file and filter keywords in the dialog.
Bins
Bins now better support working with multiple files, and you can drag n drop videos between bins. Drag the videos over the bin dropdown and pick the target bin.
Login credentials
Connecting to a remote windows share now allows you to provide credentials. Credentials are sometimes required to access shares. If this is needed depends on the configuration of your local network.
C# scripting
We improved error handling. In previous versions, sometimes exceptions in a user script could lead to a crash dialog in Fast video cataloger ( just the dialog, not a real crash…). In this version, the error gets printed in the Console Window.
We also went through all sample scripts and created separate visual studio projects for each script.
Bug fixes
Lots of bug fixes as usual. The most severe issue fixed was probably a bug that essentially broke the video wall in version 8.05.
We also fixed a few cases where layout loading failed, and we updated the Avalon docking framework to get all fixes from there.
You can view the complete list in the documentation.
We changed the default way thumbnails are scaled. Don’t worry; you can still switch to explicit scaling as in the earlier versions with a simple check-in box.
