by admin | Nov 8, 2014 | News
We just released the 3.5 version of our video file management software, Fast video cataloger.
The last couple of days I have been writing about the main new features in this version. First the new tool that helps you to eliminate duplicate video files in your video collection.
Then I wrote about the new attract windows that let you enjoy your video collection in a unique way.
However, most of the development time invested in version 3.5 went into a large number of small improvements. Little things that together make a huge difference in your everyday use of the program. And that is the topic I write about today.
Greatly improved performance
The first thing we added to fast video cataloger was the new attract windows. Since these windows need to rotate content, they need to load and decode images. One of the slowest operations you can do with a computer is to read or write from a mechanical disk drive.
When I first implemented the new attract windows, I knew we had to pay attention to performance to make sure the new functions didn’t slow down the program. This turned into quite an undertaking! We ended up not only optimizing the overhead from the new windows, but actually making the whole program more responsive. The most important change is probably that we now run more background threads than we did in earlier versions.
The end result is a user interface that is much more fluent than before, provided you have a multicore CPU in your computer.
A new way to rate videos
We added the rating as a column in the video details list, the idea being that it is now much faster to rate videos. We use stars that you simply click to light up – similar to ratings in Amazon. This saves one click every time you want to rate a video as you don’t need to open up the dropdown menu like in previous versions.
Multiple keywords
When setting keywords to multiple videos you now simply select, mark and add. For multiple keywords you enter a comma (,) separated list of keywords right away. This makes it a lot easier to set multiple keywords to multiple videos.
Extended file operations
When you browse a video collection it is pretty common that you find video files you don’t want to keep for one reason or another. I added the option to delete the file and remove it immediately from Fast Video Cataloger.
I have been reluctant to add any file operations to the program, opting instead to have most operations work on the video catalog instead of the actual file system. And I tried to keep the file operations we do support in the file organizer window. The one exception to this was the renaming of a video title, as renaming a title will also rename the video file. However, cleaning out files is such a common usage scenario, and has been requested by several users so I decided to add it Fast Video Cataloger 3.5
We have had the option to sync the organizer window automatically with the selected video for some time. In the file organizer window, you can carry out any file operations on your video files. In this version we added the option to force sync the file organizer window with the selected video.
New video file operations
All in all these are pretty small changes in functionality when working with video files, but I believe they will make a huge difference. I for one use these new functions all the time while cleaning up my catalogs.
The dynamic layout
Fast video cataloger has a very dynamic user interface. You set it up as you like and you can do it across several computer screens. In the 3.2 version we added multiple layouts that you can switch between with the function keys. It can be a big efficiency boost to have specific layouts for different types of work. For example to have one layout used for adding videos, one for keywording and one for viewing videos.
Before 3.5, however, it was pretty hard to keep track of which layout you selected. Now when you switch layouts the name of the layout you switch to is displayed for a short time. You can set the name of each layout in preferences.
I also fixed an assortment of windows bugs, in some cases it was impossible to open windows that had been closed unless you reset the layout. This is now fixed and the handling of layout windows in general should be much more stable, and layout switching easier to understand.
Video player
Fast video cataloger comes with an internal video player. We did not add any new features to the player but we did make some minor changes to how the volume control works. First of all you can set the volume when a video is not playing. We also changed the scale of the volume control so that you can set volume with greater precision.
More video detail columns
I mentioned earlier that we added ratings as a video details column. I also added a file size and the last modified time of the video file as sortable columns. The file size size and time was also added to the “add videos” list, this is really useful if you only want to add new video files or just the large files.
New videodetail columns
Summary
We manage to get a great number of small improvements into Fast video cataloger 3.5. All in all I am really happy with the new version and hope you are too. You can download the latest version of fast video cataloger from https://videocataloger.com/download
by admin | Nov 2, 2014 | Features
You know that problem, when your video collection grows to over a thousand videos? And it becomes next to impossible to remember each and every video file in your collection?
Seeking inspiration from movie file discovery
Keyword search is fine if you know what you’re looking for, but sometimes you might just want to use your movie collection for inspiration.
For example if you have all your family videos in a collection, it might just be nice to watch random videos and remember old friends, old vacation or your children growing up. If you’re doing creative work, you might want to use your video collection for inspiration, for example by watching random stock videos to get ideas for new designs. Fast video cataloger has the tools to do just this in style!
Video discovery in Fast video cataloger
Since Fast video cataloger 3.5, we’ve been able to use three new Window types that will help you get inspiration from your movies. Or simply help you enjoy your video collection. We call these new windows Attract windows.
Attract Video Wall
The Attract video wall window plays random videos as a wall of videos. Hence the name! The video wall playback shows each video thumbnail in succession, to make it look like a video. It is similar to if you would fast forward the entire video, but with just enough display time per frame to grasp what is going on.
Using the video wall makes it possible to get a pretty good idea of what happens in an entire video just by watching it for a few seconds. The video wall let you watch a bunch of videos in that way simultaneously. And the human brain is surprisingly good at getting this information, and I think it’s probably the fastest way to ingest video content.
Attract video wall showing food videos
The Attract video wall takes this type of browsing to the next level by pulling in random videos. If a video is interesting, just hover the mouse above the thumbnail and the program will stay on that video. You can then right click to select or play the full video from the video wall.
Attract Actors Window
The Attract actor windows cycles through all actors in your video catalog one by one in an image carousel. Depending on the type of video collection you have, you might now have actors set to your videos. If you don’t have any actors simply close the attract actors window and don’t use it. If you do have actors, then this is a nice way to see them all. You can quickly jump to more details on the Actor by right-clicking them. You can also filter out videos where the selected actor is in the cast.
Attract actor window
Actors are more than people
When we did the first version of Fast video cataloger, Actors made sense and we thought of Actors as people acting in movies. But the more we worked with video catalogs, the more we realized that actors could really be anything that takes part in a video where you want to be able to associate more meta-data than a simple keyword. For example, if you make commercial videos, the actors can be the brand you do the commercials for. If you are doing work for hire videos, that customer might be the actor and you might want to store their company information in the actor description.
Attract Cover Window
The Attract cover window shows random cover images as an image slideshow. In the preferences, you can select if you want to show only cover images or companion images as well.
Attract companion image showing one of the dishes.
Just like with the other attract windows, you can “pause” the slideshow rotation by moving the mouse cursor above the image. Right-click the image to jump to its video. In the same way as Actors, a Cover image does not necessarily have to be a cover. It can be any good image representing the video.
Using layouts for video discovery
Fast video cataloger has good support for setting up different layouts and switching between them. I would recommend that you create a specific layout for the attract windows – according to your needs and preferences. Most of the time you might not need them, but they are incredibly useful for the time when you want to get inspired or simply enjoy your video collection.
Note the checkbox to show companion images and not only covers in the attract cover window.
You can download a free trial copy of Fast video cataloger. Fast video cataloger is available for Windows PC computers running Windows Vista or later.
by admin | Nov 1, 2014 | Features
Duplicate video files (exact copies of a file stored in different folders ) not only occupy unnecessary disk space, but also makes it harder to have an organized video collection.
Additionally if you add meta data to only one copy of the video, that data is not shared with the other duplicate files.
Fast Video Cataloger has a quick and easy tool to help you find duplicate videos, wherever they lie in your catalog.
When you have a large video collection it is pretty likely you eventually will end up with multiple copies of the same video stored in different folders or on different disks.
How do you end up with duplicate video files?
There are many ways this can happen. Perhaps you downloaded the same file twice, moved video files from a digital camera more than once (just to be sure… we’ve all done it!), renamed a video file and then didn’t know you already had a file and so on.
How to find and clean duplicate video files
From Fast video cataloger ( https://videocataloger.com/download/ ) select File then Repair. The Repair window will open, click on the “Check duplicate” tab to get to the find duplicate videos tool.
Selecting the repair tool
The Find duplicate video tool in fast video cataloger works on all videos you have in a catalog so there will be no need to pick the folders to search for, the program already knows where all videos are stored.
Selecting the find duplicate video tab
From the find duplicate window tab, click the Start button to start scanning your entire video catalog for duplicate video files. The time this takes depemds on how many videos you have in your catalog and how many of them are duplicate.
How Fast video cataloger finds duplicate files
When Fast video cataloger tries to find duplicate video files it first check the length of the video, as this will rule out most videos as duplicates. It then checks the size of the video files in bytes.
Both of these operations are quite fast, but for all videos that are the same size and the same video length, the program needs to do a much more thorough check to make sure the videos are really the exact same video file only in different locations.
Scanning for duplicate video files
To do this check it calculates a 256 bit checksum based on the whole video file. To calculate this checksum, the program needs to read every single byte of the video file, and that can take some time for large video files. The checksum is then stored in your catalog, so each file will only need to have the checksum calculated one. This also means that you can close the program and it will resume the next time where it left off. And if you have scanned for duplicates at some time, it will be quicker carrying out the next scan after you have added more files to your catalog.
The algorithm used to calculate and to compare videos is the same used by several cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. The risk that the program will say that two different files are the same by mistake as a result of the same checksum being generated from different video files is virtually non existing. Or to put it into context with an example:
”A mass-murderer space rock happens about once every 30 million years on average. This leads to a probability of such an event occurring in the next second to about 10-15. That’s 45 orders of magnitude more probable than the collision.”
And the extra check for the size and video length reduce this risk even further.
Since the program needs access to the actual video files to be able to compare the videos, you need to make sure that external USB drivers are connected if required. If the video file is not available the program will simply ignore it, to check for missing files use the repair video tool instead.
What to do with the duplicate video files?
When the program has found the duplicate videos you get a list of the duplicates find. Click on each entry and the program will list all duplicates it found, click on the duplicate file you want to keep.
Selecting which video file to keep.
When you have gone through the list and selected the files to keep, click the Merge Videos button.
File description, ratings and obviously the path and filename will be kept for the one video file you select to keep. The keywords and actors from the other copies will be merged to the catalog entry for the one file you keep.
Duplicate videos have been merged
When the merge is complete, the duplicate files will be deleted.
The new duplicate video file finder tool makes it easier to keep your video collection ordered.
If you have not already, go to the download page and download fast video cataloger.
by admin | Oct 31, 2014 | News
For immediate release: Fast Video Cataloger 3.5 get feature for video discovery
Videostorm Sweden AB has released Fast Video Cataloger 3.5 to
introduce a discovery mode for offline video clips. Fast Video
Cataloger is a video clip management software for Windows that
presents synopses of large quantities of video files. Visual
search in combination with metadata and keywords let users find
scenes inside videos in a natural way without playing them.
Fast Video Cataloger 3 is a video clip management software for
Windows designed to handle thousands of video files on a
standard PC. The program extracts a wall of thumbnail images to
represent all scenes in each video. This provides a visual
search through inside video files instead of watching the
duration of clips. Each thumbnail doubles as a playable bookmark
for that scene and is manually enriched with keywords for
filtering and searching. Fast Video Cataloger 3.5 introduces
three new windows with functions to assist with video discovery. .
Fast Video Cataloger 3.5 is a personal video clip management
software for Windows with a changeable user layout to fit into
existing video workflows. Each video is represented by a wall of
thumbnail images that combined provides an overview of the whole
collection. New thumbnails and keywords can be added manually
by the user during playback. Search by keywords to find all
individual scenes in the entire catalog matching that keyword.
Drag and drop files from Fast Video Catalog 3.5 to external
video tools for direct access. Fast Video Cataloger version 3.5
adds a build-in tool to automatically remove duplicate video files.
Fast Video Cataloger 3.5 is a Windows tool for communicators,
educators, instructors, researchers, security professionals,
digital media labs, police intelligence specialists, and
everybody who manages video clip collections.
Fast Video Cataloger runs under Windows 8.x/7/Vista/ with .NET
framework. A single-user license costs $197(US). Multi-user
discounts are available. You can download a trial version of
Fast Video Cataloger from http://videocataloger.com/.
by admin | Oct 29, 2014 | News
The 3.50 update is free for all customers and you can use your original registration information. We have lots of minor improvements and bug fixes as usual and there has been a focus on performance and workflow that should make a few common operations faster and more streamlined.
New Attract windows
In the 3.50 version we introduced three new windows in a new category that I would like to call “Attract Windows”. The purpose of the attract windows are to cycle through content automatically from your video catalog. Just like with all other windows you can decide to use these windows, just close them or use them in specific layouts. My hope is that the attract window is a new inspiring way to enjoy your video catalog, perhaps to get inspiration.
- The Actor attract window cycles through actors one by one.
- The Cover attract window cycles though covers and/or companion images one by one
- The Attract Video Wall is a new video wall window that plays a video wall for a few seconds ( that you set from preferences) and then switches the videos to a new set of random videos.
For each attract window you can right click to get options to go to editable versions of the content.
New find duplicate videos tools
A new tool to find duplicate video files was introduced. This tools makes it effortless to clean out duplicate videos from your catalog and optionally delete them and save some space on your disks. You can find the tool as a tab in the Repair windows.
Other bug fixes
You can now set volume even if a video is not playing. Also, the scale of the volume control is now much better and the whole slider is used.
General performance improvements. This one is hard to prove and explain but you will find that some operations, for example keywording, is much faster.
Fixed a bunch of issues with disappearing windows that required layout reset to reappear.
Other general improvements
Star rating in the video detail list instead of a drop down list, save a click every time you rate a video.
The About box now show video catalog statistics.
Video file size and date modified in the add video dialog and detail list. This is good if you only want to add large files to a catalog if you have an sd and an hd version of a file, or if you only want to add the last touched file.
Added a Right click option to sync file organizer to video. This is good to have if you don’t have the automatic sync turned on. The automatic sync can cause performance issues if you have videos on powered down disk drives.
Right click option to remove a video file from disk and from catalog. You could do this before from the file organizer but since this is a pretty common thing to do when cleaning up a catalog, we added a menu option for it.
Option to show/hide horizontal video details horizontal scrollbar. With more columns a scrollbar is good to have but it does take screenspace. This might sound like a small thing and it is, but I have had emails from users that wants it there and users that hate that it is there. So now everyone can set it up as they like it.
Copy from actors, just right click the actor portrait to copy it into the clipboard. Might be useful if you edit portrait in Photoshop or another image editing program.
Support to enter multiple keywords at once with , separation.
Added message when you switch between layouts to make it more clear that you did switch to a new layout. Remember that you can set name to the layouts as well from the preferences.
And much more… Download and test from http://videocataloger.com/download/
