Improved performance for catalogs with lots of extended properties. You should notice a performance improvement when switching videos if your catalog has more than 1000 extended properties.
Added new option when auto assigning keywords from filename, the new option will only consider text inside brackets as keywords, i.e [this text] or {this text}.
Add new sample scripts.
If you used a hotkey that was a plain key (i.e no ALT/Shift/CTRL) and had keyboard focus in the script console window the shortcut action was executed. Now the character is written to the text window.
When updating multiple keywords in the keywords manager to set color the first keywords text also got updated.
When the write metadata option is enabled metadata is now also written for multi-selected videos.
If metadata writing fails because a file is locked by a program fast video cataloger will keep trying. (this typically failed because the video was playing in the internal or an external video player).
How to set keywords to video scenes in Fast Video Cataloger
Fast Video Cataloger lets you assign keyword tags to specific scenes in videos. You can then search for these tags to find a specific moment in a video. This video shows how to add a keyword to a scene and how to search for that keyword.
For this example, we will use a tutorial video about the software. Select the video.
Look at the timeline of the video. Select the scene to get a keyword.
Make sure you have the keywording window open in your layout.
Make sure the checkbox for tagging a scene is selected. Write the keyword, or use one of the keywords you have used before.
You now see the tagged scene has a changed color tint.
If you hover the mouse over the tag you see the assigned keywords.
Now we will try to search for this video.
Make sure you have the scene search window in your layout. Go to the scene search section. Click on the keyword
You will see the matching scenes.
Click on the thumbnail to play the video from the tagged point in time.
Tagged scenes will also match video file searches.
This video will show you how to import a video playlist into DaVinci Resolve.
In Fast video cataloger, you can quickly create video playlists.
A video playlist is a list of cuts from videos.
A playlist can be played as if it was a normal video file.
A playlist can work as a video edit outline.
You can then import the outline into a professional video editing software like Davinci Resolve.
Start Fast video cataloger.
Make sure you have the playlist window in your layout
Create a new playlist and give it a name.
As an example we will edit a cat video, so let us search for cat videos in our catalog
Add a video to the playlist by right-clicking on the video and select “add to playlist”
Or add a segment of a video by right-clicking on a thumbnail and select “add to playlist”
And let’s add a subscribe outtro
You now have a playlist that you can play as a video.
Export the playlist by clicking “Export”
You will see a save file dialog.
Select where to store the playlist, and select xml as format.
We now have an exported xml playlist.
Open Davinci resolve and create a new project.
Select File, Import, Timeline
Accept the defaults in the dialog
You should now see the timeline and all the imported video clips and can your editing start editing.
In rare cases the import to davinci will fail. The most common reason for a failed import is that the video format is not supported in Davinci Resolve.
Fast video cataloger supports many formats that are not supported in Davinci. If you import a playlist with these videos, like wmv, you will get an error dialog. If this is the case you will need to convert the video file.
If the clip start time is not 0 the import might fail. In Fast video cataloger you can set the default playlist starttime from the general preferences.
If you are using FastVideoCataloger and Davinci Resolve you can easily bring the videos into DaVinci resolve for editing just by drag and drop.
Working like this keeps the Resolve project less cluttered
1., Start Fast video cataloger with your video catalog.
2. choose a layout with the video catalog and the search window
3. Search for a video you want to have in your resolve project.
4. We get a list of videos.
5. Click on the video to get a good overview.
6. Have your resolve project open in another window, perhaps on another display.
7. Drag the video from Fast video cataloger to Davinci resolve.
You now have the video in the project and can drag it onto the timeline and edit as usual.
In Fast video cataloger, you can change the size and order of the video detail columns.
You can also show and hide columns including columns to show extended properties.
Here is a tutorial video to show you how:
In Fast video cataloger you can customize your video detail columns.
Start Fast video cataloger.
Open the video catalog window in detail mode.
Move the pointer between the columns so that the mouse cursor change.
Drag with the left mouse button down to change the size of the columns.
Move the pointer above a column so it changes color.
Drag with the left mouse button down to rearrange the column order.
You can also Right-click on the columns.
You will get a context menu with all avaiable columns.
The visible columns have a checkmark.
Check and uncheck columns to toggle their visiblity.
Select More from context menu for the advanced dialog.
In this dialog you can also select to show extended properties.
Click on one of the empty rows.
Click on the Extended property dropdown.
Select the extended property you want to show.
You will see the custom property in the list with an icon.
Close the dialog.
Column customization is saved with your layout.
Customized columns allow you to view, just the right video information you need.
I will show how you can save a video frame as an image file.
First, start Fast videocataloger.
Find and select the video you want to take a screenshot from.
Seek the frame you want to capture, by clicking on a video frame and using the seek bar.
Right-click the camera icon in the video player.
Select “Capture frame to file”
You will get a save file dialog.
Pick the folder where you want your image and click Save
In a few seconds, the image will be captured from the video and saved as an image file.
Browse to the folder and you can see your captured video frame image.
This video shows 3 easy tips on the metadata columns in the Video Catalog window.
This video will provide you with 3 short tips on Metadata columns in Fast Video Cataloger. The video-catalog window is a natural starting point for most use cases. Each video has a number of columns populated with metadata.
Tip 1. You can sort the catalog using the headers of the columns
Tip 2. You can resize the columns by grabbing the edges or move columns by grabbing and dragging. This is a great way to set up the layout of this window to fit your need for the work you are doing.
Tip 3. Right-click a column to add more metadata columns to the video Catalog window. Most videos do not have data in all columns but depending on your videos different sets of metadata are important. Download Fast Video Cataloger now and build your video catalog.
Clicking on one video in the video catalog window when it was part of a multiselection did not change the selection.
When a layout was reset the Video length column was printed incorrectly as a date.
If you added keywords when creating a new actor in the initial dialog they were not added correctly to the catalog.
Add actor and new Actor were both listed as shortcut options, one did not work, Now there is only one working shortcut option.
Changing the width of a column in the video catalog window by dragging the splitters did not get saved to the layout.
Added new general preferences to set the default clip start for video playlist export. This is rarely needed for normal use, but if you import a playlist to other software that have another start time for video clips it might be useful.
The window containing the video player was allowed to have zero sizes, making it easy to lose the video player.
In Fast video cataloger 8, we have made a significant improvement to what was probably the best video indexing engine available. In the previous post I gave a high-level overview of the improvements, this text will just go into some more details about the changes we have made in version 8 and why they are good.
A quick summary is that indexing is more stable than before while still being just as fast. If you just want great software to organize all your videos in one single place you can download Fast video cataloger from https://videocataloger.com
The video indexing process
Our definition of video indexing is processing a video to get metadata from the video and adding it to the video catalog. Here is how it works, step by step:
The user adds videos or folders with videos to the list of videos to be indexed.
Users add known metadata that is known for all the videos in the list
User clicks start, and all videos are put in the index queue together with their shared metadata.
The index queue is processed video by video, failed videos are put in a failed list.
The video is opened and scanned from beginning to end. In this phase, Fast video cataloger extracts thumbnails as defined in preferences.
Metadata is optionally extracted from the video file using media info
Metadata is optionally extracted from the video file using the Windows shell
XMP Metadata is optionally extracted from the video file
Metadata is optionally extracted from .nfo files.
Companion images are scanned for as defined in preferences
Video is added to the catalog with its metadata. And we repeat step 4 until all videos are processed.
How thumbnails are extracted
A separate process for stability
Fast video cataloger uses directshow to extract videos. Each video will require different types of filters and different types of codecs. Like all software, there will be bugs. To make sure a bug in any of the software used to extract frames from one video is affecting the following one each video is run in a new clean process and at the end of the frame extraction that process is closed down.
Directshow Filter graph
When the indexing starts a new directshow filter graph is built. The filter graph includes our custom filters to extract images instead of rendering the video to the screen.
Directshow has support to automatically use the codecs installed on your system. This is both good and bad. It is good because new video formats can be added to a system without us having to even be aware of it. Video vendors can simply provide new filters and they will work in all software supporting directshow. It is bad because installed software we are not even aware of can introduce issues with indexing. There is also the uncertainty of what software to use when more than one filter is installed that handles the same format. Fast video cataloger can use the default way to build filter graphics ( in preferences, on the index tab, use directshow ) but by default, we build our own filter graphs. Because of this, the frame extraction works on your computer even if you have misconfigured or competing directshow filters installed.
If you do want to index videos that are not supported by the built-in filters make sure to change the setting and make sure you have installed 64-bit filters.
Hooking into the indexing process
Fast video cataloger has a scripting interface. New in version 8 is the ability to hook into the indexing process. Using the scripting API you can easily set up a callback to be called at the end of the indexing process or as part of the process for each thumbnail being extracted.
Machine learning and object detection
The callback to process the thumbnails allows you to do things like machine learning to process all the frames as the video is being indexed, and perhaps add extra metadata or even alter the thumbnails for the video.
Custom scrapers
The callback at the end of the indexing process allows you to add your own custom scrapers or crawlers to add more metadata for the video.
Conclusion
The new indexing process in Fast video cataloger is Fast, stable, and extensible. You can quality index large lists of videos and leave the program to do the work without supervision. The indexing process can also be extended to suit your specific needs. Download fast video cataloger from https://videocataloger.com/
