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/
We have worked very long to make sure Fast video cataloger indexing is stable and can handle just about all video formats.
Indexing videos are always going to be a pretty time-consuming process since the video file needs to be read and decoded. Just reading through the large files is a time and CPU-consuming process. Having videos on a fast device and having a fast multicore CPU will help but even so, if you have many videos it will take considerable time.
From the start, we made sure you can add a list of files to index so that you can let it work along if you have hundreds or thousands of videos to index. After each video is indexed the current playlist is saved so the program can continue where it left off in case the program crashed, the power went out, Windows decided it was the perfect time to do an update, or the program closed down for any other reason.
We have put in plenty of effort to fix bugs in our software to make this as stable as possible. We also code to handle broken videos, conflicting codecs, and so on. But even so, we have reports of people getting crashes when they index large lists of videos.
So what happens when a video is indexed and what is the problem here?
What happens during video indexing?
To decode a video we first need to load and parse the video file format. A video file, i.e the container, contains video, audio, and perhaps other data. So the first thing we need is to read the data in the container and split it out into its different parts. How the format stores its data is dependent on the video format i.e. mp4, MPEG, Avi, etc. This piece of container parsing code is also sometimes called a splitter as it is splitting up the video file into separate streams of the same data type i.e streams for audio, video, etc. Then we need a video decoder for the video stream. This basically takes the video stream and reads it in compressed format and decompresses it. There are a whole lot of different compressions out there and they are constantly being improved upon. Typical video compression is lossy and uses similar techniques as image compression, like jpeg for each frame in the image and also the fact that not every single pixel changes between frames. Some of the compression algorithms have been implemented in hardware on GPU, so for even speedier decompression the decoder can in some cases use hardware decompression, in that case, you also have a video driver involved and the driver depends on the type of video card you have installed.
After the decompression, we have an uncompressed image of a video frame. This is basically all we need for the indexing process, we compress the image again and it is saved in the video catalog.
What can go wrong?
So to summarize, every time a video is indexed, in addition to Fast video cataloger there is a splitter for the format of the video, a decoder for the compression, and possibly a video driver. How these different components run also depends on parameters given to the container format and compression. So for every video, there is a risk that there is an issue in the splitter, decoder, or driver and the bug might not be an obvious crash. It could be a random memory overwrite that messes it up for the following video or another of the components.
The more videos you index in a row the higher is the risk that the computer encounters something unexpected that goes wrong.
And
There is basically no way we can prevent this from happening.
The Fast video cataloger 8 solution
What we can do is to isolate the whole indexing process from the rest of Fast video cataloger and each indexed video from the next. We basically launch each indexing in a separate process so that we always start from a known state and so that each indexing of a video is separate from the other. As a user you should not see any difference, speed is the same as before and you can follow the progress as the video is indexed.
This has now been implemented in Fast video cataloger 8 that you can download from here: https://videocataloger.com
Settings for indexing videos in fast video cataloger
Fast Video cataloger 8 is a local video content management system. Have instant access to all your videos from one single place and produce content quicker than ever before.
We started development in 2011 and today we are happy to finally release version 8. The program is available now for Windows PC from https://videocataloger.com/download/.
Version 8 is a major update and comes with more than 100 improvements. Enhancements to the playlist feature help editors to quickly draft up outline suggestions for exports into editing software like DaVinci Resolve.
Automatic video metadata extraction now supports XMP and Windows metadata as well as further customization of extended properties.
We have written a summary of everything that is new in version 8 that you can view here.
The documentation explains the program in detail, you can download it separately or download the full software package including the documentation.
fast video cataloger 8 is now available for download
The start/help window in Fast video cataloger is a web browser. It uses the chromium embedded framework and you can access and use it easily from scripts.
You get the browser interface from the standard scripting interface
var browser = scripting.GetBrowser();
To open a web site in the browser you would simply write: browser.Address = "https://google.com/";
And here is a full example:
using System.Runtime;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using VideoCataloger;
using VideoCataloger.RemoteCatalogService;
class Script
{
static public async System.Threading.Tasks.Task Run ( IScripting scripting, string arguments )
{
var browser = scripting.GetBrowser();
browser.Address = "https://google.com/";
}
}
The use of the browser has almost endless possibilities. You can use it to present information and info from your scripts, you can fetch data from other systems or even create custom user interfaces.
This text will show you step by step how to add a custom button in Fast Video cataloger that will let you google results for the currently selected actor.
Custom Actions in Fast video cataloger allow you to easily extend the functionality.
You can extend the program to launch web pages, launch external programs, or for more advanced scenarios launch c# scripts with full access to the complete video database.
In this example, I will show how you can search google on the currently selected Actor.
The basic Googles URL for searches is this:
https://www.google.com/search?q=
The text after q= is the query, and if you have more than one term just use a + in between them.
In Fast video cataloger, go to preferences and to the Action Tab.
Action tab in preferences
Click “Add” to create a new action.
On the first tab, Enter “Google Actor” as a label. And for tooltip enter “Google the selected Actor”
Title for the actor search button
Click on the “Execute” tab and change the drop-down list to “Web Page”
For URL Enter: https://www.google.com/search
site of the the search engine
Click the Arguments tab.
For arguments enter : q={actor_firstname}+{actor_lastname}
Enter the url arguments to pass in the first and last name of the actor.
Click OK to close the window. And ok again to close the preferences.
From the view menu, open the Action window.
Open the “Custom Actions” expander and you should have a button “Google Actor”
The new search actor button is in the action window.
Select an Actor in the Actor window, click the “Google Actor” button and the browser window in fast video cataloger should show you the result.
