How to Catalog DV Camcorder Tapes¶

Footage captured from MiniDV and Digital8 camcorders carries information that ordinary video files do not: the camera writes the date and time of the recording into the video itself. Fast Video Cataloger reads this while indexing, so tapes you have captured to disk keep the moment they were actually filmed. This works for raw DV files (.dv) and for DV stored in an AVI container (.avi).

Recording date and time¶

DV camcorders stamp the recording date and time into every frame. When you index a DV file, Fast Video Cataloger reads that camera clock:

• The recording date of the video as a whole is stored in its metadata properties (as Recorded date), alongside the other file information.
• Each thumbnail is noted with the exact moment it was shot. The note appears in the Notes view for that thumbnail, and because it is a normal note, you can find footage by when it was filmed using the note search.

Nothing exposes this camera clock through a normal video player, so this information is otherwise lost once a tape is captured to a file — the only date such files usually carry is the timestamp of the file itself, which is the day you captured the tape, not the day you shot it.

One thumbnail per recorded clip¶

A single DV tape is almost always a string of separate recordings — every time you pressed record and stop on the camera, a new clip begins. Fast Video Cataloger can use the camera clock to find where each recording starts and capture a single thumbnail at the beginning of every clip, instead of sampling the tape at a fixed time interval. The result is one thumbnail per shot, which matches how the tape was actually filmed.

This is controlled by the One thumbnail per DV clip option in Preferences (CTRL+P) → Video Indexer. It is turned on by default. When it is on, it only affects DV files; every other kind of video is indexed on the normal thumbnail interval as before.

If a DV file carries no usable recording time — some captures, such as broadcast recordings, leave the camera clock unset — Fast Video Cataloger falls back to the normal interval sampling and adds no recording notes.

Re-indexing existing videos¶

DV videos already in your catalog were indexed before this information was read. To add the recording notes and pick up the per-clip thumbnails, re-index those videos.

Note: Fast Video Cataloger recognizes the .dv extension as a video format, so raw DV files are picked up when you add a folder or use auto-add, the same as any other supported video.