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Hints and Tips for Your Everyday Work

  • Use the Video Details and Keywording windows to enrich your videos' specificity in a structured manner. This investment will repay as your catalog fills up, and you must find specific content. It will significantly enhance the power of the filter function to extract material accurately and efficiently.

  • Look at the video indexing settings and decide if you want to extract XMP and other meta-data from the video.

  • Change the Video Catalog preview thumbnail and the Video Scenes thumbnails to represent videos as accurately as possible.

  • Use Keywords actively to make specific content more accessible to find and compare.

  • Filters are inherently wild-carded; for example, writing "a" in the Title field brings out everything containing an "a" somewhere in the title.

  • Using secondary storage media, use the same drive letter to store your catalog files. In cases of a forgotten or misplaced File, try searching for it first on your Windows search bar.

  • The program will start with the last catalog loaded; however, you can access other catalogs through the Catalog/Open dialogue menu. It shows the recent catalog listing and an open catalog button.

  • Fine-tune the preferences by initially using only a small number of videos to test your settings before piling in your whole collection.

  • Sometimes, the first few seconds of a video are blank or uninteresting. If this is a common problem in your collection, you have ways to deal with it. In the Preferences/Video Player tab, you can set the 'Video Start offset:' to the number of seconds necessary to skip these initial frames at playback (the default is 4). Also, in the Preferences/Auto Indexer tab, enter the position where you want to capture the preview thumbnail in the' Capture video-frame after: ' field.

  • Create many different layouts based on what you currently do with the program.

  • Bins can help in setting up workflows.

  • Learn to use shortcuts.

  • There are many windows in Fast Video Cataloger; if possible, a second monitor would help.

  • The real power of the program comes when you start using the C# scripting interface to automate tasks. Looks at the samples and try altering them to get started.

  • Re-index a video will use the current index settings in preferences to extract new thumbnails. Keywords you have assigned to the video will be kept.

  • CTRL+I open a small search input to let you search without opening the search window. Useful for most searches, each new search term narrows down the selection.