Version 10¶
Fast Video Cataloger 10.3.1¶
The AI assistant connector now describes how the catalog works when an assistant connects. Assistants are less likely to present scene thumbnails as detected cuts, and know to check the keyword list before a keyword search and that transcript search matches the words exactly as they were transcribed.
Fixed Check Catalog closing with an error when a new scan was started while broken videos were still being removed.
Fixed Remove thumbnails without faces taking a video down to no thumbnails at all. A video with no people in it had every thumbnail removed and dropped out of the catalog views; the cleanup now always keeps one, as the server version already did.
The Search window's List and Tree switch now applies to the Search window only. It shared one setting with the Keywording window, so choosing to search by tree also took the list, and with it the keyword filter box, out of Keywording. Preferences, on the GUI page, now sets both windows: the two settings you had are the Keywording window's, and a new pair below them is the Search window's.
Fixed picking a keyword from the drop-down in the search window doing nothing. The keyword boxes in Video Keywords, Exclude Keywords and Scene Keywords let you type a name and press Enter, but choosing a name from the list they drop down only filled the box in, and you had to press Enter as well. Choosing from the drop-down now applies the keyword straight away. A keyword applied this way is also ticked in the keyword tree, not only in the list, so it shows whichever view you are using. The Exclude Keywords and Scene Keywords boxes also had the wrong text colour, and both showed an empty keyword group drop-down on catalogs with no keyword groups. Turning off the keyword list on the Video Keywords row no longer hides the group drop-down in the Exclude Keywords section.
Fixed keyword groups added, renamed or deleted in the Keyword Manager not reaching the search and keywording windows until Fast Video Cataloger was restarted. Creating your first group looked like it did nothing at all, since the group drop-downs are hidden while a catalog has no groups. They now update as soon as the change is made, keeping whichever group you had selected.
The keyword filter box in the Keywording window now sits above both views and filters the tree as well as the list, so it keeps working whichever view you have showing. Typing opens the branches that hold a match, and clearing the box puts the tree back the way you had it.
Reset search can now be given a keyboard shortcut, in the Shortcuts window. It clears every search filter, the same as Reset in the search window, and comes with no key assigned so you can pick a combination that suits you.
Fixed switching to a saved layout minimizing Fast Video Cataloger to the taskbar. Closing Fast Video Cataloger while it was minimized stored that in the layout, and the next start restored it, leaving no visible window. A layout now records what the window will come back as, so closing it minimized keeps a maximized window maximized and keeps the size and screen you had set, and layouts already holding a minimized state are repaired the next time they are used.
Fixed actor detection missing actors who were clearly on screen. When a face scored almost as high against two similar-looking actors, that thumbnail was discarded and counted for nobody, so a video showing the actor in two thumbnails could end up with one usable thumbnail and no cast entry. Such a thumbnail now counts for both of the actors it could have been, while at least one thumbnail that matched a single actor outright is still required before anyone is added to the cast, so an actor who never won a thumbnail on their own is still never added. Detection during indexing, Detect Actors on selected videos, and detection on selected thumbnails all used the same rule and all missed the same actors; they now share one implementation.
The Detect Actors window now lets you select its log and copy it, and has a Copy log button that takes the whole run to the clipboard. The log also says, for every actor it considered but did not add, which condition was not met.
Fixed face recognition failing on catalogs with several hundred actors while the catalog server was running. Learning faces, matching actors and the Learn Actor Faces script all stopped with a message about a MIME part quota, and the only way round it was to stop the server first; the stored faces are now read in pages and the limit is no longer reached.
The Learn Actor Faces sample script no longer works through every image an actor has. It learns at most twenty faces per actor and picks the images to examine at random, which is both faster and a better spread than taking whichever images come first - they are usually all from one shoot. Images it cannot read are counted in the summary instead of listed one by one, so a catalog whose companion images have moved no longer fills the console. Both limits are constants near the top of the script if you want to change them.
Fixed the Bin window still showing a video's old title after it was renamed. The new title showed everywhere else, and switching bins and back was the only way to see it in the bin.
Fixed the right-click menu in the bin list acting on the selected bin rather than the bin you clicked on, so Delete could remove a different bin and Clear Selection could appear to do nothing. Deleting a bin now asks first and says when the bin holds other bins that have to go first; the videos in a deleted bin stay in the catalog.
Fixed videos indexed after deleting the Recently Added bin going nowhere. The bin is now recreated instead, and it is described in the help under Bins.
Translated the AI settings in Preferences. Scene classification, object detection, the confidence, frame skip and pool size settings, and the options to remove thumbnails without faces or that look alike, all showed in English whatever language Fast Video Cataloger was set to.
Fixed Scale to fit showing only one thumbnail per row when the video scene window was narrower than the thumbnail size, for instance 640 pixel thumbnails in a 500 pixel wide window. It stopped at the scale where a single thumbnail fitted the width instead of scaling further down towards the minimum scale, so the row count never went up.
Example images can now be dragged onto the example list in the Trained Tags window, from Explorer or from another application, instead of going through Add from files.
A trained tag no longer takes the same example image twice. Adding a picture the tag already holds - the same file picked or dropped again, the same picture under another name or off the clipboard, or the same thumbnail taught again through Teach trained tag or Remove and teach as - is skipped, and the message says how many were. A different region of a thumbnail already taught is still a new example.
Adding example images to a trained tag no longer redraws the whole example list. Every example the tag already had was read and decoded again on each add, so a tag with a few dozen of them locked the window up for seconds; only the new examples are added to the strip now.
The AI features now look at every thumbnail by default instead of every fifth one. Scene classification, object detection, image tagging and trained tags all read your captured thumbnails, and skipping four out of five of them made a run look as though the AI had missed things rather than never having been shown them. Raise the frame skip, in Preferences or in the AI Scene Classification window, when you want the speed back. A frame skip you have already set is left alone, and so is the one in an existing server configuration. The server now also looks for faces on every thumbnail, which the desktop version already did.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.3¶
Teach Fast Video Cataloger keywords of your own with the new Trained Tags. Select a handful of thumbnails that show the thing you mean, right-click and choose Teach trained tag, and the AI can then find that subject across your catalog and keyword it — around ten examples give good results, with no dataset to annotate and no training run. A tag can match whole frames, for scenes and settings like a particular studio, or apply to a detected object, so you can teach apart kinds of the same thing — say two dogs by name — with each detection going to the best-matching tag. The new Trained Tags window on the start page manages the tags, takes example images from files or the clipboard, and can test on the current selection to show what a run would tag without writing anything. Matches run from the AI Scenes batch tool or automatically while indexing, become purple keywords, and a wrong match is corrected by right-clicking it and choosing Remove and teach as — the correction itself teaches the right tag. Trained tags use their own AI model, downloaded from AI Models on the start page's Maintenance section.
Connect an AI assistant to your catalog. The installer includes fvc-mcp.exe, a connector built on the Model Context Protocol that assistants such as Claude use to reach outside systems. Point one at it and you can ask for footage in your own words - it searches your videos, scenes, transcripts and cast, looks at the actual scene thumbnails to judge what is in a shot, and can tag videos, take keywords off again, and gather them into bins for you. It works through the Fast Video Cataloger server, so the catalog and the video files stay on your own machine. See Connect an AI Assistant in the server guide for setup.
The server can now be given API keys. A key is a long-lived credential with its own role, for a script or an assistant that runs unattended, where the normal login would expire after eight hours - it is what an AI assistant connected through fvc-mcp logs in with. Keys are created and revoked by an administrator in the User Management window, which shows each key's role, when it was last used and when it expires, or through the REST API. Each key carries its own permission level so it can be limited to read-only access, and only a fingerprint of the key is stored in the catalog; the key itself is shown once when it is created. Keys have their own allowance, the same number as the user accounts the server's license allows, so a single-user license can run one assistant.
Videos already in the catalog can now be indexed through the server's REST API, so a script or an assistant can find the entries that have no thumbnails yet and work through them. Indexing this way applies whatever the server is set up for, including transcription and the AI features.
AI image tagging can now run while videos are indexed, instead of only as a batch afterwards. Turn it on under Preferences, on the AI Classification tab, alongside scene classification and object detection, and set the tag sensitivity used for those runs there as well. Videos you add from then on are tagged as they are indexed. The setting is carried over to catalogs shared through the server, so a server can tag the videos it indexes too. Tagging still needs its model downloaded from AI Models on the start page's Maintenance section first, and it is heavier per frame than the other two AI options, so indexing takes longer with it switched on.
AI image tagging now adapts to your own footage. Tagging decides that a tag applies by how far a frame stands out for that tag compared to normal, and until now "normal" was fixed when the model was built, measured once against a broad mix of general video. On a catalog of material unlike that mix, tags were being judged against footage nothing like your own. Fast Video Cataloger now learns what normal looks like for each catalog, from the frames it tags anyway, so there is nothing to turn on, nothing to wait for and no extra processing time, and the more of a catalog you have tagged the better the fit. On general footage this changes little, which is what it should do - the built-in reference already suits that material. It matters on a catalog made up of one particular kind of video, such as screen recordings or interviews, where tagging becomes more selective and keeps the tags a frame genuinely stands out for rather than the ones its whole library has in common. On a catalog that is all one kind of material, expect fewer tags than earlier versions produced. Re-running tagging on videos tagged by an older version brings them up to date.
Fixed extended properties extracted while indexing not showing up anywhere they can be used - the search window's Extended properties filter, the video list's column picker and the property editor were all empty even though every video had its properties. Videos indexed since 10.2 were affected; opening a catalog once with this version repairs it, with no re-indexing needed.
Fixed the details window still showing the title, path and other details of the previous catalog's last selected video after switching catalog.
The Extended properties section of the Search window now opens the groups that hold a restored search value, so a search remembered from the last session shows what it is filtering on instead of only marking the section as active. A range search now also remembers both of its values.
Fixed searching a newly opened catalog with the previous catalog's extended-property filter still applied, which usually found nothing and left the Extended properties section marked as active until Reset was pressed.
Fixed deleting an extended scene property removing the values from your videos instead of from your scenes, so a video property with the same name lost its data while the scene values stayed behind in the catalog. Removing the last property with a given name now also cleans up its category and grouping information, which used to be left behind.
Fixed deleting an extended property whose name contains a quote or an apostrophe doing nothing, with no message. The property came back as soon as the list was reloaded.
Fixed the All option for extended properties in the Search window not being applied, so a search that should have required every property still matched videos with just one of them. Choosing Any or All under Scene Search turned the setting off for videos, and the scene section's own Any and All had no effect at all.
Fixed the Extended properties section of the Search window staying empty for the whole session, so there was nothing to search on. It happened when a saved layout opened that section automatically at start up, and it then stayed empty for every catalog until the program was restarted. The section now also says so when the properties cannot be read, instead of just looking empty.
Fixed the mouse wheel doing nothing over the Search window's Keyword Tree. The wheel now scrolls the search panel there, the same as over the keyword list.
Fixed the start page's Server section showing stale buttons, so Manage Users - the way to create the first API key for an AI assistant - could stay hidden even though the server was running. The section now updates when it is opened and when Server Setup finishes, and the server guide now documents the built-in admin account and creating the first API key from Manage Users.
The last page of the Share Video Catalog wizard, and the Manage Users description on the start page's Server section, now say that API keys for scripts and AI assistants are created from Manage Users. Nothing in the guided flow used to mention that the path existed.
Fixed "Skip videos in folders containing" under Preferences > Video Indexer not covering the subfolders of an excluded folder. Only the name of a video's immediate parent folder was tested, so a video one level down from an excluded folder was indexed anyway; the whole folder path is now matched. The setting takes one piece of text, not a list, which its tooltip now says.
Fixed the User Management window's user list having column headers styled differently from every other list, with a different look when the mouse is over them.
Fixed dragging an actor towards the Cast window, or double-clicking an actor to edit it, sometimes blanking every portrait in the Actors window until Reset was pressed, and repeated drags eventually freezing the application. A refresh that fails now also keeps the current list on screen and says so instead of silently emptying the window.
Fixed video streaming from the server for catalogs that store their video paths relative to the catalog folder, which is the usual layout when the videos sit next to the catalog file. The server could not resolve those paths, so streaming a video over the API returned nothing.
Fixed the server console closing with an error instead of starting when a folder setting was left empty, and closing down when it was started without a console to type commands into. It now reports which setting is missing, and treats the folder settings as optional when ID-based streaming is on, matching the Windows service.
Fixed the server's catalog statistics always reporting zero thumbnails, both in the combined statistics and on its own endpoint.
Fixed searching actors over the server's REST API returning each actor's full portrait image along with the details, which made the answer many times larger than it needed to be. Searching by name now behaves like the other actor searches and leaves the picture out; ask for it with skipImageData=false or fetch it from the actor's portrait address.
Fixed searching scenes over the server's REST API returning every video that matched the search, however few scenes you asked for. On a large catalog a request for a single scene came back with thousands of video entries. The answer now carries only the videos the returned scenes belong to, and reports the total number of matches.
Fixed the server console ignoring a catalog file passed on the command line, and being unable to accept the upload folder there at all.
The lists of videos in a bin and of videos waiting to be indexed can now be fetched a page at a time over the REST API.
Searching videos over the server's REST API can now find the videos a person appears in, and can require every keyword instead of any of them. Both were already supported by the catalog but had never been reachable through the API, so there was no way to go from a person to their videos, and adding keywords to a search only ever widened it.
Fixed a search that requires every keyword returning the whole catalog when none of the keywords exists in it. It now returns no videos, since no video can carry a keyword the catalog does not have. The same applied to scene searches.
Fixed the AI features finding nothing when the server indexes a video. Scene classification, object detection, image tagging, trained tags and face recognition all ran while the server indexed, but their results were stored against a thumbnail that does not exist, so nothing showed up on the scenes and the keywords they should have placed were missing. Videos indexed by the server before this version have to be indexed again to get them.
The capture width list in Preferences now offers 640, the width the AI features make full use of. Object detection reads frames at exactly that size, and image tagging and trained tags get noticeably more detail than at the default 320.
Fixed uninstalling leaving files behind, so the Fast Video Cataloger folder stayed on your disk after the program was removed.
Fixed a subscription asking to be activated again every time the program started while a monthly payment was still going through. The activation was accepted but not carried over to the next start, so the same computer had to be activated day after day.
Fixed moving a folder inside the File Organizer starting a Windows copy of it as well, so the move then failed because the files already existed at the target, and the program could stop responding. Renaming and deleting files in the File Organizer had smaller versions of the same timing problem, also fixed.
Fixed the File Organizer moving a video on disk but leaving its catalog entry pointing at the old location, with nothing reported. The entry was updated by matching the old path, which could miss; it is now updated by the video's id, and a move whose catalog entry cannot be updated is reported as failed.
The Share Video Catalog wizard no longer shares a whole drive. When the catalog's videos sit directly on the root of a drive, sharing stops with a message asking you to move them into a folder, instead of sharing the entire drive and changing its permissions.
Folder clean-up after a drag-move now only removes folders that were part of the drag. Dragging a folder still moves it with its subfolders without leaving empty husks behind, but the folder you dragged items out of is never removed, even when the move empties it.
Fixed the video title on catalog thumbnails being hard to read in the dark skin, light gray text on the light label band. The same fix applies to the video wall title, the actor names in Add Videos and the timing text in Export Contact Sheet.
Fixed merging keywords silently failing when the keyword being merged away had child keywords. The child keywords now move along to the keyword you merge into, and a merge that cannot complete now says so instead of staying quiet.
Fixed renaming an actor keyword to the name of an existing but unused keyword silently doing nothing. Merging actor keywords now asks for confirmation first, the same way video keywords do.
Fixed the filter above the Extended video properties list matching case-sensitively, so typing frame did not find video_FrameRate. It now ignores case, like the other filter fields.
Fixed some MP4 files reporting a far too high frame rate in the video's metadata properties, such as a 29.97 fps recording showing as 96 fps variable rate. Re-index affected videos to correct the stored value.
Reindexing a video now updates its stored length and file size. Previously these were only read when the video was first added, so a video that was edited and reindexed kept showing its old duration.
Fixed a keyword with no colour set showing in white in the Search window but being drawn transparent in the Keywording window and the Add Actor window. All three now show it the same way.
Keywords created in the Keyword Manager before 10.2.3 without picking a colour were stored with a transparent colour, which made them sort to the top of the keyword lists instead of alphabetically. Opening a catalog now gives those keywords the same white as keywords created from the Keywording box. Keywords created in 10.2.3 or later were already stored that way.
Fixed keywords added to an actor in the Add Actor window not showing their colour until the window was closed and opened again.
The colour square next to a keyword in the keyword tree now shows a tick when the keyword is applied to the selected videos. It looked like a checkbox that never ticked, and the only sign a keyword was applied was the highlighted row, which read as selected rather than applied.
The Keyword Manager no longer selects the first keyword when it opens, and shows the selected keyword in its title bar. Previously the only sign of what was selected was the name in the Keyword field, which is also where you type a new keyword, so the dialog opened ready to rename a keyword you had not picked.
A plain click on the selected keyword in the Keyword Manager now deselects it, which takes you back to creating a new keyword. Previously that needed Ctrl+click.
The Search window now has List and Tree checkboxes above the keywords, so you can switch between the flat keyword list and the keyword tree, or show both, without going to Preferences. The choice is remembered and the Keywording window follows it. The controls were there since the tree view was added but never shown.
The Keyword Manager can now filter its keyword list by group, with the same Group dropdown the Keywording and Search windows have. Previously the Groups column could only be read, not filtered on.
The Keyword Manager now remembers the order and width of its columns between sessions, the way the video catalog list does. Previously they reset to the defaults every time the dialog was closed.
Fixed the progress bar in the title bar always animating without showing progress while a script reported it through SetProgress. It now shows how far the script has come; a script that passes no range still gets the animation.
Fixed the Learn Actor Faces sample script leaving the progress bar showing after it had finished, until the program was restarted.
Fixed the Open Folder button in Export Playlist opening the exported file instead of the folder it was saved in. It now opens the folder with the file selected.
Fixed a keyword created while the Search window was open showing up in its keyword lists but not in its keyword tree. The tree now gets the keyword straight away, under its parent if it has one, and a deleted keyword leaves the tree as well.
Fixed the "Remove and teach as" entry in the scene keyword right-click menu drawing black text on the dark menu instead of white.
Fixed a search failing when it excluded a keyword whose name contains an apostrophe.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.2.3¶
More of the Actors window right click menu now works on a multiple actor selection. Select several actors and you can add them all as cast to the selected videos in one step, filter the videos on the whole selection, or add the whole selection to the current filter. Filtering on several actors shows the videos featuring any of them. Previously only Delete worked with more than one actor selected, and the rest of the menu was greyed out.
Thumbnails from DV video now carry the date and time the footage was shot. DV camcorders record a clock into every frame, and this is now read while indexing and saved as each thumbnail's note, so the Notes view shows when each moment was filmed and the note search can find footage by when it was recorded. The recording date for the video as a whole is read into its metadata properties as well. Previously none of this was picked up, and captured DV tapes often have no date other than the file's own timestamp. Re-index videos that are already in your catalog to add the notes.
DV footage can now get one thumbnail per recorded clip. A DV tape is usually a string of separate recordings, and the new One thumbnail per DV clip option (Preferences, Video Indexer, on by default) reads the camera clock to capture a thumbnail at the start of each recording instead of on a fixed interval. The .dv file extension is now recognised as a video format.
Indexing now reads more details from the video file when they are present: audio language and channel layout, video bit depth, HDR format and TV standard (PAL/NTSC), and the genre and director. These show up in the video's metadata properties alongside the information already read.
The Bins window right click menu now has a Sort by submenu, the same one as in the video catalog list. Sort the videos in a bin by any of the columns it shows and switch between ascending and descending order, including in the icon views where there are no column headers to click.
Fixed the video player coming back at the wrong playback speed after a video was stopped and started again. The speed was restored from a value that lagged one step behind the speed you had picked, so a video playing at 2x could return at normal speed.
Fixed the playback speed reported to scripts. GetPlaybackRate returned the previously set rate rather than the current one, and a rate the video format rejected was reported as 1.0 while the video kept playing at its old speed. SetPlaybackRate now raises an error for zero, negative and other invalid rates instead of accepting and discarding them. Note that the speed a video actually plays at is decided by the video format and its codec, so a rate that is accepted is still not a guarantee.
Fixed Add to Current Filter replacing the actors already in the filter instead of adding to them.
Fixed the program shutting down when you closed the Edit Actor dialog with the title bar X after changing something and then answered No to the prompt to save. Answering Yes was not affected.
Fixed keywords with an underscore in the name losing it in the keyword tree, in both the keywording window and the search window. The keyword lists were not affected.
Fixed typing a new keyword group name in the Keyword Manager also adding an existing group that started with the same letters, so the keyword ended up in both groups.
Fixed renaming a keyword in the Keyword Manager to a name that already exists silently doing nothing. It now merges the two keywords, after a prompt telling you how many videos and scenes will move, as the 8.6.4 release note described.
Fixed removing a keyword that has child keywords doing nothing, silently. The Keyword Manager now names the child keywords that block the delete.
The Parent dropdown in the Keyword Manager now has a (none) entry, so a parent can be cleared once set. It is greyed out for actor keywords, which do not support parents.
Fixed the rename and delete menu on keyword groups being almost impossible to reach. The group dropdown sized itself to its contents, so with short group names the right-click target was a sliver under the control. Rows now match the control width.
Fixed the Nof Children column in the Keyword Manager only updating after the dialog was closed and reopened. It now updates as parents are changed.
Deleting a keyword in the Keyword Manager now asks for confirmation first.
The keyword filter in the Keyword Manager now has a Clear button, like the other filter fields.
Fixed the same keyword appearing twice in the Recent keywords list.
The group filter in the Keywording and Search windows now reads Group: (all) instead of All Keywords, to make clear that it filters the keyword list by group.
Untagging the last video or scene that used a keyword still removes the keyword from the catalog, but the program now tells you it happened, so a keyword with a parent cannot quietly disappear from its hierarchy. Removing a keyword from all videos in the Keyword Manager no longer deletes the keyword.
Fixed the thumbnail in the Bins window flashing the loading image while the mouse was moved over it.
Fixed sorting on the Path column doing nothing, in both the video catalog list and the Bins window.
Fixed the Sort by menu not sorting when the program was set to a language other than English.
Fixed sorting on the color label in descending order giving the same order as ascending.
Fixed the Bins window sorting on the wrong extended property when its columns are set up differently from the video catalog list.
Fixed the File Organizer leaving empty source folders behind after a drag-move. A folder the move empties is removed for you, and this now works consistently when a move involves several folders or a nested subfolder.
Fixed a script that adds a folder and then starts indexing leaving the videos sitting in the Add videos window. The videos were found and queued, but indexing never actually started, with nothing reported to say so. Scripts can now add a folder or a video file and start indexing straight after, as the Auto Index Folder and Skip Dark Frames sample scripts do.
Fixed the program stopping responding, or closing down, when you dragged an actor out of the Actors window. The drag now also starts straight away instead of pausing first.
Fixed saved filters only working once per session. Picking the filter that was already showing in the Saved filters list did nothing, so the video list kept the search you had made in between, and only a restart made saved filters work again.
Fixed the search window keeping parts of the previous search when a saved filter was applied. Excluded keywords, the keyword tree selection and the selected archive were left as they were, and the leftovers were still used in the search.
Fixed the * that marks a filter as changed staying on after the filter was saved. The Save button is now only enabled when there is something to save.
The filter options are dimmed while No Filter is on, to show that they are not applied to the video list. Your filter is still there and comes back when you press Filter.
Fixed the Saved filters bar opening again immediately when you clicked it to close it.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.2.2¶
You can now add and remove actor keywords directly from the Actors window, without opening each actor for editing. Select one or more actors and a keyword panel appears: type a keyword — with autocomplete for ones you have used before — or pick it from the list to tag every selected actor at once. The keywords already on the selection are shown as chips you can click to remove, dimmed when a keyword is only on some of the selected actors. You can also select several actors and delete them together in one step. Previously, keywording an actor meant opening the Edit Actor dialog, adding the keyword and saving, one actor at a time.
Keyword export to CSV now includes each keyword's type and groups, and importing the file restores them. Previously imported keywords always became user keywords with no groups.
Fixed issues with transciption failing on some machines due to a missing redist file in the installer
Fast Video Cataloger 10.2.1¶
Fixed keywords created by the AI tools not showing up in the search window's keyword lists until the program was restarted or the catalog reopened.
The AI Scenes batch tool now shows progress while a video is being processed instead of only when a whole video is finished.
Fixed the skip thumbnails already classified option in the AI Scenes batch tool having no effect.
AI scene classification, object detection and image tagging are now faster and use much less GPU memory, especially when several AI options run at the same time.
Fixed importing keywords from a CSV file. Keyword files now import correctly whatever spreadsheet saved them, with the hierarchy preserved, links and descriptions imported, and keywords that already exist moved to the parent named in the file instead of being duplicated.
Fixed importing from another catalog not preserving the keyword hierarchy. Video and actor keywords now keep their parents, colors, links, descriptions and images, and keywords that already exist in the catalog are merged instead of skipped.
Fixed the messages in the import catalog window running together on a single line.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.2¶
Added support for AV1 video. The built-in codecs have been updated to their latest release, so AV1 files — increasingly common from phones, drones and web downloads — are now indexed and played out of the box, with no codec packs or system codecs needed. The codec update also brings several years of format fixes and improvements for other formats.
Added AI image tagging. A new option in the AI Scenes tool describes what is in your video frames using a broad vocabulary of scenes, objects and settings — for example beach, kitchen, crowd, airplane or sunset — and adds the results as searchable keywords. It complements object detection, which only recognises a fixed set of 80 object types. The tagging model is downloaded on demand from the AI models dialog, and a sensitivity slider lets you tune how freely it tags. See the "AI Image Tagging" help page.
You can now import your own object detection model to detect object types the built-in model does not know. Train a model on your own classes (for example with RF-DETR or RT-DETR) and import it with the new Import button in the AI models dialog; detected objects are added as keywords just like the built-in model. See the "Custom Object Detection Models" help page for a full walkthrough from training to import.
Hold Shift and click the remove button on a scene thumbnail to also remove all thumbnails to the nearest end of the strip: Shift+click near the start removes the thumbnail and everything before it, Shift+click near the end removes the thumbnail and everything after it. A quick way to trim away intro or ending frames in one click.
Fixed keyboard shortcuts not working in the fullscreen video player. Only Escape and the jump forward/backward keys worked in fullscreen; now the whole shortcut set works there as intended, including play/pause, frame stepping, capture frame and any custom shortcuts.
Fixed the View menu buttons appearing to do nothing for windows floated outside the main program window. Floating windows are no longer hidden while the View menu is open, so showing or hiding a floating window from the menu now takes effect immediately. The other menus still hide floating windows while open.
The folder button in the Edit Actor companion images section now opens in the folder where the actor's existing companion images are stored, for example the actor's own folder when actors were created with Import Actors from Folders. If the actor has no companion images yet, it opens in the shared folder of the actor's videos, so actors imported from folders of videos start in their own folder too. Previously this worked only for actors with a linked companion folder; for all other actors the button opened in the last folder used for any actor.
Fixed video file paths sometimes being treated as case sensitive, which could add the same video to the catalog twice. Windows paths are case insensitive, but the catalog's duplicate check only ignored case for the letters A-Z, so paths differing in the case of other letters, such as å, ä and ö, were seen as different files when adding folders or importing another catalog. Path matching now ignores case for all letters, the same way Windows does. The add video window also no longer lists the same file twice when the same folder is added again with different casing.
The program stays responsive during operations that previously froze the user interface while waiting for the catalog. This covers a large number of places, including searching transcripts, batch AI runs (scene classification, object detection, image tagging and face recognition), merging actors, importing keywords and actors from another catalog, the archive wizard, repairing the catalog, merging duplicate videos, and dialogs that load lists of actors or archives. The largest improvement is with big catalogs and when connected to a server.
Fixed importing actors from another catalog adding each companion image twice.
Fixed archiving with the ignore already archived option still copying and re-archiving videos that were already archived. They are now skipped as intended and no longer count toward the required free space check.
Fixed a transcript search being able to delay all other searches while videos were being indexed.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.1¶
Added support for external input devices. You can now control Fast Video Cataloger with an Xbox (or compatible) game controller or a MIDI control surface such as the Behringer X-Touch: bind device buttons to any command, and scrub through video with a jog wheel or an analog stick. Set it up from the Shortcuts window, where keyboard shortcuts and device controls are now configured together (see the "Use Input Devices" help page).
Added keyboard shortcuts to step the video one frame at a time: Ctrl+. (period) steps one frame forward and Ctrl+, (comma) steps one frame backward, pausing the video so you can review it frame by frame. Like all commands they can be rebound in the Shortcuts window or bound to buttons on a game controller or MIDI control surface.
Keyboard shortcuts now work in the fullscreen video player. Previously only a few shortcuts, like jumping forward and backward, worked in fullscreen; now the whole set is available, including play/pause, frame stepping, capture frame and keyword assignment.
Fixed learning faces from selected actor portraits skipping images that had scrolled out of view; all selected images are now learned in one pass.
Fixed the Edit Actor dialog asking to save changes when you had only viewed the actor without editing anything, which could also lead to an error when reopening the dialog.
Removing companion images by folder or zip archive in the Edit Actor dialog now correctly asks to save changes on Cancel.
Fixed masking and unmasking of videos failing with an encryption error since version 10.
Fixed video player not restarting when pressing play after a video had played to the end, and seeking back to the same position twice being ignored.
Selecting the next or previous video with a shortcut or controller button now keeps the playback state: a playing video keeps playing and a paused video stays paused on the new video. Previously, switching from a paused video incorrectly started playback, and switching from a playing video stopped it.
Added an Add To Playlist command that adds the selected videos to the current playlist, same as the catalog context menu item. It has no default key; assign a keyboard shortcut or a controller button to it in the Shortcuts window.
Adding to a playlist now shows a confirmation with the playlist name, and a message if no playlist is selected instead of silently doing nothing.
Scripts can now use face recognition through the new GetFaceRecognition function in the scripting interface, see the scripting documentation (script interface version 2.3).
Scripts can now stop video indexing with StopIndexing and control the player volume with GetVolume/SetVolume. RunCommand accepts language-independent command names so scripts keep working when the user interface language changes.
Added new sample scripts: Learn Actor Faces, Find Scenes with Faces, Auto Index Folder, Skip Dark Frames, Capture at Playhead, Search Top Rated and Mask Selected.
Layout Reset now restores your saved layout instead of the factory default, so you can close temporarily opened windows and get back to your customized workspace with one click. Hold Shift and click Reset to restore the factory default layout.
Fixed the File screen and the Start, Layout, View and Help menus opening behind floating windows. Floating windows are now hidden while a menu is open and come back when it closes; window layouts, including saved layouts, are unaffected.
Fixed renaming an actor not updating the name shown in the Actors window until the program was restarted.
Fixed re-importing a companion image folder in the Edit Actor dialog bringing back images that had just been deleted from the folder on disk.
Fixed removing all companion images and then re-adding the same folder in the Edit Actor dialog silently losing all the actor's images when saving.
Dropping a folder on the companion images area in the Edit Actor dialog now imports the images in the folder instead of adding the folder itself as a broken image.
Images dropped on the video cover areas now accept the extra photo file extension configured in Preferences, like all other image import paths.
Added a Close All button to the View menu that closes every window in one click, leaving an empty work area — handy when building a custom layout from scratch. Also available as the Ctrl+Shift+Q keyboard shortcut (changeable in the Shortcuts window). Windows reopened from the View menu come back in their previous positions.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0.6¶
Added red to mark actor companion images where we tried to learn a face and failed.
Updated the object detection feature to a new detection model. Existing object keywords are kept; newly indexed videos use the new model and results may differ slightly from before.
Face recognition now uses much less memory during indexing and the installer download is about 100MB smaller. Your existing actors and face data keep working, no re-indexing needed.
Added new dialog to download models, this also allow you to download a multilanguage whisper model
Update transcription to new whisper version
The transcription progress bar now shows real progress while the audio is transcribed, instead of freezing partway through.
Fixed an issue where transcription could stop working and return no result. The program now clears any leftover indexing process on startup so it recovers automatically.
Fixed issue with attract video wall stop changing videos in same cases
When switching catalogs we did not clear the search
Load progress bar is now removed when the videos has loaded
Fixed random shutdown crash after using the file organizer
Esc now closes modal dialogs like the "Edit actor", "Preferences" dialogs
"Import actor from folders" is generally improved and can now also add new companion images in a folder.
In the edit actor dialog, added check to prevent the same folder being added more than once.
Update of components used
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0.5¶
Fixed numerous backend issues when lots of people were accessing the same catalog.
Fixed issue where a broken date data in video metadata could lead to a crash.
Improved startup speed for large catalogs with lots of xmp data.
Fixed rare crash when adding tags.
Much faster refresh of keyword window when changing videos (should speed up selectiion when keyword window is open)
Much faster population of extended properties, and categories will stay open
Fixed issue where windows did not show when clicking them in the view menu (worked after a layout reset)
Remove a companion image from the companion image browser, scrolled the list to the top.
Right click a keyword in the detail view and selecting filter on, did filter the video but the correct keywords were not updated in the search window.
Black and white background option was missing from action buttons.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0.4¶
When autoindex from folder was enabled, and the folder was not accessable during startup we showed an error dialog behind the start splash screen, now the splash screen is closed so the dialog is visible.
When autoselection was disabled from selecting a thumbnail it was not enabled again when a new video was selected.
Some windows, like the cast window, did not properly use the width of the window.
Fix for shortcuts with arrow keys
Fix for using shortcuts in floating windows
Fix crash when switching catalogs
Switching catalog did not refresh the list of keywords in the search window
Moving the mouse over a bin video did not update the thumbnail on the bin but in the video catalog.
Fix for startup crash on some windows machines due to security settings blocking access to the locally hosted catalog.
Fix for crash when first running scripts and then opening popup windows in the same session.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0.3¶
Fix for startup crash due to CETCompat os settings, shadow stack enforcement (happended with cpus that has this feature if it was enabled in the os).
Fix for random shutdown crash in some cases when videos indexing was running.
Fix for thumbnails not being rendered in the details list in the catalog window if the thumbnail was from a video in portrait aspect ratio.
Fix for random crash when clicking words in the transcript window.
If MPV was set as default player and a transcript word was clicked, the internal player window was shown before the video played in mpv.
Keywording shortcuts (Default ALT+Numpad) did not work.
Actor window now have a field to filter keywords.
Recent keyword list is not updated when a user changes color of a keyword.
Camera icon context menu had really bad colours in the light skin, makeing them unreadable.
Size of the keywording window and add actor is now saved.
Fixed issue with ALT shortcuts getting re-routed to mpv player when using the "UseMpvPlayerWhenALT.
Fixed issue with keyboard shortcuts assigned to numbpad.
When switching keyword in the keyword search window, with the keyword tree visible, an extra unneeded clear filter triggered, making the search slower than it needed to be.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0.2¶
Fixed random crash, issue with the c# scripting engine causing resource to fail loading.
Fixed a null reference exception shutdown crash.
Fix copy paste from some programs, depending on the format of the image in the clipboard it could fail with an error dialog.
Transcription window now has a Transcribe button.
Index/Transcribe did transcription but it also did whatever other index settings was set in preferences.
Manage keyword window did not show all keywords.
Opening the Actor window wrote a debug log file, or gave error if it could not write it. This is removed.
Drag n drop of a video to a folder in the file organizer did a copy instead of a move.
Fixed issues with transcription hallucination on videos with no audio.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0.1¶
Crash fix when closing tutorial dialog.
Fixed resource leak with drag n drop.
Fast Video Cataloger 10.0¶
Infrastructure¶
We have moved from Net framework 4.8 to .Net 10. This should make the whole software much quicker and prepare us better for the future.
New file organizer component, should fix a bunch of bugs and be faster than before.
New sqlite server backend, note that the encryption has changed so it is not possible to migrate a password protected catalog from version 9.x to 10.x. You first need to remove the password in 9.x, then load the catalog in 10.x and add the password again.
Localization¶
Whole program is now localized in German, Spanish and Swedish. Select language from the General tab in preferences. Let us know where translations can be improved, we are not native Spanish or German speakers, so some of the translations might be off, we will fix as soon as people report to us.
Server¶
A New hosted server option that also host all companion images and videos was added. Use the wizard from the Server menu (Renamed from Share). This is the new recommended version to share a catalog over the internet,
New user accounts for hosted server, when hosting a catalog you can setup account on the catalog and you can give them different access rights.
Improved rest api, the whole scripting api is now available through the rest api.
Improved server admin application, to manage your server.
Static html version for the static server, the web site version allow viewing a catalog, tagging videos and uploading new videos. This web version does not have all the features of the desktop application and since it is running in a web browser it will not support all video formats that the desktop application does.
Documentation¶
Documentation has been completely reworked, all documentation is now web based and searchable. As before you find it in the documentation tab.
Indexing¶
Face detection, we have added facial detection. Actors can be detected in videos if you enable the feature. There are a few things to consider for facial detection to work well like good portraits and enough thumbnails in the video.
Scene classification and object classification, we added scene classification and object detection. It can be done as part of the indexing process or from the maintenance screen. Detected scenes and objects are added as keywords.
Automatic faceless thumbnail removal, a new option to automatically remove thumbnails without faces during indexing. Enable "Remove thumbnails without faces" in the Video Indexer preferences tab. An additional option lets you keep faceless thumbnails that have scene or object classifications. The default thumbnail size has been increased from 160 to 320 pixels for better face detection accuracy.
Remove similar thumbnails, a new tool to deduplicate consecutive thumbnails that look visually similar using perceptual hashing. Available as a batch tool from the right-click context menu, the maintenance screen, and as an automatic step during indexing. Enable "Remove similar thumbnails" in the Video Indexer preferences tab and set the desired similarity threshold.
Native transcription, we moved the whisper transcript support from the plugin that we had in version 9 to be part of the program. The process is also optimized and should be much faster and the whisper ai model is included with the installer.
Companion images¶
Companion image zip support, you can now add entire zip files as companion images.
Faster threaded prefetch should help load images quicker.
Actors¶
Drag n drop an actor on another actor to merge the actors.
Video formats¶
Blackmagic RAW (.braw) support added. BRAW files can now be indexed, played back and included in catalogs alongside the previously supported formats.
Maintenance¶
Recover catalog, a new command on the maintenance menu that rebuilds a damaged catalog into a new .vcat file. The original catalog is not modified. You pick where to save the recovered copy (the default is the source name with a .recovered.vcat suffix, but you can place it on a different drive, which is recommended if a disk-full condition caused the corruption). Recovery can take hours on large catalogs and some data may be lost; a summary of what was recovered is shown when it finishes.