Version 10¶
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 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.