We made the decision today to step up from a single user version to the Enterprise Version of CatDV from Squarebox.
I’ll be honest and say I don’t even understand everything this software can do because it does so much, but it’s incredibly powerful, incredibly deep and in just the short time we’ve had it, it’s already helped us get our library and media more organized. What I flat out love is the ability to create proxy files so when we search for media, transcriptions, etc… we don’t just see a description of the tape log or the words from the transcriptions. We see the actual video clips so we know right away if a shot or interview will work. That’s a HUGE timesaver.
In our case, we’re only keeping the proxies online as we just don’t have a need for our entire library to be live at all times. CatDV keeps all the media locations as part of the metadata for each clip so we can very easily load the full rez clips from the archive drives.
Lots more to update on this as we really get into the software and what the Enterprise version will bring us vs. the single user beside just allowing multiple people to access the database at a time. In fact we’re hoping to offer some workshops and training seminars in our new location next year.