SDCAT

Following on from the tutorials I did for 7D ingest workflow, the one thing I miss is having a contact sheet with all the thumbnails, shooting information, and log notes on that I can either get to with a web browser or print off.

In the days when I had a PC, I ran a great program called Scenalyzer which was primarily for the capture and logging of DV tapes. This was a great little piece of software as it could catalog in about 5 minutes, and entire one hour tape and produce some html pages with basic shooting info, and thumbnails of each clip. This was invaluable for quickly looking for shots.

Things move on however, and now I don't have tape, just SD cards which have all the clips already stored separately with no need to fast scan a tape. Now, with the Canon 7D/5D, each MOV file comes with it's own tiny little THM (thumbnail) file. Three great things about the THM files:

  • They contain a visual thumbnail of the 1st frame
  • They are small (i.e. quick to process)
  • They contain a wealth of Exif info

I am now looking at writing a java app that will automatically catalog the SD Clips and produce a contact sheet with the thumbnails on. In addition, I will probably have some way of adding log notes at some point. A have done a quick POC and taken a bunch of random 1-2second clips using all the lenses I have (including some that don't register with the camera). It takes virtually no time to create the page (but then at the moment, it is very simple). Below is an example:

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