Creating a catalog of stock footage for in house use?

[Austin Burke]

I work for a start up company and over the past few months we have been shooting a ton of footage and also B roll for our projects. We have been growing and now have 2 shooters and 2 editors plus assistants and are looking for the best way to organize our footage so that it's easy for the editors to look through and find B roll clips for our segments. We are shooting on the Sony FS7 and FS5 which are shooting .MXF files (I know not red cameras sorry guys). We thought of using Lightroom as a catalog as we would be able to add search able keywords to the files but lightroom doesn't seem to accept .MXF Files. We also are wanting to have all the files on a dedicated computer that would be searchable from anyones computer through an ethernet connection. Does anyone have any ideas on the best way to go about this and how do you keep all your footage organized?

 

[M.Halsell]

Digital Asset Managers (DAMs) is what you are looking for. Most of the capable systems are quite expensive. Not much off the shelf, so to speak, unless you roll your own. If you have an Adobe workflow, they offer Adobe Experience Manager. Also, in your search you will probably find DAMs can be too complex and not flexible enough for your needs. Take a look at something like KeyFlow Pro, perhaps a starting point in solution search.

At the basic level you can create video contact sheets with Adobe Bridge and Photoshop depending on how simple or complex your needs are. If you run across a good solution, please share with the community.

 

[Mark van Coller]

I am using CatDv and it works quite well. It is scalable with a database functionality and integrated with Premier and I think with Avid. I believe Only there Premier Package "Pegasus" works with Red footage natively. CatDv Pro MXF with the additional Calibrate MXF Codec Pack works natively with FS7 Footage. This package allows you to add clip ratings from 1 to 5 stars as well as keywords and a tone of other user definable logging fields.

 

[Austin Burke]

THanks for the responses. I made some suggestions but for now its out of my control as I let the higher ups make the call. Will update you guys once I figure out what we go with but it might be a bit. For now we are playing around with the comment feature on macs to add keywords to the files (though the comments are removed when transfered to a new mac by usb or air drop)

 

[Eric Santiago]

I catalog using foolcat.

Now I wonder if hyper links to the proxie would work.