Metadata for finding clips to use

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Hi. I have hours and hours of sports video, primarily cycling, and I'd like to be able to find clips of certain activities to use in compilation videos. For example I'll have a 3 hour video of bike races and I'd like to have some organization method to find all video segments that have street corner shots. I'd like some kind of list with clip name and time segment. I've tried keywords, descriptions, etc. but that doesn't really get me time points as there could be a couple dozen of those points.

If you have any ideas how to find this kind of clip segment I'd appreciate it.

Cheers,
Kawika

[Battle Vaughan]

You could build a database in a program such as Microsoft Access, and design the description fields to suit yourself. The data input, however, could be pretty labor intensive. I once designed a file-retrieval system for my newspaper's film negative files using Access, it can be done if you have the interest in learning the program (not trivial, I admit) and doing the data entry...

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question but have you entered metadata at the time of shooting, or at the time of logging and ingesting?

There are no strict rules for metadata. Each software is different, and each production is different. Can you give us more details about your workflow?

[Trevor Dennis]

What do you edit with? If you are an Adobe user, then you'll have Bridge which has full metadata capabilities. If you just have Photoshop but used FCP for instance, you'd still have Bridge, but I can't say for sure it would recognize your video files.

I suspect you could still get round that though. Bridge plays my MXF files no problem.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Hi and thanks for the replies. I use Adobe Production Premium CS6 on my PC. Main camera is a Canon XA10 and I use MTS Joiner to put files back together. It's normal to have 6-12GB files which I'll then import into Premiere Pro.

I'll use directories named year/date_camera<cam#>_category_event_clip (e.g. 20121219_xa10_race_redtrolley). Files inside will have the same name with the clip name (e.g. 20121219_xa10_race_redtrolley_cat4.mts). I'm experimenting with sub-directories for the different content since I also use images, AE projects, client files then output and would like to keep them all together so the video files may be in a sub-folder called 02_Footage.

For metadata I usually just put what is already in the directory/filename plus teams of special interest in that race. I really don't use this feature to it's fullest. I'd ultimately like a searchable resource to tell me what clip has a certain type of scene and the start/stop points. I guess that would be a database but I was hoping there was something already in PP or even Prelude but I didn't get the impression that's what they were about.

I create a project and import all the footage. Wait for the conforming to finish. Usually drag the first clip onto the new item icon to create a sequence and start chopping it up into a manageable video.

At some point in the middle, once I have a rough idea of the length and the feeling I want I'll jump over to SonicFire to put together a rough audio track. Push it back to Premiere pro and start editing the clips to hit the beats. Fine-tune the audio and timing then output it for upload to youtube or vimeo.

Once I'm done I'll push the whole directory to my external RAID which is where everything is generally reachable.

I use Lightroom for photos and have considered using it's interface for managing my videos as I like the metadata interface but I haven't made any decision there.

Thanks for any tips.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Prelude will get you what you want. I haven't used it but from what I've seen it seems like what you're looking for. Check it out. Its metadata support is supposedly outstanding.

And, afaik, Lightoom and Premiere isn't directly integrated, unlike ACR and/or photoshop. I could be wrong here, though.

[Kawika Ohumukini]

Thanks Sareesh, I'll take a closer look at Prelude.

Cheers,
Kawika