Australia’s Training Technology Centre Uses CatDV as a Media Asset Management System for Their Students

The Training Technology Centre in Australia recently needed a content management system for their large collection of training material and came to Square Box Systems Ltd. for the solution. Having carefully considered the state of the content management/asset management marketplace, Harley Doughty and the Training Technology Centre eventually settled on a solution based around the CatDV Workgroup Server and HTML Publisher:

“It was the good folks at WGBH in Boston who recommended that I take a look at the CatDV application when I visited them last year.”

“We had a lot of success with testing Live Capture and are getting very close to deciding on a purchase of a client/server system.”

“What I am now thinking, after extensive trial of CatDV , is to use it as our principal asset management solution. It handles a reasonable array of file formats, which would largely meet our requirements (ie. multimedia production), and it does video extremely well. I was surprised to find it ingested Photoshop formats as well as Flash, both of which are commonly created here.”

“On the capture side, we will probably go with a Canopus ADVC 300 Analog to Digital Converter in order to convert our analog collection. We don’t want to tie up an edit system with this function. In trials, we were able to use a Sony DVCAM tape deck to convert, on-the-fly, analog video to DV and capture this directly through “Live Capture”. If we record the analog source, and its accompanied Time Code to DV Tape through the DVCAM tape deck the resultant export also includes the timecode.”

“We would use the Web Publishing component to present a search portal to our general staff (ie. 30-40 personnel). I was considering one of the big boys as a workgroup solution, but having seen CatDV’s comparable abilities, I am rethinking the need for two systems – especially considering the cost and integration complexities involved. Although a market leader, the other system lacks the ability to truly understand video effectively, but CatDV can perform similar asset management functions in terms of metadata capture, thumbnail proxies, assignment to catalogues etc.”

Later, after using CatDV for a few months:

“We are seriously into the logging process now and I have started to establish some standard operating procedures based on the different media types we are ingesting and their various requirements. I have decided to group the media into: Video, Audio, and Graphics, and create bins and a range of catalogues under these media types.”

“Let me say that having used CatDV for a while now that the application is very cleverly designed. I am very pleased that I decided to go with this approach compared with other asset management solutions, as the underpinning design of CatDV truly understands management issues associated with rich media. Already I have commenced a logging process for our sound archive of CD music and sound effects – by ripping these into MP3 and centrally storing them. This process is relatively straightforward. The video is going well.”

“We have started a specialist cataloguer in the last week so our asset management project is hitting full speed as we start to work through our archive of footage. I just have to get other media producing elements of my organisation (ie graphic design and audio) to start implementing standard operating procedures that will support the whole asset management approach. Your tools have been invaluable, and because they are so user-friendly, the new guy has very quickly picked it up and is running with it.”

Harley Doughty
Manager, Training Technology Software Project
Sydney, Australia