what's a good video tagging solution for final cut?
January 14, 2010 3:01 PM   Subscribe

this is kind of a redo about a former question. I have a SAN at work that we use for storage of all of our media for video editing. We would like to figure out the best way to tag all of our media for searching from now on.

To be clear about our specs:

our SAN is not XSAN. It's a 3rd party solution we're happy with and won't be changing.

We really just need to tag clips for searching. Final Cut integration is optimal, but the ability to simply look at one database, search it and get every clip that fits our search criteria presented to us so that we can copy the clip to a project is all we ultimately need.

i've heard that xsan has this functionality, but I don't understand its specifics. if it sounds like xsan fits the bill, I'd love to know specifically how it works, and if it'll play nice with our 3rd party SAN. as a for instance, looking at the apple site: I see that XSAN has some kind of spotlight co-functionality for searching media, but does it also bring up all the other stuff that spotlight would return if I searched for "foo?" If I'm searching, I want it to be video only, not word or excel documents being returned.

sorry for being so very specific, but we've been running in circles with this for months and haven't really hit the solution we're looking for. tia.
posted by shmegegge to Media & Arts (3 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
This is what Final Cut Server is designed for. It's big, quite hairy and needs a babysitter, though.
posted by bonaldi at 7:07 PM on January 14, 2010


Response by poster: thanks for the recommendation. we'll look into that. what do you mean, precisely, when you say it's quite hairy and needs a babysitter?

what we'll probably end up doing with whatever solution we use is we'll have a dedicated staff member for logging, organizing and managing our media. is that what you mean? or does it actually need a tech to constantly make sure it still works?
posted by shmegegge at 8:28 AM on January 15, 2010


What I mean is that on a scale from set-it-and-forget-it to techs-need-to-watch-it-daily, it's somewhat closer to the latter than the former. It's not as bad as something like, say, Microsoft Exchange, but I wouldn't expect to be able to have a technical person install it and then everybody just use it worry-free in perpetuity. It has maintenance that must be done, and so forth. Your dedicated staff member should be able to cover a lot of this, however.

Also importantly, installation requires a fair bit of planning and preparation. There's work that must be done before the software's even installed -- and going back on the early decisions is painful.

(A lot of this is par for the course for enterprise and business software, to be fair -- it's not high maintenance by standard IT standards. I mention it only in case you assume it is as forgiving and friendly on a par with the majority of other Apple software, which the server side of it certainly isn't)
posted by bonaldi at 6:30 PM on January 15, 2010


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