CatDV Pegasus Changelog

What's new in CatDV Pegasus 14.0.4

• AtDV 14 builds on CatDV 13 with significant technical changes under the hood to provide a cleaner, more modern codebase, plus a number of functional enhancements:
• The bundled version of Java has been updated from Java 1.8 to OpenJDK 14. This fixes a number of long standing UI glitches on the Mac (such as menus sometimes being greyed out until you switch to another app and back) and allows the app to be notarised to be compliant with the much stricter signing requirements under MacOS Catalina and later.
• Any last remaining 32-bit code (such as the AAFTool for processing AAF files) has been removed, as has other legacy code such as to handle special characters in XML files.
• The native player has been updated to use a new rendering pipeline and other improvements:
• Use of OpenGL (instead of Direct3D9) on Windows, and Metal (instead of deprecated OpenGL 2.1) on Mac, allowing colour space conversion and other processing to be done on the GPU, and overlays such as subtitles to be rendered
• A new container architecture for low level tracks, making it easier to add new codecs and formats to the player.
• More efficient file handling when the same file is used in different tracks or more than once in a sequence, resulting in improved performance.
• Ability to turn individual channels on and off when playing files with audio tracks containing more than two channels.
• The native player and transcoding library has been updated with additional codec support:
• Add support for encoding to Apple ProRes (on Mac and Windows) using Apple SDK.
• Add support for encoding to DNxHD and DNxHR using Avid SDK.
• New support for decoding Canon RAW.
• These are in addition to the existing support for natively playing and transcoding most common camera formats including ProRes, DNx, Blackmagic RAW, ARRI, and RED.
• CatDV 14 adds experimental support for using the CatDV desktop application in the field as an ingest tool:
• A new Preferences option (in the Import section) will prompt you to copy media files to local storage whenever you import files into CatDV (so you have a local copy of media from a removable storage card for example). At the same time, you are prompted to fill in basic metadata that is set on the clips, and you can choose whether to link to the copy or the original file path.
• Additionally, the new Upload Media To Server command will copy media to a suitably configured server: import files from a camera card, set up a destination on the the server using media store mappings, then copy files to the server and place them in the correct server location via http/web upload without requiring file system access to the server. Files can also be uploaded automatically whenever clips are published to the server with a new Preferences option (in the Server section).
• Display a modernised thumbnail-only grid view optimised for video with widescreen thumbnails that fill the cell (by adding a blurred background if necessary). By contrast, the new "Photo Icons" view uses a square cell grid and is optimised for viewing still images and documents which might have a mix of portrait and landscape orientation.
• Add support for quickly scrubbing through a movie by moving the mouse over the thumbnail image (using either the new filmstrip proxy image, used by Web 3, or the thumbnails stored against the clip, indicated by a red or orange cursor respectively)
• Support for viewing and managing all the proxy and other files associated with an asset via the Media menu and the media panel popup menu. These include different types of proxies, filmstrip images, and different language tracks as used by the web interface and defined via media stores. Media stores are now cached in local preferences so they are available even if you are not connected to the server.
• The Media/File Information command lists all the available files and versions for a clip, and there are improvements to the information dialog itself (including a Reveal In Tree button, better player support, a new panel to extract any JPEG images, better metadata display, and a larger hex display panel).
• Add support for extended proxy file naming to cope with different files in the same directory that differ only in their filename extension. By default the proxy for a file called MyFile.mxf is now called MyFile.mxf.mp4 rather than MyFile.mp4.
• Add support for displaying subtitles or closed captions in a VTT or SRT file, either as a sidecar file (alongside the movie) or defined via media stores. You can customise the appearance of the subtitles including their size, whether to merge multiple captions showing at the same time, and whether to ignore any position information and always display them at the bottom of the screen.
• Display a checkerboard background when viewing still images or movies with transparency
• Add support for displaying marker annotations that were created with Server 10.
• Add support for displaying filenames containing emoji characters.
• Improvements to the Find Similar command to make it easier to find and delete duplicate clips (by choosing which clips to select, and letting you delete directly from the result set).
• The new media metadata FileHash field is calculated by sampling the file at various points throughout the file from the beginning to the end, providing an easy way to find duplicates or moved files, while being much faster to calculate than a full MD5 checksum.
• The Disk Space Tool command now lets you compare two snapshots or two directories so you can quickly see why a directory or volume has grown since it was last scanned, and there are new commands to find any corresponding clips on the server and to filter the file list by file name.