F55: Sony Catalyst Browse & Catalyst Prepare review, comparison and write-up

.. taking the stills workflow parallel I only shoot stills on 3200 or 6000 which is why I am used to makeing a correction on every 'set' (woodwork room, kitchen being a 'set') because it is unlikely that the CTemp was actually 3200 or 6000, usually I click grey balance on something and slide a couple of hundred k warm of 'correct'. I hope to shoot my 'sets' with a consistent enough exposure so that one correction can be applied to the whole set without further correction.

Back to SlogEI and we will be in the same boat because we only have 3200, 4500, and 5500k so if our scene/set is not exactly one of those temperatures we need a global correction for that set.

So in EI I would suggest that while not critical the subdivision of colour correction would be a huge upgrade.

Shooing in non Custom Slog we can actually get the right Colour temp, but if we ETTR (a bit) for a clean file we are going to have to make a -ve gain adjustment in post as the Custom mode does not sustain EI.

On that basis once again we are probably going to have corrections, roughly divdieded in to 'sets/scenes' and again subdivision of colour correction would be of benefit.

S
 
I asked on the sony board what was their 'motivation' for design in such a manner - it would be really interesting to see how they think people will use it or how they envision it being used.

I know how I use capture one and resolve but maybe everyone else has a completely different approach?

At the front end of C1 I often rank my shots with star - one can then 'sort by rating'
In CB/P one can rank by OK, NG etc, but I cant see how to group those shots together?

S
 
Sony should turn Catalyst Browse into a plug-in like Film Convert or Colorista. The colour science and tools are great but stand-alone programs like this are an irrelevant step in most modern post production pipelines.
 
I've been using Catalyst Browse for 6 weeks or so. I as a version 1 piece of software it has some amazing features and looks quite promising. The ability to export cube LUTs is amazing, the scopes that are there are super responsive, it JUST recognizes CUDA based GPUs even if they are not in the primary spot and automatically picks the best one for rendering. The wheels are amazing for version 1 software, the plethora of metadata is great and it is fairly well organized for the user, exporting ASC-CDLs is useful and and there is a preset LUT for (drumroll) Slog 1.

People who are using PCs have the added benefit of being able to transcode material, more so in Catalyst Prepare, so you can get your material converted for use in Resolve. As PC users are painfully aware, the transcode options are very limited so these apps together remove a lot of grief particularly for those with XDCAM-EX or XDCAM-HD material.

I am sure that I will be missing things, as I am not in front of my workstation but off the top of my head those are the things I am jazzed about with CB and CP.

Looking forward to upgrading to version 1.1.

I was wondering if anyone else was using this software yet as things have been pretty quiet about it till this thread.

Thanks Dennis for your write up and Sam I feel your angst about this as well. Sony should have come out with this solution a long time ago but at least now they have and their efforts show that they mean business. Let's hope the momentum is sustained in developing these software tools.
 
While I have touched on the topic of PC user grief in transcoding material, anyone that uses Adobe Premiere / Adobe Media Encoder on Windows MUST get a copy of Miraizon's DNxHD Prores Encoder software. They just upgraded it so it uses all the cores on your machine, so it works about 2.5 times faster than the previous version in encoding to Prores. The files are recognized by Resolve, so you have a way to creating ersatz Prores files (including 4K) on a PC with relative ease and the cost is around 60 USD if don't have the prior version.

There are other solutions out there but they are silly expensive and are stand alone products and don't integrate into Adobe Media Encoder. This is a no brainer purchase for PC users.
 
Andrew Stone said:
I've been using Catalyst Browse for 6 weeks or so. I as a version 1 piece of software it has some amazing features and looks quite promising. The ability to export cube LUTs is amazing, the scopes that are there are super responsive, it JUST recognizes CUDA based GPUs even if they are not in the primary spot and automatically picks the best one for rendering. The wheels are amazing for version 1 software, the plethora of metadata is great and it is fairly well organized for the user, exporting ASC-CDLs is useful and and there is a preset LUT for (drumroll) Slog 1.

People who are using PCs have the added benefit of being able to transcode material, more so in Catalyst Prepare, so you can get your material converted for use in Resolve. As PC users are painfully aware, the transcode options are very limited so these apps together remove a lot of grief particularly for those with XDCAM-EX or XDCAM-HD material.

I am sure that I will be missing things, as I am not in front of my workstation but off the top of my head those are the things I am jazzed about with CB and CP.

Looking forward to upgrading to version 1.1.

I was wondering if anyone else was using this software yet as things have been pretty quiet about it till this thread.

Thanks Dennis for your write up and Sam I feel your angst about this as well. Sony should have come out with this solution a long time ago but at least now they have and their efforts show that they mean business. Let's hope the momentum is sustained in developing these software tools.
Click to expand...

I never would have even tried Catalyst if it weren't for private conversations with Sam when I was complaining about the lack of visibility of exposure indexes burnt into file metadata and he suggested Catalyst.

So thanks to all of us for sharing, discussing, and to all a good night.

;)
 
Liam Hall said:
Sony should turn Catalyst Browse into a plug-in like Film Convert or Colorista. The colour science and tools are great but stand-alone programs like this are an irrelevant step in most modern post production pipelines.
Click to expand...

I don't think it's really intended as part of a high-end post pipeline. I think Catalyst Browse is intended to fill a hole for producers to review footage. As a standalone tool that lets producers log footage and export individual clips, it works. It even lets them apply LUTs so they're not reviewing with the log curve. For simple post workflows it's a way to do simple copies and batch transcodes.

I think for these features it will be servicable. Sony annoyed people when they made Content Browser require a paid license - this remedies that for basic functionality, and leaves complicated functionality on a paid license. That's fair I think.
 
I also saw Sam mention Catalyst Browse in another topic and I've found it incredibly helpful for reviewing clips and checking metadata.

Does anyone know if Catalyst Prepare has been updated to support FS7 files yet? I'm slightly annoyed that I burned through the trial when it didn't even work with the camera. Is there any way to get Sony to reset the trial or send another trial key? (once it's updated for FS7, of course)
 
Viddovation said:
I don't think it's really intended as part of a high-end post pipeline. I think Catalyst Browse is intended to fill a hole for producers to review footage. As a standalone tool that lets producers log footage and export individual clips, it works. It even lets them apply LUTs so they're not reviewing with the log curve. For simple post workflows it's a way to do simple copies and batch transcodes.

I think for these features it will be servicable. Sony annoyed people when they made Content Browser require a paid license - this remedies that for basic functionality, and leaves complicated functionality on a paid license. That's fair I think.
Click to expand...

Maybe Sony are missing a trick here. I have no issue paying for software and would be happy to pay to get it integrated into my NLE. Both Film Convert and Colorista work as a stand alone programs and as a plug-ins, but I doubt many people use either outside of their NLE or graphics program.
 
jshbckr said:
I also saw Sam mention Catalyst Browse in another topic and I've found it incredibly helpful for reviewing clips and checking metadata.

Does anyone know if Catalyst Prepare has been updated to support FS7 files yet? I'm slightly annoyed that I burned through the trial when it didn't even work with the camera. Is there any way to get Sony to reset the trial or send another trial key? (once it's updated for FS7, of course)
Click to expand...

Yes, Prepare has been updated and finally "sees" FS7 files!
 
I am sorry to break in with a "newby" question.
I need to upgrade my older PC to something that can handle these new applications well.
Thinking a Macbook pro would be a good portable solution. My question:
There are a lot of choices around graphics cards or integrated graphics, and such.
What should I be looking for in that department.
Thanks so much for any light you all can shed on this quagmire.
mark knobil
Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh!
Docco DP
 
So far after my testing, even on an older machine Catalyst is fast and responsive.

Two things to consider about your new machine; stick with NVIDIA graphics cards not ATI. If you ever want to use Davinci Resolve it works better with Nvidia although in the past year BMD made Resolve work with ATI cards through OpenCL but its sluggish in my tests. I also think Premiere uses CUDA so again, Nvidia, Nvidia, Nvidia...

Second thing is using an SSD hard drive as your primary drive if possible. Your computer will fly like it's on steroids, I did this on one of my PC's and it's almost like working from memory at memory speeds since SSD is not mechanical (which I'm sure you already know).

You can get a 240GB or 512GB SSD drive for under a couple hundred dollars if you look around. They seriously fly. My Windows machine boots up in 8 seconds.
 
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I am sorry to break in with a "newby" question.
I need to upgrade my older PC to something that can handle these new applications well.
Thinking a Macbook pro would be a good portable solution. My question:
There are a lot of choices around graphics cards or integrated graphics, and such.
What should I be looking for in that department.
Thanks so much for any light you all can shed on this quagmire.


You want the highest end Nvidia chip/most video RAM that is available in the MacBook Pro you are considering.

So the reality is, buy all the options. My late 2013 has all the RAM, etc and the 1TB PCIe SSD. This machine may be the best piece of hardware I have ever owned. And I have owned a lot.

And don't upgrade the OS yet. Vendors are still working to approve the latest versions of Yosemite. There are major performance issues with Avid. I am on Mavericks but the new machines will have some version of Yosemite.

Hope your purchase goes well,
Robert
 
starcentral said:
Yes I got a message this morning when I fired up the old computer, haven't had a chance to try it out yet.

Let us know your findings, hopefully "batch" is back. ;)
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Hey,

In the Mac version of 1.1 I cannot seem to select multiple clips for transcoding. The are all from the same test shoot, same codec, same everything. Anybody got it to work on a Mac?

Thanks,
Robert
 
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