Handling Media Manager

cadu wrote on 3/11/2012, 2:23 PM
Hi,

I begin to use Media Manager and I am found difficulties to find out information about how handling Media Manager in a better way.

Actually, I know how to operate the basics of Media Manager. However, as it is being my first experience organizing media, I will be grateful if anyone has any tip or rule of thumb about organizing with Media Manager.

Ps.: Is there any way of Media Manager as an stand-alone application (without the need of open Vegas)?

Thanks in advance,
Cadu

Comments

i am erikd wrote on 3/11/2012, 2:37 PM
This may be stating the obvious but I use Media Manager as a way to handle many different libraries. One for Stock Video, Motion Graphics, SFX, Loops, Stills and many, many more. I must have 30 different libraries which keeps me from having more than a couple thousand of different pieces of media in each library.

Then I create specific tags that work for each library as I find that tags aren't usually universal in applying to the libraries.

Erik
cadu wrote on 3/11/2012, 6:16 PM
It seems that Media Manager just tag files, is it right (there isn't file duplicating) ?

My audio files are in folder C:\Users\Documents\audio. So, I tagged all this folder. If I move files from this folder to other one, will the sources / links be lost (Media Manager can't find the file)?

Best,
Cadu
NickHope wrote on 3/12/2012, 12:51 AM
There is no way that I know of running Media Manager standalone.

There is no file duplicating.

If you move the files, the links will be lost. At first it seems incredibly time-consuming to re-link the files one-by-one, but actually there is a "hidden" way of doing it en masse. Highlight all of the files in the "search results" pane in Media Manager, then start to drag them. As soon as you have dragged just one pixel, the "Resolve Offline Media" window pops up. Then you can choose "Smart Search" and re-link all your files in one operation.

Here are a couple of screen grabs showing how I'm using Media Manager for my archive of marine life footage. They might give you some ideas.

Media Manager 1
Media Manager 2

I haven't yet tried the "Save Tags and Properties To Selected File(s)" function, which writes tags right into the file headers, but I plan to. Will be testing it first though, in the light of this.

Media Manager is a rather under-developed application. It's a real shame that development of it did not continue, and I really hope SCS address it. If anyone has any suggestions for improving it, please add them to this thread.
cadu wrote on 3/14/2012, 2:37 PM
Hi,

Thanks everybody for information!

I am really liking Media Manager. Great and flexible tool, even being under-developed (last version 2.4 from 2008). Although I have experience few Vegas 11 crashes when I was just tagging files...

About "Save Tags and Properties to Files", I could apply it just to video and audio files. When applying to image (.jpg, .png) an error appears=> "Saving tags and properties failed for some files and the cause could not be determined".

Does anyone know if Media Manager is unable to "save tags" to image files?

And about files with tag saved inside, would the same hierarchical tag tree structure be recovery using media manager in another computer? I am thinking about share files with other people maintaining same organized structure...

Best,
Cadu
NickHope wrote on 3/15/2012, 12:36 AM
For tagging image files, the best software I found was GeoSetter and it's free. I would use that instead of Media Manager for image files, but I can't guarantee the tags will then show up in MM. They should do.

I assume when you save tags to files it just saves the tags that you can see bold in the properties pane and which appear in the "Advanced search" pane. e.g. Artist, Copyright, Tape Name etc. (I might be wrong since I haven't done it yet). Those tags are a separate thing to the hierarchical structure of tags that you create in the database. But you could transfer a media library to the other user so that they get those tags too.

Many people have had trouble with access permissions when transferring the MM database to another user or computer. I had trouble moving my MM libraries between my desktop and laptop, but I can do it by backing up my media library to a USB memory stick and opening that on the other computer.
cadu wrote on 3/15/2012, 6:08 PM
Thanks for the image software tip. I am trying XnView as well...

http://www.xnview.com/en/index.html