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Southwest Gaming ExpoWorkshop on Network and Systems Support for Games (NetGames 2009)ICIDS 2009 Interactive StorytellingGlobal Game Jam
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Jump to: Software All product reviews |
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Keeping media organized for software projects is, in general, a real pain. In addition to source code, software nowadays is made up of dozens of different drawings (bitmap and/or vector), audio files, and video files. Windows explorer does just fine for moving files around, but it does a pretty poor job of letting you browse pictures in a meaningful way, and any kind of annotation is limited to creation and modification dates. iView Media 2 and MediaPro 2 are very capable media browsers that allow you to browse, thumbnail, preview, and annotate your media quickly and easily.
At its heart, the iView Media product is a database. Creating a database is as simple as dragging a folder into the program's main window, after which the program will drill down through all the subdirectories, indexing and thumbnailing every media file it can find. Once it's done, you can save out the catalog to disk for instantaneous loading later.
To show off the features a bit, I created a test folder and filled it with several different file types. Let's first look at the folder using plain old Windows explorer.
(click for full-size version)
Honestly, it's not very helpful. Every icon is just a generic placeholder. Some items, like the GIF and JPG files have a preview option available under the right-click menu, but the rest require you to open up an application (Media Player, Internet Explorer, etc) to view 'em. When you're dealing with a non-trivial number of files, this could get very time consuming. If you're trying to keep a "trail" of earlier versions, this gets even more difficult, because there's no way to annotate the files to show what changes have been made from day to day.
Now let's drag this folder into iView MediaPro and see what we get.
(click for full-size version)
Ahh, now that's better. Most of the files now have a thumbnail that shows you what's in the file. It even made a thumbnail for the html and the text file, although it wasn't able to thumbnail the Flash file. The panel on the left gives you some very complete information on the selected file (in this case, the animated GIF), even including details like resolution and frame rate. The "Caption" panel allows you to enter and store general notes about the file.
There are some tabs along the top of the window, so let's take a look at a couple of those. I'll also scroll down the left panel to show more options.
(click for full-size version)
Here's the "List" view that shows the media in a more traditional detailed spreadsheet-style view. Clicking on any column sorts the files by that column, which is handy if you want to see what your "fattiest" graphics are for size-pruning. Scrolling down the panel on the left, you see that there are over a dozen different specific annotations you can give each file to ensure that any author/copyright info or dates or special notes are kept with each file. The "People", "Keywords", and "Categories" boxes remember their entries so you can build up lists of commonly used information and select them for each file.
iView MediaPro's search feature is absolutely superb. In addition to being able to search by filename or any annotations you create, you can search by file size, image pixel-size, audio bitrate, number of frames, or any other information that's associated with any of the files. This is the only product I've found that lets you do a search as sophisticated as "Show me all of the AVI and Quicktime video files that are longer than 3 seconds but shorter than 15 seconds". iView MediaPro's search capabilities are amazing.
Now then, let's explore a couple more tabs, namely the Media tab and the Organize panel. . .
(click for full-size version)
Clicking the "media" tab will give you a preview of the image in as large a size as will fit in the panel. Since my GIF is rather small, so is the preview. Also note that since my GIF is animated, I have controls so I can watch the animation without having to load up an app that's capable of viewing it with animation, like Internet Explorer.
The panel on the left now shows some more options that are available. I can change the individual colors of item listings (to flag items for action, for example). I can also quickly filter my file list by date or type, although my little sample catalog only included media item of each type.
iView MediaPro also has some interesting capabilities, like the ability to generate HTML thumbnail contact-sheets and PDF files. It can batch-convert between different file-types, or it's scriptable via VBScript or JavaScript (on Windows) or AppleScript (on Mac), so you can hack together quickie scripts if you needed to do something more involved than simple batch bit-depth or resolution changes to files. It can also burn an entire collection (along with catalog file) to a CD recorder. This CD, in combination with the free read-only version of iView available on the site, is a great way to share portfolios of images
As you can see, I'm almost a convert to the iView MediaPro way of organizing your media, so I took the logical next step. I tried to kill it!
I recently upgraded my computer to a fancy-pants new machine with a 160 gig hard drive. Since I've got a bunch of old clipart CD's that I use from time to time, I decided to put 'em all on the hard drive and let iView be my clipart browser. These CD's have about every possible combination of media you can find, with file types including WMV (Windows vector), JPG, GIF, TTF, MIDI, WAV, MP3, and a few other formats I can't even identify. Some (like Broderbund and Corel's products) require custom browsers because they've got proprietary graphic formats, but others (like IMSI and GlobalStar) resort to "lite" third-party image-browsers like Hijaak, which honestly doesn't do a very good job of browsing large collections. That being said, I figure 18 gig of media files should be sufficient to stress-test iView MediaPro's cataloging capabilities. iView does publish that the MediaPro product can only handle 120,000 files in a single catalog, so I know that some of the collections must be broken up, but it should be able to handle the bulk of the collections.
The results of the torture test were mixed. While iView MediaPro had no problem building a catalog of the smaller collections of 1,000-5,000 pieces of media, it choked when it got to "Art Explosion Seasons, Events & Holidays", which is a collection of about 15,000 holiday-themed pictures, mostly in WMF format. It loaded and built thumbnails just fine fine, but closed without warning when I attempted to save the collection out as a catalog file. I tried again and verified that the program does get troublesome with larger archives of WMF images, apparently well short of its advertised 120,000 file limit. I tested again with some other clipart directories, and the program did indeed seem to die without warning somewhere around 15-16,000 files.
Now then, the file number-limitation probably won't bother most folks who are trying to organize project data, which will hopefully fall well short of such a quantity of pictures. I did notice some other problems, though. Specifically that the program couldn't thumbnail about 2-5% of the TTF files I gave it, the scrollbar thumb didn't work well with a ridiculously large catalog (more than 32,000 files), and MP3 is not an available format for batch conversion. Documented is that the Windows version cannot yet support EPS and PDF files. Given that EPS and PDF are common file formats on Windows as well as Mac, that's a not-insignificant deficiency with the Windows version.
Tech support was very helpful. The aforementioned problems were all addressed in one form or another. In fact, there's now a new minor update available that addresses a couple of my problems, and fixes to the rest (including EPS/PDF support on Windows) are in the works. Kudos to the iView folks for being responsive to problems. Bugs happen, and how you react to them is what separates good products from bad.
Complaints aside, iView MediaPro is the best solution I've seen for cataloging, organizing, searching, and annotating multimedia files. It supports dozens of file formats, has top-notch search capabilities, and has several powerful built-in tools. I could think of several uses for this tool besides media organization. It'd be great for making thumbnailed HTML picture collections. It would make a good batch format-converter so you can keep your original graphic files at the same bit-depth, resolution, and format as they were received from the artists. The free read-only version on the website and ability to burn media/catalog to CD would be good for helping to distribute media collections to clients electronically (ala Acrobat).
iView MediaPro is just one of those tools that'd be handy to have even if you don't have an immediate need for it. You'll likely find a place where it can make your life easier after you've used it a bit. The price is either $199 or $49 depending if you want the pro or standard version, and they've got a comparison chart to help you figure out which would best serve your needs. If you buy the pro version, you should opt for the shipped-n-boxed version. It costs the same and includes a very good manual and reference card. The manual's spiral-bound, so it'll sit nicely on your desk as you dig through all of iView MediaPro's features.
