This movie provides a basic understanding of the function and capabilities a Phase One
Media Pro
Media Pro is catalog software
that helps you organize and manage
a large photographic archive or an archive that includes other kinds of Media
such as movies,
Audio’s, text documents,
layout presentation and more
the first thing to understand is that all the work you do to organize your pictures
resides in a catalog document
not in the files themselves
this catalog document
like the One we have here
is One that can be
moved from One computer to the other
so that even if
that second computer isn't currently connected to the set of files
it can still know everything about your collection
let's open up this catalog and see the kind of information that we get
as you can see we have a set of thumbnails that's on the right-hand side of the window
and then we have upset of categories over here on the left
down at the very bottom we have this thing called catalog folders and what that is
is a representation of the file system itself
and I can click through any of these folders
and look at any images that happen to be in these folders
now One of the things you notice of course is that they're these red question marks
and that means that these images that can't be found this foulder can't be found and in
fact if we look all the way up to the drive itself
the drive itself can't be found either
now that's okay because
we know that this drive isn't currently connected to the computer
but One thing that this does illustrate that's very important
is that
the catalog structure gives you the ability to
look through, browse and organize your pictures even if you are not connected to the pictures
let's connect up the drive
and see what we get at that point
once the harddrive is connected, when we go back in the Media Pro, we can see that all
the question marks have disappeared browsing through folders is a useful way to find pictures
but it's not necessarily the best way to find pictures
Because the pictures you may be looking for may be widely scattered
let's look at some of the
what they call catalog fields
these groups of metadata tags
that we can use to find pictures that we're looking toward any given time
so here in the date finder we can browse
by date and I can open up
to any particular day and
click on that day and all of the pictures
that were
shot that day, if they've been catalogued
are now available to me. We can also look for files according to file type or according
to which camera shot the pictures so all of the work that we've just seen
are tags that are put into the picture as soon as the picture is shot so we didn't have to
do any work to get those tags there
Media Pro also lets you create and use our other really useful tags such as these location
tags
which organize pictures by
Country, state
city and location
Media Pro can read these tags if you've created them in Capture One or Bridge, Photoshop, Lightroom
Photo Mechanic
or lots of other applications, or you can create them here really easily
you can also organize your pictures according to tags
such as ratings
as well as keywords
and author and others
you can also cross reference tags
so for instance if I’m looking for the best pictures from Iceland I can select Iceland
and hold down the command key and control key on pc
and cross reference that with
four stars, which is my highest rating in this catalogue
and I come up with the just five images that have been rated as four-star pictures
that came from Iceland
if I want to
continue that search through more images I can add the
three-star images to the group and the two-star images and the One star images
and so on
the catalog sets panel is the most capable and flexible place within the Program
to do lots of organization
you could set this up however you want and you can build a hierarchy
that suits the needs of your collection
for instance I have
uh... all of my commissioned work within this one very large set called “jobs”
anytime I doing assignment for our client
I make a subset for that client
and then I can put the different jobs I do for that client within that group as well
so if I do multiple jobs
for the same company
they can all be organized this way
now this looks like a set of folders
but it's not, the images are living in the folders
wherever the folders happen to be they may be on different drives but I can bring them
together here in these virtual sets
when I have a small shoot I may not need to subdivide the images very much but when I
have a large assignment like what we see here
I had multiple situations
and I can
subdivide these images for each situation so that it makes it much easier for me to
go through and
find those pictures and organize them
and deliver a very coherent and
well edited and organized group of pictures
for the client
One of the most valuable things you do to your image collection
is to search it for high value items
such as images you might want to use in a portfolio or send off to a stock agency
by doing those searches here within
the Media Pro catalog
you can save that work and you can revisit it later
for instance I have a earlier searches that I’ve done here and I’ve just created catalog
sets for those
and when I just
the other day went through and looked for images I might want to add to my portfolio then I was
able to name
this group
for
the search that I was doing
and subdivided according to the type of work
looking in here I might say well
I’m going to decide that I am going to use of few of these
so I’m simply going to
hold down the control key
or right-click
and add a group and say
let’s say add to website
and put a date; 110514
and
I’m going to
say that, this one
And this one and that one
are going to be added to my website
so I simply drag them into this group and they show up
and now I’ve been able to subdivide
This set of images down into some really high-value images
and be able to use them for something
and to be able to save that information
that's really a an important
kind of function that we want to do across the entire collection
and something that's very nice about this
as I’ve been able to do this
without having to create
a new set of pictures
or without having to move things around in to different folders
because remember these aren't folders these are just
like a playlist in your music program
and Media Pro doesn't only let us organize the pictures
we can also do stuff with the pictures
we can create web galleries
we can create slideshows
We can convert images
or we can even send them straight to the image editing application of choice here with the
right click
look for other movies on the website
that will show you how you can take advantage of some of these other functions