I've been scouring the internet looking for a tool that could take a miniDV tape, and record just the first 5 or so seconds of each shot. This would allow me to catalogue the tape (preferably inside MC), and take up very little disk space. I could even convert the dv files to something smaller like wmv's later to save even more space. Adobe Premiere can almost do it, with it's "scene detect" option in the capture software, but you can't set an arbitary amount of time for each clip to be recorded. So you'd end up with the whole tape on your hard drive.
The only thing that came close was a program called
scenalyzer. It "scene detect"s and caputres about 5 thumbnails from each shot to give you a little filmstrip summary of each shot on the tape. But it saves it's catalogue file and thumbnails as a special file that can only be read in that program. I have lots of data, and want to use MC to organize it all, so physical video files on a disk is better for me.
Another one that came close was
CatDV. But it is a bit expensive.
I imagine that this could find a use even at the home video, consumer level. People might want to keep a library of all their home movies, without having to capture them all and make them into dvds. If there were enough demand for it, then perhaps something for a future MC???