Square Box Systems announced on Monday the immediate availability of CatDV 6.0, a major upgrade to its video logging and media asset software for Mac OS X and Windows.

The emphasis in CatDV 6 has been to simplify the user experience with these enhancements:

• The new tree-based navigator provides a unified and intuitive interface to organize clips in a catalog, access clips in the shared database, and directly browse the file system.
• The new filmstrip view gives an exploded thumbnail view of any video clip in the catalog, making it easy to see the entire contents of a clip at a glance.
• The clip details panel has been completely redesigned, with a customizable layout, separate tabs for different logging fields, and a fully resizable media player.
• The new two-window timeline editor lets users assemble search results into a rough cut sequence, with all the power of 3-point editing but without the need to learn a complex editing package.

CatDV 6

"Designed for both standalone and networked operation, CatDV is a cost effective and highly scalable media asset database and video logging tool. With advanced metadata extraction, automatic scene detection and a powerful yet intuitive user interface, CatDV is the ideal application to bring order to the mass of media files content producers everywhere have to deal with on a day to day basis," according to Square Box Systems.

CatDV 6 requires Mac OS X 10.3 or later and Java 1.4.2 or later. The entry-level Standard Edition is priced at US$79.00 and the Professional Edition is priced at US$295.00. There is a free, limited-time trial.