Media Pro revival
Implemented
Hi,
This is not a real feature request, but I cannot find another way to have my saying. Well, MP is dead. Really? I think there is a way to make it alive. And better. It only takes good will! C1 will benefit from it, I am sure. MAKE MP an open source program. I am sure the OS community will rise to the opportunity. After months of trials, MP is still the best concept! C1, please be nice and show the world that money is not all that counts. I would buy the product and make OS, but I have no money for this.
Thank you,
Florin.
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Official comment
Hi,
Thank you so much for your feedback. I can't comment on why Media Pro was discontinued, but I will take your feedback back to our developers.
Best regards,
Jakob, Capture One -
My understanding (limited!) is that one of the issues is that Media Pro (which I also used) is only 32 bit. I don't know how difficult it would be to make a 64 bit version. I suspect that there may not have been enough users to make the investment in that worthwhile.
Ian
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Ian,
Thank you for the answer. My (limited!) understanding is that you are not affiliated with C1. I still use 32 bit programs, AV included, with Win10, no problems. I tried several alternatives to MP, IMHO, none is even close to the ease of use and "lightness" of the flow. As I see it, the main problem is the bad management by C1 that killed the product, not the 32b technolgy. They had a winner and turned it unto low quality product. I do not easily give up and I believe that people do value quality. Many reviews of "modern" DAM programs still quote MP as a standard. This is, IMHO, among other things, a strong indication that MP should be revived.
Would you not use it if available?
Best, F.
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You're right, I'm not affiliated with C1.
I liked MP, but since they discontinued it, I have put quite a lot of time into using a catalog in C1. Whether I would go back to MP (superior in several ways, of course) I am not sure. It won't pick up on C1 edits in a catalog, only in sessions, and all my keywording etc in C1 would be wasted effort then.
Ian
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Let me second this request. I know a few people who rave about Media Pro and the model it offers. Many positives here and would be great to see it continued into the future.
I know Capture One are aware of it's support. Let me also add if they are listening, what a powerful tool it would be if integrated to run the catalogue as a service on some of the linux based NAS boxes (Synology, QNAP) - this way that the grunt is happening on the NAS where the files are. Just a thought.
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Media Pro remains the best Digital Asset Management software available until recently. I can speak for hundreds of users within a specific community of designers who all miss this tool. Is there any possibility to bring it back? There’s no replacement available out there that is comparable in function and quality. The fact that it’s no longer available has many of us left with a seriously hindered workflow. I’m refraining from upgrading my OS simply to be able to still use Media Pro. Would it be possible to buy back the software and its technology so it can remain in (or come back to) existence, if a new brand/company could keep it alive?
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Simon,
I try in vain to understand a company that, willingly, acquired the best DAM program (Microsoft did not succeed in destroying it completely) and then kill it. On top of it, so many still use it, need it, want it, want to pay for it... nada.
P1 is not, IMHO, a customer oriented company. I used and payed for C1 several years. As the time went by I felt stronger and stronger that P1 is less and less interested in their software quality (both functional and engineering).
I do not use FB. I suggest some one using FB open a page to petition P1 to sell it, or make it open project, or bring it back to life. Something like Conan Doyle and SH.
But I doubt it will happen. P1 want their integrated poor DAM tools. Period.
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Dear Jakob from Capture One,
Add my name to list of Media Pro users who would like to see an updated version. Many of my colleagues have contacted me for alternative program suggestions so I know there is a market for it.
Melinda Sue Gordon
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On the old forums I remember it was mentioned that Media Pro was based on now outdated software libraries that, as Ian pointed out, worked only on 32 bits. So, updating Media Pro would have involved rewrite it all from scratch.
I'm also not affiliated to PO and can't assure that was the real reason, but I can understand that they will see unfeasible to make such effort in that case.
That said, please add me to the list, too. I'm still using Media Pro for my 180k pictures catalog, and every day I'm more concerned about using unsupported sotware. I would gladly pay for an updated version.
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I also remember that back when Media Pro was still available, there were very view posts in its section of the then forum, which suggests to me that the user base was not very large. Possibly not worth their while for that reason too.
Ian
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Please add National Geographic to list of users who want Media Pro back. We all loved it! So many of our photographer's contact us to see what we are using to take its place and we keep saying there is nothing known that has taken its place. I am personally not updating my personal OS as long as possible so I can still use it. It is a tragedy that no other catalog system prioritizes seeing multiple metadata fields in list view. In my opinion- it is very shortsighted- and many developers do not have editorial needs in mind....
Ed
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Good photographers! I have opened a Facebook page called "Media Pro Revival". I may be a dreamer, but this is what I can do. Visit the page and add pressure. Good luck to us all.
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Florian- I looked for a Facebook page called "Media Pro Revival" and did not find it. Can you please include a link? And what will the Facebook page do exactly if it is separate and not connected to Phase One?
Ed
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Christina-Florin please. I did a search and I found it right away. But, here you have the link https://www.facebook.com/MediaProRevivalFC
I did decide to open a FB page because Phase One can decide not to let me write what I want to write. It can be easier to spread and create a united attitude.
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I'm glad others are also interested in continuing to use Media Pro! No sign of the Facebook page yet. I have been keeping one computer on Mac High Sierra just to have access to the hundreds of MP catalogs in my archive. None of the other programs work as efficiently to organize and cull material.
MSG
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Melinda, see the link https://www.facebook.com/MediaProRevivalFC
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Please add me to the list, too.
I have tried many DAM software, but also for me MediaPro was the best, fastest way to do annotations. Unfortunately after it got acquired from Windows and then Phase One, nothing more than a little bit facelifting happened. I wished they had at least integrated fully all DAM features into C1 … only the "place finder” filter reminds me to MediaPro. I remember there where some workflows shown on PhaseOne website to work with both. But for me it was easier to do all in one software, so I kept using Aperture and Lightroom… (i hate Apple for this and Adobe too). I don’t really want to buy again another software to do all the DAM stuff either. As said already in the Media Pro forum please dear Phase One team, you got the best RAW software, please include more MediaPro’s DAM functionality. You will get the a LR killer – at least for the professionals;-)
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A year or so passed since I've started this request. Not many had added their voices. It's a sad remark.
I think now that we (those who actively ask for MP) have no idea what happened. Why it was discontinued, why C1 has such poor DAM capabilities, why did P1 purchased MP to start with, why MP is now hidden behind bars. C1 was to become, IMHO, a Rolls Royce of the trade. Now it is a Rolls Royce with square wheels. Maybe we do not understand something P1 knows. This understanding, if any is possible at all, might help the cause. Personally, I cannot fight against something I do not understand. Maybe, the sad answer is that most of the photographers are more interested in a few extra dollars than spending a few hours on reviving MP. In his autobiography Ansel Adams told about a Hasselblad camera he had received for review. Hasselblad implemented most of his observations. P1 is not Hasselblad. Maybe Hasselblad is no longer Hasselblad. Keep that in mind.
Happy and healthy clicks.
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Hi Florin, good point "Rolls Royce with square wheels". To keep up with is this. Back in the days, I have studied a lot about DAM and RAW processing software for my diploma. Unfortunately I needed a faster car than a Rolls Royce and Apple released Aperture their new car – even for weddings;-) But this Porsche, became a Golf. So I moved over to Volvo - Lightroom;-) It isn’t so beautiful, but it was working – until i was forced to rent it. So many years later, I was thinking, now with faster CPU, I can drive a Rolls Royce, but I have the feeling it still have the wrong wheels:-(
Btw. it seems like DAM features are not high on the wish list of many (professionals) here. To do all these annotations is less fun than doing skin retouch and colour grading…
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Hi Phrank, I think you gave me a good point to start the understanding process. I am not a business. I just love to do things with the far end in site. Case 1, small business. Not enough time, not enough personnel, Q&D is the name of the game. Case 2, medium and big business. Not enough time, but personnel available to search for old work, for most Q&D is the game. By the way, how many times per month does one search for old photos? I begin to believe that P1 understood this long ago. I use Open Office. No bug is fixed unless there are enough votes to invest resource in the fix. In 2000 Gramophone published a special review of the 20th century recorded music. One reviewer wrote that one must not think that classical music died with Klemperer. Correct. But what is left does not look much better than a beautiful corpse. If people can live with plastic taste, why bother feeding them gourmet?
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Btw. to be on the safe side, I have bought the last 2018 Mac mini to run Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave) as log as possible. There is a project which let Aperture run under Mac OS 11. Does anybody know a way to run Media Pro 2 under Mac OS 11?
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Florin- it looks like the Facebook site is no longer active.
This Page Isn't AvailableThe link may be broken, or the page may have been removed. Check to see if the link you're trying to open is correct.University of Virginia Library also is interested in revival from a Groups.io listserv we belong to and I wanted to send her there...Ed0 -
Christina,
After about two weeks without any activity on the page I deleted it. My previous post explains why. Practically, no one is really interested in reviving MP. 20 posts from 10 people in one year will not make P1 do anything. Years ago tens of posts per day about their poor software design and engineering meant nothing to P1. They have the best image processing engine, and this appears to be enough for them. Or, am I wrong?
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I was quite busy in the iView Media Pro forum ages ago, but not much has improved when they moved from Windows to Phase One. One of my high feature request was “smart albums“ - and then i got the message “discontinued“, so i switched over to Capture One (because I‘m not a big fan of Adobe‘s rental model). At least a few things from Media Pro are included into C1 - i wish more. So now I‘m testing Photo Mechanic plus... As previously said, DAM, doesn‘t make much fun, so rather press / agency photographers (have to) use it - and they stay with Photo Mechanic. I work now with XMP data again - and keep Mac OS 10.14 (as long as possible) to be more flexible.
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I want to revive this thread.
So many professionals in the entertainment industry, especially in the agency area, use Media Pro. It's high functionality in catalog building, assets management, and ease of use are essential to so many workflows, including my own.
Capture One fails completely to capture what Media Pro does in a professional entertainment agency setting.
Why was Media Pro abandoned? There has never been any satisfactory answer from Phase One.
Are there plans to revitalize Media Pro?
As more operating systems are updated, we are having to move away from Media Pro and find alternatives. Has anyone found a good and real alternative to Media Pro? That can build a fast, accurate catalog, that can be posted to a server project, that can be sent to offsite freelancers, etc.?
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Hi, not yet. My demo of PhotoMechanic+ has expired and at this moment I wasn’t really happy with their workflow. Good for press work, but after the DAM was not so nice like in MP.
I’m hoping C1 will include some more DAM features soon, because their new "preview before import" feature is a good step in this direction.
I will try to work with via XMP with both C1 & MP for the moment as long i don’t have a new Mac with Big Sur only… I recommend to keep a copy of MP installer, because it seems like it's not available anymore on this web site.
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Hi all,
Today is the first day I’m switching from Media Pro to another Asset Management application.
After a while trying to figure out if Media Pro would be back (I even played with the idea of buying back the technology and having it be a user-lead development), I’m now forced into finding an alternative as the Mac system where I work will be updated out of OS 10.14 (the last version that Media Pro can work under). My own computer is also running the outdated OS so that I can still use Media Pro but that will also be over.
It’s with a heavy heart that I’m forcing myself to use something else. I’ve also brought it up at work within a team of designers struggling without it and it looks like we’ll be following the trend to stop using Media Pro and instead have to do with Adobe Bridge.
I can go into a lengthy discussion about the available solutions out there but I’ll try and be short. For a team (an advertising agency more specifically), it seems Extensis Portfolio™ is a good alternative. It works off of a server, though, and doesn’t have individual (local) applications/solutions. It’s good for a team, even though it doesn’t have some of the great functionality of Media Pro. On my own machine, I’ll be using Adobe Bridge. I’ll terribly miss the ability to save catalogs and will have to do with rescanning folders of assets every time I launch or even look outside of a folder, but I have to say that so far Bridge is doing that fairly quickly.
I’m baffled that Media Pro doesn’t exist anymore. In my industry, it’s been the only reliable Asset Management solution adopted by every agency in the business. It is preventing me from being ultra-efficient to know finding myself struggling to go through assets and I’m having a hard time understanding the gap between what Media Pro got right and what current Asset Management solutions still aren’t doing in comparison.
Good luck to you all who are suffering from this as well.
After 20 years using iView ;) it will be out of my life.
We had a good run!
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Anthony, look into Extensis Portfolio™.
http://Www.Extensis.com/portfolio
I believe you have to request a demo from them to see it in action. It’s worth doing anyway as they walk you through it and are available for questions.
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Oh, they still alive? Probably not an alternative to me I hate rental software, specially software which works with archives. Many years I worked also with Canto Cumulus but they also turned into a workstation server something software – I'm self employed – no need…
One day, if I have to invest into a new Mac and damned to run Big Sur, then I have to drop Mefoia Pro too. So far I’m almost happy with my hot Mac mini 2018 which runs on Mac OS 10.14 as long as possible…
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I have been keeping my Mac on Mojave just so I could run Media Pro. Recently I started outputting USDZ files to show clients interactive designs. The latest apple AR apps that would help me to optimise these files don't work on Mojave so I finally gave in and updated to Big Sur. I have another machine running High Sierra and Media Pro works fine on that.
But I regret it because of the simple ability to drag and drop from the media pro catalogue directly in to a p'shop document or Modo shader tree or indesign or in to another folder.
Or when the production designer sends me a folder of references I would simply hit 'command n' in media pro..get a new window and dump the folder on to it and in a split second be able to see every image in the folder with no fuss, no waiting, no having to tell Media Pro to 'show the contents'. It just did it immediately and simply.
Like others on this page I have tried (and paid for) many other catalogue solutions and they are all rubbish. Bridge is clunky and unwieldy - just the fact that you need to keep going to the menu to tell bridge to 'show items from subfolders' to see all the image files makes the process painfully slow. I've also paid for Capture One which is useless for what I do. I have p'shop for photo-retouching why would i need my cataloguing software to do it?
I put together two Fantastic Beasts 'Art of Books'. I dealt with thousands of images from over 60 artists all over the world. I did it all in Media Pro and InDesign. I could not have done it without MediaPro.
My day has slowed to a crawl without it.
I might just use my time machine backups to go back to last week when life was easier.
Phase One kidnapped one of the best apps ever created.
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