Only the people whose email addresses you add. Publishing a catalog does not put it on the open web: every request is checked against your share list, so someone who has the link but is not on that list is told to ask you for access rather than shown the footage. You add and remove addresses whenever you like, and removing one takes effect on their next click.
In the region of a four hundredth of the footage it indexes. The number on the front page is a real measurement: four hours of RED came to a 7.5 GB catalog from 3 TB of masters. Previews are 640 pixels wide by default, because they exist to be scrubbed and searched rather than graded. The practical upshot is that a laptop can comfortably hold the catalog for a shelf of drives it could never hold the footage for.
You lose the masters on it, exactly as you would have without VAMP. VAMP is a catalog, not a backup, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What you do keep is everything the catalog holds: the filenames, the metadata, the transcripts, and a scrubbable preview of every clip that was on that drive. Knowing precisely what was lost, and being able to show a client the preview of the shot, is a very different conversation from a drive that will not spin and no record of what was ever on it. If footage matters, keep two copies. The verified copy tool makes the second one painless, and VAMP Preserve (coming soon) can keep one off-site.
Everything your camera writes as a normal video file, yes. For camera raw: RED (.r3d) and Blackmagic RAW (.braw) both work, tested against real footage. They need the maker's own software installed for the decoding libraries, REDCINE-X and the free Blackmagic RAW download, because nothing else on earth can read those formats. ARRIRAW is wired up but not yet proven. Canon Cinema RAW Light catalogs with all its metadata, but Canon ships no command line decoder, so it can't get a preview here until they do.
Yes. Point VAMP at a mounted share exactly as you would point it at a drive. It catalogs a share as a folder rather than as a volume, because a network share has no serial number to recognize it by, so it is remembered by its path instead. Everything after that is the same, including the part that matters: once it is cataloged you can browse, scrub and search it with the network unreachable.
VAMP makes tape less of a one-way trip. Catalog the drive before the footage goes off to LTO and you keep a searchable, scrubbable index of everything on that tape, with no library to mount and no restore to sit through. When you find the shot, you also know exactly which tape to pull.
Re-catalog the drive and you have it back, minus anything you typed yourself. VAMP keeps automatic backups of its own database and stores everything outside the app folder, so updating or reinstalling cannot wipe it. You can also write a copy of the catalog onto the drive itself, so the drive carries its own index.
Yes. The default engine runs on your computer and nothing is sent anywhere. There is an option to use OpenAI instead if you would rather, but you have to choose it.
Sign up with your email, then download the app. You need an account to use VAMP, and Solo is free.
Yes. VAMP runs on macOS and Windows, and the invite link gives you whichever you're on.
Yes, for browsing. Share a published catalog and they open it in a browser, scrub the clips, search the transcripts and request what they need. The requesting and delivering happens through your machine, because that is where the drive is.