The code change is stupid simple. I added default answer “.mov” and default button 3 to the existing popup. Done. If I would have had more time I would have made it work recursively, so that I could do my whole directory structure in one blow, but that would have been more time coding than compositing, so I stopped there.

If you want to grab a copy of “add mov to filename”, here it is.

I’ve also used it a bunch since then and decided to create a “silent” version. No dialog box. The only thing it does is to add .mov as an extension. You can download “add mov to filename silent” here.

If you go into applications>utilities you will find “Applescript Editor” Open it up and go into preferences.

Click on the “show script menu in menu bar” radio button and quit the app. Now you should have a little icon in you upper right menu bar that looks like a piece of parchment. That is a shortcut to open a bunch of applescripts. The os has a few installed by default. The most important ones (to me) are in the finder scripts folder. There you can add suffixes or prefixes to filenames, you can find and replace text, change case, or trim from the start or ending. This set of tools really helps when you need to batch change a bunch of .movs to .mp4, or when you want to add a job number or date to a bunch of deliverables.

There are definitely other standalone apps for renaming files out there. A better finder rename, name mangler, and automator all come to mind, but they aren’t as easy to use, or they don’t come pre-installed. Give it a shot,, you might not need it every day, but no one wants to have to manually do anything that can be automated.

It should also be noted that if you do write any applescripts, you can put them in the scripts folder and have them appear in the pulldown menu. Have fun automating!

UPDATE-I just saw that 10.6 (snow leopard) doesn’t install all of the scripts that previous versions did. Most importantly it doesn’t install the finder scripts. I’ve zipped the 10.5 scripts up and you can download them here.

At work I am working my way through nuke, and it is really a pain to be able to use Mocha with AE but not nuke. The simplest fix would be to buy Mocha for nuke, but the powers that be haven’t done that yet, so I had to figure out a way. I got to thinking the other day, and tracking data at it’s simplest is only x,y points, so what is stopping me? It turns out that the only thing is formatting!

I whipped up a quick applescript to strip the x,y data out of the MochAE exported text file and put it into 4 separate txt files for nuke. It’s really that simple! One thing that you need to do in nuke is to set the y axis to (frame height-curve) because the two apps have a different coordinate system.

After all of this I have a passable workflow, but I want to stress that if you have enough dough to be using nuke, buy Mocha! This app is intentionally a little rough around the edges because I don’t like the idea of taking away anyone else’s business. It also isn’t a replacement for the standalone Mocha; it doesn’t offer any of the other (quite worthwhile) features. It’s a fun little hack, and hopefully it helps someone out of a jam somewhere, but if you need this, then you need to buy the full version of mocha!
Click here to download the MochAE to Nuke converter

The first script is called “Render Notification 1.0.2” by Josh Petok from the current cut. It is a nice little script that watches the processor usage of a few pre-selected apps and will email you when the load goes down. In other words it alerts you to your render finishing. This is possible in a few other ways, but there hasn’t been a nice clean solution that works across multiple apps before.
Josh’s version is available for download here.
I poked around in the code a little bit and enabled it to work with after effects. This is relatively untested, so it might give you an email too early or too late. All credit goes to Josh, as I’m just adding a few lines of code to his.
If you’re feeling lucky, you can try the AE compatible version here.

The second script is the strangely named “AE Suicide” (try to find an ad for that google!) from scott at http://scott.j38.net/. It is a great little app that does one thing: it kills after effects! AE has a pretty good crash control system built in so that if it crashes, then it generally will save a version of your project file to you current directory. The only problem is that AE also loves to hang. It will get stuck for hours if not indefinitely. What this app does is it gives AE the little nudge off of the cliff that it needs for it’s self-preservation to kick in and save out a file. The author does have a disclaimer saying that it doesn’t always work, but then again if it ever works it is better than the alternative.

You can download AE Suicide here

If you have any other useful workflow scripts I would love to hear about them! Hit me up on the “Contact me!” box to the right, or leave them in the comments!

FCPFolderMaker

is a simple app that builds a folder structure for you to organize your project with. The structure is as seen in the photo below. It generates folders named Projects, Assets, Cache, and Exports. The idea is that this type of directory structure will greatly ease finding assets and clean things up considerably.

FolderDateMaker

is an app that has many potential uses, but it only does one simple thing: it creates a folder named with today’s date. I use it in my export folder to keep apart every day’s exports.


Both scripts will need to be pasted into “Script Editor” and saved out as an app. From there I suggest you either drag them into the sidebar in your finder window, or (even better) the top bar. I used a cute animal and a monster icon for mine (that I got from this icon site), and you can clearly see them in the top bar of each finder window above. Then to call the script, just double click on them. They will do their respective business in the top most finder window. You should download both of them here because wordpress mangles the code below.

FCPFolderMaker


(*
This script creates a folder structure suited for organizing a video editing job. It can be modified easily to
create whatever folder structure you may desire. Ideally this script is saved as an app and run from either
the script menu docklet or placed in the finder window. For more info go to http:/
blog.youDownWithFCP.com. Written by Ross 2010-01-20
*)

on error
beep 1
end try
end tell

FolderDateMaker


(*
This script creates a folder based on todays date. It creates the folder Year-Month-Day so the
date is finder-sortable. Ideally this script is saved as an app and run from either
the script menu docklet or placed in the finder window. For more info go to http:/
blog.youDownWithFCP.com. Written by Ross 2010-01-20
*)

tell application "Finder"
try
tell (current date) to tell (year * 10000 + (its month) * 100 + day) as string to set MyDate to text 1 thru 4 & "-" & text 5 thru 6 & "-" & text 7 thru 8
make new folder at the front window with properties {name:MyDate}
on error
beep 1
end try
end tell


If you end up using these, or if you find a better way to go about this let me know in the comments! I'm also always on the prowl for more final cut related workflows and scripts. Let me know!

This script is from macworld, (osx only) but the way they posted is not only horribly un-user-friendly, it also wouldn’t compile without a lot of text massaging. I decided to put it up here to save you the trouble and explain 3 ways it can be used. What it does is to look at a file and see if it is the same size as last time it checked. You can change the interval based on the application, and you can tell it what to do once it has detected the file is “finished”

Here are three (of many) ways it can be used. These are all based on the script below, but they would require you to add code in the section below commented with “–this is where you put your “do when finished” code” The script as it is written will beep 3 times once the file is finished and 5 times if an error occurs. If you end up writing something useful to go with this post it here for others to see!

Firefox download monitor
Set this script to alert you when a big download finishes. A small interval ought to work out provided your connection doesn’t timeout.

Compressor secondary action
If for some reason you don’t want to run an applescript through the default compressor interface you can do it through here. This could be because you are watching it from another computer on the network, or maybe you have other specific needs. This will also allow you to open the exported file directly with an application, which compressor doesn’t let you do.

Export from fcp / after effects secondary action / alert
I guess AE dings when an export is done, but FCP doesn’t do a damn thing. If you run this on your export then it will do your bidding once the exported file is finished.

Here is the code!

on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving these_items
-- this is the standard intro for a folder action
try
repeat with f in theItems
-- wait for the item to be all there
set Was to 0
set isNow to 1
repeat while isNow ≠ Was
-- the basic idea is that the script loops until the file size is the same for more than 30 seconds. That means the file has finished copying.
set Was to size of (info for f)
-- this section is getting the file size of the video
delay 30 -- modify this for delay time
set isNow to size of (info for f)
-- this section is sampling the file size 30 seconds later
end repeat
--this is where you put your "do when finished" code
tell application "Finder"
beep 3
end tell
end repeat -- get next item f in thisFolder
on error error_message number error_number
if the error_number is not -128 then
tell application "Finder"
beep 5 --if the script errors out, beep 5x
end tell
end if
end try
end adding folder items to

Copy the code and paste it into Script Editor. Then you can save it, apply it to a folder as a folder action and you are on your way!

PS> as a side note, isn’t it weird that userfriendly doesn’t have a good antonym? anti-user? Userunfriendly?

Actually, this post has two different was of accomplishing the same goal. The simplest way is to create a shortcut in fetch and then create a droplet from it. Here is a page describing how to do that. Short version: command-S.

The more advanced way to do it is the script below. As it stands it offers almost the exact same thing as the droplet, but it is written in applescript, so you have room to tweak things. Would you like to add a folder with todays date to the directory? Copy the link into the clipboard and open in a web browser? There are a million possibilities, you just have to get your hands dirty.


If you really want to start automating things then you can create a folder with one version of this script for each directory / server that you may upload to and then you can select the appropriate script from the last tab in the compressor inspector window. Heck, if you do one upload frequently enough then go ahead and save that compressor / applescript combo as a droplet and put it in your dock!

The original code came from proactive interactive. But I have made some tweaks for security and to allow you to open the app to select files as well as drag files on top of the app.

You can read the code below, but if you are going to copy and paste it, do that from here as wordpress does a weird thing with quotation marks.

on open (thefiles)
(*There should only be one file, but just in case send it through a loop*)
repeat with thefile in thefiles
FetchUploadFile(thefile)
end repeat
end open

on run
choose file with prompt "Select file(s) to upload:" with multiple selections allowed
open (result)
end run

By tweaking the shortcuts in fetch you can select different servers and starting directories. Create one shortcut for each project and export one applescript app with each shortcut.

This script will also work outside of compressor. Drag and drop a file onto the app to start an upload, or double click it to bring up a “select files to upload” dialog box.

Side note: while I was researching this I came across a cool widget for transmit. It does the same thing as this app, but it lives with your widgets and may or not be accessible from to compressor post processing window.

This can help to show clients / account managers footage without forcing them to watch hours and hours at a time. It can also be really useful to quickly find out what take the skiier landed the trick, or pick the best lit scene.

Enough about the benefits of this, here’s how to create them. I made an applescript that will take any quicktime clip and spit out stills based on whatever interval you decide. You can download it here. It will label the stills with their frame number too. Here it is explained in pictures.
To kick it off, drag one or more movie files onto the applescript.

Click here to see
Select a destination folder for the images to sit in. It is generally a good idea to make a new folder for this, as it will generally be a large number of photos.

Type in the base name for your exported files. A shorter name here is easier to fit on the contact sheet.

In the last step, select the interval between stills. It defaults to 60, or one photo a minute. If you have a different need, feel free to change it! When you hit Ok Quicktime should jump to the first interval and start exporting files to your destination folder.

Next up, load all of the photos into photoshop using the contact sheet II option under file>automate.

Pick whatever options you want for # of pictures and layout, and select your source folder.

Once photoshop is finished you can print your contact sheets out, or print them to pdf and save them for emailing.

One Note: The files have the frame number appended to the end of the name. To see frame numbers in quicktime, just click on the clock to the left of the play bar. A little menu will pop up, and you can select frames. Now you can directly relate the filename to the section of the footage.

Let me know if you end up using this, and tell me if there are any features you would like to see added!

I don’t know if you have ever been able to get compressor to email you when it is done compressing, but I never have. The email control panel in compressor never seems to get the job done, so I decided to go about it a different way.

I just wrote an applescript that you can link to in compressor (last tab of the compression settings panel) It’s useful for when you’re really focused on something exporting, so you know when to be back at the old desk.

It will email you when it is done. simple. Click the read more link below to read how it’s done.


Here it is.

on open (thefiles)
--There should only be one file, but just in case send it through a loop
repeat with thefile in thefiles
do shell script "mail -s 'your mail subject here' you@youremail.com < /Users/YOURUSERNAME/Documents/> emailcontent.txt"
end repeat
end open

The file emailcontent.txt is just a textfile with the content of the email in it. Replace the email in the script with your email address. Paste this into script editor, save it as an application, link to it from compressor and BOOM! you’ve got mail!

One other trick is that you could send an email to your cellphone as a text message. For more info on that, check out this link.

This script sends mail through port 25, and many isps have this port blocked. You may run into trouble if they have it blocked. There are other ways of sending mail via applescript, but I will leave that part up to you.