• Square Box CatDV

  Relinking a Catalog to new transcoded Source Media

  Posted by Will Fortune on August 16, 2011 at 5:49 pm

  I have a large catalog of clips in MPEG-4 Movie format which have already been tagged with metadata. I’m transcoding the source media to Apple Prores 422 with Episode and I’m looking for a way to link the catalog entries to the new Prores source media. Using ‘Attach Media’ gives me an error because the source media isn’t the same file. I’m able to force the link with ‘Update Media Location’ but I have to do it one entry at a time. Is there a more efficient way to link catalog entries to new source media? If we were to get the Worker Node, would it be able to automate this process at all?

  Thanks,
  Will

  Bryson Jones replied 14 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Bryson Jones

  August 16, 2011 at 7:23 pm

  There are a few ways to play that.

  Do you want to just discard the mp4? If so, you could bulk rename the mp4’s to be mov’s and then replace the files easily. (.mp4’s and .mov’s can generally interchangeably use both file extensions if your codecs are compatible.)

  You could also try making the mp4’s the “proxy” of the pro res by duplicating the folder structure in the correct places, depending on your media path settings. If you wanted to keep both versions.

  Also, there are a few ways to automate that proxy/hi-res workflow using the Worker Node, if you’re handy with the command line & or variables. You can make the Worker translate the path from the mp4s and put the movs in the right place based on those paths. It’s a bit much to type here but the answer is “yes, that can be done, by an experienced person”.

  All of these depend upon the durations and frame rates being the same. Otherwise you’d need to cut and paste the metadata over and that could get time consuming. The real question is “how many assets?” That’s really how you determine if it makes financial and time sense to automate.

  I just told a client today to not have us automate something because it was simply cheaper to get an assistant to do it for a one-time job.

  Your mileage may vary, but as always, the tools are in there, it’s all about how we use them.

  bryson

  bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

  hidefcowboy.com

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