Change file names

[Anders Teigen]

OK, so this is how I do things now:

-Using a automator rename routine, I replace the diffucult characters in the media (capture scratch) folder.
-I filter out all the problematic clips in the CatDV Catalog.
-For each clip I replace the same characters in the “Name” column, and do an “Attach Media” routine to the right media file.

Tedious, yes, but the director was “happy” to do it…

[Bryson Jones]

Anders,

Do you have the CatDV Worker?

Worker has some pretty heavy file rename features. Coincidentally I was just working on some workflows for a client, so I was digging around in there this am.

If you had your files in a “bin” or tape folder structure, meaning one folder per load named as a virtual tape name, the worker can pick up the enclosing folder name and automatically increment them, while adding any other text you like using a string of text or variables. It can then move them or republish them to catalogs with the new names. “Rename” can be as simple as pulldown item in your server layout.

The Worker is a truly powerful, and mis-understood, piece of the CatDV family. It’s the engine that “gets things done”, once you dig in.

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[Matthew Stamos]

Bryson brings up a good case for the Worker Node and it really is the key to automating and streamlining CatDV enterprise server based workflows. Another manual way to do this is to use the bulk edit option under the tools menu as this can be a powerful tool for renaming most any field.

[Rolf Howarth]

You should be able to do what you want with the Bulk Edit tool. First you could copy the Name field from all your clips to another field such as Notes (if you want to keep the descriptive name as a comment). Then you can check the “Auto rename files when setting Name or Bin” in Advanced User Interface preferences and do a Bulk Edit of the Name field, setting the name to something like “Clip 001.mov” with the “auto-increment following pattern” option checked. That should rename all your files to Clip 001.mov, Clip 002.mov etc.

[Allan White]

“The Worker is a truly powerful, and mis-understood, piece of the CatDV family. It’s the engine that “gets things done”, once you dig in.”

It’d be great to see more examples of what Workers can do on the Squarebox site; I know about ones that do encoding but that’s about it. This is a very worthy, but under-marketed tool/system in my opinion.

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Allan White]

Squarebox have acknowledged others’ ideas for improving the Bulk Edit feature elsewhere in this forum, which is appreciated.

Here’s another refining idea: The copy/move from field is really powerful, but could be more so for building filenames. In addition to my suggestion on a token-based string generator, being able to truncate or limit strings would be magical. I used to use Excel to do this with formulas, and was nice for clip names.

Something like this: notes field says, “Comcast is so lame in the US” might yield a filename like,
Interviews-AW 001, "comcast is..".mov

To build all of that in one operation (bin name, ‘person’ custom field, number, note field in quotes) would be really amazing. Consider it! =)

– Allan White, Video Producer, Luis Palau Assoc.

Quad 3Ghz Mac Pro, 10GB RAM, X1900 GPU, XSAN, CatDV Server

[Bryson Jones]

Let me run down a few of the things that the worker can do. (it’s hard to demo sometimes, for me, because the workflows are involved to set up and pretty specific, so I tend to show simple watchfolder and server queries but we’ll have some stuff at NAB)

I call The Worker a scripting engine that can read from and write to the CatDV Server. It can watch the Server for changes to metadata and then perform actions based on that. Also it can do things based on watchfolders in the OS, as well as move and copy files at the OS level. All of this can be fired by a change in the metadata such as setting a flag or changing a value in a field.

Here’s some things that we do with it:

Worker can, create proxies based on a watch folder and then publish the clips into catalogs, filtering by any number of variables, like file type, etc… perfect for auto ingest of footage or ftp drop situations where you catalog everything that comes into a facility automatically. (a large music company uses this to receive video clips from around the world and have an “inbox” ready when they come in in the am)

That same “sort” allows people to dump media into a large “dumpster” folder and have CatDV sort it by type and auto catalog it, so instead of “where did you put that?” and “did you catalog that?” you can be assured that the clips are all in CatDV and that the Worker has tucked the media into the correct folder on your SAN or server.

You can export quicktime files of movies from a pull down item. As in, pull down a tab that says “send to bob” and worker will export a QT in your chosen format and then drop or FTP it to “Bob”. (idiot proof, automated delivery)

Export the metadata of a clip as XML so that another system or company can accept it. With XSLT, you can reformat it on the way out into their preferred data format. (I do this for a company delivering files to web hosts. It makes sure that they have the correct credits and licensing data for each file) so the “send to brightcove” pulldown exports a copy of the file in the format they need, and then uploads it and the corresponding XML file onto their server.

Move clips from catalog to catalog based on a pulldown status field, so that you can use a catalog as an “inbox” for work coming in. For instance, “for approval” might move a clip to a producer’s inbox catalog and sends them an email that they have a new clip to approve. Then, when they’ve watched it, they mark it approved or rejected and then the worker moves it to the next place down the line, and sends you an email detailing what just happened.

It’s basically a lot of the stuff that Final Cut Server was supposed to do when it came out. (You all have that running now, right?) In Apple’s defense, none of this stuff is “plug and play” but if you put in the time, or have the right team, you can move a few mountains… of media.

There are thousands more ways to use it. Kevin Duggan has done miracles with it. But basically, if you have the Worker, you can all just go home and the place will run itself… 😉 Now, if it could only heat up a Hot Pocket…

bryson

bryson “at” hidefcowboy.com

hidefcowboy.com

[Anders Teigen]

Thanks for good ideas!

I’m not on a server solution, so I guess I will try to manage with Bulk Edit. At the moment I can not find a way to rename so the media files get the same names. The names of the media file on disk does not change. This is essential. If the link later should be lost between the file and log in FCP, it will be very hard to locate the right file if they are not the same.

There are three possible columns for “name” in the catalog view, but only one available in the Bulk Edit tool. Is there a way to get to the “hidden” columns from bulk edit?

[Rolf Howarth]

The destination of a bulk edit can’t be a read only field, but you should be able to use any field as the source of bulk edit when you’re copying data from one field to another.

There are some changes coming up that will make it easier to identify which field you’re using if you have different fields with the same name (eg. built-in fields, user-defined fields, etc.)

[Anders Teigen]

“The destination of a bulk edit can’t be a read only field”

So there is no way to change the media file names from inside CatDV?