Watch Folders?

[John Davidson]

Progress thus far:
FCP doesn’t have smart folders.
Automator doesn’t work w/ final cut

looking into folder actions – which I’m sure won’t import into fcp correctly…

You’d think will all apple’s masturbation over ‘smart’ folders in nearly every program, some variant of this feature would find itself in final cut.

Will update my results for future searchers…

John

[Jeremy Garchow]

I hear you, but the structure of Final Cut would have to change a bit as the bins don’t correspond to anything right now, like a finder folder. As much trouble as Final Cut has keeping track of itself, I would imagine that anything that resides outside of the FCP project that’s not media, would be disastrous at this point, it has a hard enough time holding on to a render file that was created by itself from sequence to sequence, let alone a whole folder that isn’t connected to FCP in any way.

It would be a really sweet addition though, I would have constant use for this.

https://www.apple.com/feedback/finalcutpro.html

Jeremy

[John Davidson]

Feedback submitted to apple.

I think it would be a great feature. Imagine rendering to a ‘graphics’ folder in your project out of after effects that automatically imports to fcp. Perhaps I’m not enough of an engineer to understand why it’s not part of the system already – but it would save small bits of time that would eventually add up.

Don’t laugh but I’ve been a real fan of iPhoto over the summer and it’s got solid media management – with smart folders, even.

You know, even a ‘refresh folder’ option in fcp would help a ton….

Thanks JG!

[Jeremy Garchow]

You have no idea how much I have dreamed of this feature.

I am not laughing at you for your iPhoto observation, I am crying (with laughter?) at Apple for getting this right in a program that is given away with every mac and left out of FCP.

[Shane Ross]

Just to turn this into an iPhoto praise discussion…

I NOW LOVE iPHOTO! Man, I hated the first version. Organization made NO sense. And finding the photos on the finder level? Forget it. But when ilife 08 came out my buddy said “you GOTTA try iPhoto now.” Fine…I did.

They fixed it..and well.

NOW…if they can get media managment fixed in FCP…then I’ll be a happy camper.

Shane

Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net

[John Davidson]

Well I feel alot better. I thought I was the only one lauding iPhoto’s praises on everybody I saw. You know how I shut skeptics up now? I show them the apple printed wedding book (and thank you cards) my wife and I made in about 45 minutes. The book, plus a web gallery (with 30 gigs of dot-mac space, duuuude!!!), and all 4000 of our photos color corrected beautifully on Apple TV pretty much knock ’em out.

Suddenly everybody wants it.

Probably as much as I’d stay ‘On Topic”.

iPhoto 08 rocks.

ok I’m done.

[Andy Mees]

hey John

its been done over and over by many users who have used the methods provided to implement their own soultions.
far from rocket science, you just need to know a modicum of scripting.
you just create a folder action that creates an fcp xml file which contains the “pathurl” element that points to the clip dropped in the folder, it then sends an apple event to FCP to import that xml file and drop it in a named project

whats more Apple have even attempted to kick start the FCP developer community by providing the code needed to do all that above and a whole lot more besides.. you can download it for yourself, plus all the developers tools you could possibly need, all for free, from Apples developer site.
its all here: https://developer.apple.com/samplecode/MovieAssembler/index.html

or, you can wait, maybe indefinately, maybe not.

Smart Bins are bound to happen sooner or later (or so it seems to me) as in dynamically updating find results folders, but not necessarily “Watch Folders” … watch folders require the folder to know what project is open … and what if you have 2 projects by the same name? fcp has no limitation in that regard … and if you have multiple identically named projects, with multiple identically named bins within … how is the watch folder meant to distinguish what to do then?? its tricky for Apple because their own solution would need to be foolproof (and there are thousands of fools in FCP’s userbase … you can mintor any FCP forum and meet a few quite quickly) … but if you know and control your own environment then you can roll your own solution without too much trouble.

hope that helps
Andy

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

[Andy Mees] “… watch folders require the folder to know what project is open … and what if you have 2 projects by the same name? fcp has no limitation in that regard … and if you have multiple identically named projects, with multiple identically named bins within … how is the watch folder meant to distinguish what to do then??”

Just think how many versions are in the Autosave Vault.

[David Bogie]

Smart objects within applications such as Aperture still require the items to be imported and metadata available before the references to those objects can be sorted into smart folders.

bogiesan

[John Davidson]

Interesting – I’ll try to figure out that scripting thing – but it’ll take some research and learning as I don’t have even a modicum of scripting experience :-).

Perhaps ‘watch folder’ was a not the best name. What I’d specifically like would be an automatically updating folder that reflects the contents of an actual folder on the drive. You drop a file into that specific folder, the contents are automatically updated in final cut.

I’m pretty sure that wouldn’t cause any issues regardless of the naming of the project or however many versions of that project you have open. I could be wrong though – I so often am now that I’m married!

I saw a screen shot of automator in Leopard – I bet money it will recognize FCP. Not real money, but maybe spacebucks or gold-pressed latinum.

Thanks guys,
John