Bryson Jones
Forum Replies Created
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Vik, good to hear you are testing.
The read me for Worker is the main resource, along with the Squarebox website. We learned it the old fashioned… and painful way.
I’ll reach out off the board but JB&A offers a full slate of training on all the products as well.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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We have set it to “XDCAM Metaclip” in the past. Setting that should get you rolling just fine.
I’ve been meaning to write a white paper/blog post on the fact that, it seems to me, that Sony meant for XDCAM to be an acquisition format mostly. The main reason I mention this is that CatDV enables some very powerful manipulation of clips and that can be misused.
Specifically, you can break clips out of their clip structure and copy 1 clip out of an XDCAM load. This should not be done. I personally believe Sony intended those clips to be kept in that card structure and copies or transcodes or rewraps made from them.
In our deployments, we try to get the XD media in a safe place and leave it there (and get it to an archive asap.) Moving it or mucking with it too much is probably not a great idea.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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You can cut and paste metadata on a clip.
Just do a “copy” in the edit menu and then there’s an option to “paste metadata”.
It’s really slick. So you can’t do the whole catalog at once, but you can do clip by clip.
Or, if all the changes are in the clips they have, just delete from the old catalog and drag those clips back over there in their place.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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They are doing it wrong.
Something is amiss. If someone is in a window named “untitled” they have left their catalog. I suspect they are duplicating clips and that’s bad.
I’d get a tech in to work on this with you. This is pretty hard to diagnose without seeing it, but I can say with 90% certainty, this isn’t CatDV “breaking”. It’s a keyboard to chair interface issue.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Yes.
😉 I’m joking. Generally we tend to go to the side of separate actions instead of lots of actions in one. Troubleshooting a complex workflow can be a pain if it’s all in one.
The variables are in the help, as you know so depending on which folder you’re looking to pull the name of it can vary. (Pardon the pun.)
This info is provided unsupported. If you delete files or any other data, I and North Shore Automation are not responsible. We recommend you receive training and preferably have complex workflows integrated by an authorized dealer. (There, legalese done. Now let’s tear some stuff up!)
For instance, the “$q” variable gives you the name of the enclosing (parent) folder. You do need to select “expand variables” which brings me to an interesting question. We tend to use timestamps to ensure unique filenames. I’ve never tried to make a variable increment the filename. Could someone from Squarebox support speak to that? You can select “number files consecutively” or “expand variables” but not both.
(Date and or timestamp are pretty great though.)
Variables are added to the end of the path in the “Destination” field, as you assumed.
/Volumes/Folder/file.mov
With a destination of /Volumes/watch-output/$D-$Q-$f
Would give you a file and path like this:
/Volumes/watch-output/20140204-Folder-file.mov
Hope this gets you started. As I stated, a lot can go wrong, very quickly so please, please test and do research off of your main storage and media. (I mean it, we’ve seen some really bad things happen.)
This can get pretty deep quickly and is super fun. If you stack up a few actions, you can have some really neat analysis and then run operations based on them.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Fraser, this XML doesn’t include a path or any way to link it to a single file.
If I’m correct, you are looking to use one of the files listed in this XML (There are HD & SD versions as well as a thumbnail jpg. in the doc.)
You’d need to do an XSLT to convert this into a readable format for CatDV and import the metadata but that’s very do-able and very common in broadcast workflows.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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CatDV is an interesting hybrid in some ways. The client app will store/access conditional info that is not in the db, such as “online” meaning, “it’s online to me now, on this station.”
There’s no reason you can’t add a field that indicates online status but know that it should never be relied on as it can of course be wrong at any moment. In our archive plugins we manage this ourselves as when we move to “Tier-2” we note that the asset is “online” but on Tier-2 so that the system knows where to look. In this way, it’s “offline” to all users except the server that’s moving the files but we are assuring the user that it’s available to the automation.
This of course requires that no one be able to “go around” the MAM and move files around but I know you can control access over there. One tip, you might also want to store a log field of the last time the file was checked. We keep a checksum and the date/time it ran so we know the file was “good” as of that date/time.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Excellent!
Glad you got it sorted.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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Then this is not a matter of not seeing the USER fields in the web client, or at least not being able to map them.
So the Squarebox guys have this clearly documented, this is not that the CatDV default “Status” field is not showing, it’s that a USER field named “clip status” doesn’t appear to be mapping.
One last question, (actually 2) do your other user fields map correctly and are you clear on how to manage the layouts for the Web Client?
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com
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There is no command for this to my knowledge.
If the file is “seen” the CatDV Pro app can perform actions. (The Worker Node also works this way.)
The db does not store “online” as a status.
The purpose of the scripting would only be to check if the file is there and report status or fire an action.
Worker knows if the file is online or not, but doesn’t have a way in the GUI to report that into a db field.
bryson
bryson “at” northshoreautomation.com
northshoreautomation.com