Creative Workflow Hacks

Here’s a fun one. Run this script and it will import every Quicktime on your hard drive or mounted server that After Effects understands. Stupidest hack ever, right? Well yeah, but there is some real gold in this line of the script

mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "QuickTime Movie"'

mdfind is the command line version of Apple’s spotlight technology. Combined with the new Quicktime metadata API and system.callSystem() there’s a lot for a hungry developer to chew on.

The script, osX 10.4(Tiger) and After Effects 7 only (I know, I know)

var myProject = app.project;

var osString = "mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "QuickTime Movie"' | wc -l" ;
var numberOfQTs = system.callSystem(osString);
//After Effects seems to choke when I feed it more than 41 items at a time, so let's use sed to give it 40 to chew on at a time
for(x=1; x < numberOfQTs; x = x + 40){
	var osString = "mdfind 'kMDItemKind == "QuickTime Movie"' | sed -n '" + x + ", " + ( x + 40) + "p'";
	//alert(osString);
	var systemCall = system.callSystem(osString);
   
	var movArray= systemCall.split("\n");

	for(y=0; y < movArray.length; y++){	
			try{
				var my_io = new ImportOptions(new File( movArray[y]));
				var myItem = myProject.importFile(my_io);
			}catch(e){
				//eat errors
			}
	}
}

And the downloadable version

importEveryQuicktime.jsx.zip

followup 5/4/2006 2:30P EST:

So, most folks working in motion graphics have a lot of quicktimes on their system and don't necessarily want to take a long time to import all of them into an After Effects project as a proof of concept ( I told you this was a Stupid Scripting Trick). Therefore, here's a version that imports the first 20 of them with head -n 20 to act as a proof of concept for you busy people .

Here ya go:

import20Quicktimes.jsx.zip

You'll need to turn on Allow Scripts to Write Files and Access Network and turn off Enable JavaSript Debugger so we can eat the errors. As in anything that allows write access to your file system, be careful in experimenting with this script.