It’s definitely an advantage when you can hard code locations, etc. In fact in my early explorations of the FCP To AE scripts much of the scripts were based on my locations and things I was doing in production at Primal Screen. Now I’m trying to make them more general and usable in different production situations.

Dale

Most of our production machines have the same user (eg ~/gfx) and our projects are all on the server(/Volumes/MyServer/Projects) so it hasn’t been a big issue so far.

Plus, having the script break when the file is not where the script expects it is an evil way to encourage people to keep their projects in the standard places on the server.

Thanks for the encouraging words…

As far as the Javascript path munging…

Final Cut XML has an element called <pathurl> that contains a macintosh file path url, that will usually begin with file://localhost, so the first order of business is to strip that away. Then depending on which user is logged in, we need to look for /Users/Dale or some such, if there is Users/SomeOtherUser we have to do some indexOf switching and we are still just guessing as to who is the local user. If not, we pass in /Volumes/Path/To/File. As you can see, it’s rather messy. With this it’s

var afterEffectsPath = system.callSystem(’pathconvert -u file://localhost/Volumes/Storage/Users/Dale/Test/myFile.mov’);

returns

~/Test/myFile.mov

I like this one better. I’ll follow up with more info later.

Best,
Dale

(PS - great site!)