Comments on: Reading Quicktime Timecode in After Effects Redux: A Solution

By: Dale

Dale — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:10:41 +0000

Hey stib,

Good catch! That’s certainly a more general purpose solution.

Dale

By: stib

stib — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:49:32 +0000

Oh, got it. I had a look at the source, and changed

fprintf(stderr,”%s\n”, [timecodeString fileSystemRepresentation]);
to
fprintf(stdout,”%s\n”, [timecodeString fileSystemRepresentation]);

..and it worked. That was a lucky guess!

By: stib

stib — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:44:28 +0000

Oh btw I also tried doing this in the shell:
timecodereader ‘Volumes/media/mymovie.mov’>>~/Desktop/test.txt
and the resulting text file was blank.

By: stib

stib — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 08:42:56 +0000

Thanks for the timecode reader app. It’s amazing that Apple don’t provide an easier way to access timecode from quicktime files. For that reason I’m trying to use timecodereader in an applescript application that reads timecodes from quicktime movies. But it doesn’t seem to be returning a value on stdout. If I do

set startTC to do shell script “timecodereader /Volumes/media/mymovie”
the result is “”
If I run the same script in the terminal I get the correct result. Do you know what could be going on here?

By: Creative Workflow Hacks » Blog Archive » Apple Sample Code: QTKitTimeCode

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 18:42:32 +0000

[...] found myself deep into the Quicktime API before and the modernization of the Quicktime architecture can’t come too soon. Unfortunately, [...]

By: Dale Bradshaw

Dale Bradshaw — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 00:37:16 +0000

Mel, Thanks for the kind words. That way, I can look at the EDL from the FCP timeline, and just slip/slide the layers in AE to match the timecodes. Your best bet to handle this kind of thing is to use FCP-XML. I've written a post about working with FCP-XML in AE via sripting. Moving Between Final Cut Pro and After Effects: The Scripting Option The timecodereader utility is handy for working with FCP timelines, but you need to do a bit of work via scriptiing to calculate from the first frame, so it helps to have some scripting experience to work with these tools. Is this even possible using these hacks you came up with? Or do I still have to shell out the big bucks for a copy of Automatic Duck? I'm a big fan of Automatic Duck, it's a great piece of software. It's definitely possible to do similar kinds of things with scripting, but you won't be able to duplicate the seemless experience you get with such well designed software. I use scripts and hacks to develop custom workflows and project management solutions, but I still use Automatic Duck daily for project integration between AE and FCP.

By: Mel Matsuoka

Mel Matsuoka — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 23:34:57 +0000

Nice hack, I have to say! But I still haven’t figured out how to utilize this script in a real-world fashion.

I need to recreate a sequence which was cut in FCP in my AE comp (using the same media, of course). The media/sequence was consolidated with 30 frames of handles.

The timecodereader script only seems to return the timecode of the first frame of the .mov file. What I would like it to do is return the timecode number of the selected clip’s frame which is currently under the timeline cursor. That way, I can look at the EDL from the FCP timeline, and just slip/slide the layers in AE to match the timecodes.

Is this even possible using these hacks you came up with? Or do I still have to shell out the big bucks for a copy of Automatic Duck?