Creative Workflow Hacks

Apple posted some sample code demonstrating how to extract timecode from Quicktime files using the objective-c based QTKit only dropping down into the low level C API when “absolutely required”.

I’ve found myself deep into the Quicktime API before and the modernization of the Quicktime architecture can’t come too soon. Unfortunately, digging deeper into the sample code, it’s clear that it’s going to be slow-sledding before we get NSString *timeCodeTime = [movie tcTime]; or some such. Anyway, it’s good to have this info from the definitive source, it’s taken a bit of research to find before now.

This one deviates a bit from my usual video workflow stuff, but I’ve been writing a lot of Actionscript and spent too much time researching this topic without a lot of great answers.

It’s surprisingly hard to restrict text entry to a limited number of lines in an input text field in Flash. You can restrict characters, but unless you’re using a monospaced font it can produce inconsistent results and you have to make sure you catch the return and enter keys so that you don’t scroll into oblivion. The following code simply replaces the return and enter key with a space and uses an onChange handler to make sure we don’t exceed maxscroll, which in this case is hard coded at 3 lines. It works pretty well and handles some edge cases like copy/pasting by restricting the paste to just visible characters in the text field.

textEntry.onChanged = function(){
     var symbol:String = "\\r";
     var symbolPos:Number = textEntry.text.indexOf(symbol);

     if (symbolPos > -1) {
		textEntry.replaceText(symbolPos, symbolPos + 1, ' ');
	} else {
		//trace("symbol '"+symbol+"' not found.");
	}

	for(i=0; i< textEntry.text.length;  i++){

		textEntry.scroll = textEntry.maxscroll;

		if(textEntry.bottomScroll > 3){
			  textEntry.text = textEntry.text.slice(0, textEntry.text.length-1);
		}
	}

}

Apple posted some interesting sample code called TimelineToTC that takes a Sequence XML file and returns a basic edl file of the selected attributes. Not very full featured, as is typical of Apple sample code, but is a good starting place for someone looking to do conversion work or a more full featured edl. Worth a look especially for a nicely packaged function/method called FormatTimecode which takes a frame count and returns a formatted time code string accounting for drop and non-drop frame sequences. handy.

Paul Tuersley has written a script for exporting camera data from After Effects to Cinema 4D. Paul has also written an extensive brain dump on his process of writing the script and it’s a great example of how research and development of scripts and tools can take on a life of its own. I’ve talked to a couple of people lately who feel that scripting is just beyond their reach, but I hope by reading posts like Paul’s, folks realize that a bit of tenacity and letting a problem gestate and get under your skin until you “just have to solve this” goes a long way to developing really useful tools.

Paul was also kind enough to send me his upgrades and update to my Auto Rig Script for After Effects. I’ve posted his version of the script and I hope to make his changes permanent once I can get some field testing of it working out in all situations. So, I’d appreciate it if you’d download it and give me feedback if you have any issues.

Great work Paul!

UPDATE 04.24.2007

Paul posted a project (riggedCam_noXYZ.zip) set up to animate the null instead of the camera that will allow the use of motion paths addressed in the comments below. It also sounds like Paul has a lot of ideas about new features and is looking for feedback at the thread he’s set for the script at aenhancers.

UPDATE 06.09.2007
Paul has updated his script to version 1.1

Paul writes…
I’ve posted a new version of that AEtoC4D script that exports normal
AE cameras, and more.

AE to C4D

One of the most popular pieces of content here is Moving Between Final Cut Pro and After Effects: The Scripting Option. I think the idea of using scripting to move between Final Cut Pro and After Effects resonated with people working in a production environment.

Unfortunately, the post was more of a tech demo of the kinds of things that were possible with After Effects scripting and less of a practical demonstration for non-technical users. I still urge non-technical folks to dip their toes into the scripting waters, it can be really rewarding, but the challenges presented in “rolling your own” in this situation may be a bit much. So, I decided to write a small application to provide a way for readers who don’t want to deal with the scripting hassle to use some of the techniques I described in the article.

FCPToAE (working title) is an application for OSX 10.4 and above designed to create a .jsx file from a Final Cut XML file for import into After Effects without the hassle of scripting the different parts yourself. Read the rest of this entry »

Around Macworld time this year, there were rumors floating around that there were problems at the company that produces a pretty key piece of software for a lot of Mac production shops. The product? Retrospect. Retrospect is back up software. I’ve had a long 17 year love-hate relationship with Retrospect and my opinions have had the resultant peaks and valleys, so I wasn’t sure what to think of the rumors. There were initially some denials of problems with the program but now, it looks like Larry Zulch, the founder of Dantz the orginal parent company of Retrospect has left the company.

I’ve been here before, with an investment in a technology that seems to be going away. I tend to take a pragmatic approach as much as possible. Things usually don’t fall apart right away, but as each new software update is added to the puzzle you start to lose functionality. So you have to start your migration strategy early. I first do an inventory of the current technology landscape and what options are available. If there is a clear migration path (hint to backup vendors: If you can read a Retrospect catalog , reverse-engineer the tape format and make it seemless I’ll be the first in line) I’ll take that path. If not, it usually involves some sort of dual platform support until the first technology platform fades into the background. This path is less ideal because that first platform becomes so archaic, Jazz Disks anyone?, that you end up having ancient workstations dedicated to that format taking up valuable studio space. If the data is important, I’ve found that it makes sense to bite the bullet and migrate to the new format.

Either way, none of this is fun. I don’t have any definitive answers of what is the right direction to take, but I’ll be posting some of the information I find out as I do the research and see what’s out there. Feel free to leave comments about any information you have about good options for small and medium sizes businesses with the heavy back-up requirements that digital studios face.

Looks like Apple’s chocolate is in Adobe’s peanut butter, or is it the other way around? Import Motion Files Into Adobe After Effects is an Apple tutorial on how to bring Motion files into After Effects.

The cool thing about Motion files is that the project format is a well formed XML file that Quicktime understands how to render. That’s how you get cool products like Digital Heaven’s Automotion. If you’ve got more of a DIY bent, that also opens up a lot of possibilities for creating cool projects via XML transforms and scripting. More to come as I explore some of the possibilities.

Update 03.08.2007

While I was researching, it looks likes the folks at motionsmarts have already been hard at work with cool scripts for Motion. After Effects Position to Motion Position script looks particularly useful for the kind of stuff I do.

Apple is hosting an online seminar on creating rich media podcasts with Final Cut Pro.

It’s a nicely paced tutorial with a lot of useful information marred only slightly by too many required fields in the registration. Interface gripe - Is anybody else tired of web forms with every country in the world included in alphabetical order and the most common countries like I don’t know, the US and the UK requiring days of scrolling. I’m sure all those users in Antarctica are happy to not scroll.

Update 03.02.2007
Martin Baker writes a nice scrolling tip to address the above

Avoid scrolling tip:
Click the menu once and release mouse. Press a letter on the keyboard and the list will scroll to it.

It’s a beginner level tutorial, but you’re likely to pick up at least a few tips. I’ve gotten to where I play this kind of stuff in the background while I work as an alternative to music. Yeah, I’m a geek.

Ever have a PDF that you need to grab a bunch of text from and don’t want to spend a lot of time selecting and copy/pasting? You can use the Spotlight Importer command-line utility to extract the text on OS X.

/usr/bin/mdimport -d2 /path/to/pdf/file.pdf >& pdf.txt

It’s the raw text that Spotlight is using to index the file, so you’ll need to do some clean up, but your mouse hand will thank you.

(via Borkware Quickies)

Since I’ve been posting about Final Cut XML for a while, I’ll occasionally get a, “so this Final Cut XML stuff seems pretty cool, but I can’t imagine what kind of stuff I might do with it” comment. And I’ll admit, it can seem sort of esoteric. You’ve got this spec and cool new stuff like Apple Event support but until you start to see practical examples you can’t wrap your mind around it (although I’ve tried to start the ball rolling with things like my sequencing utility).

Here’s a practical example to start your brainstorming. What if you took David Thorpe’s Compressor API Framework which is an Objective C framework for programmatic access to Apple’s Compressor application and combined that with the Apple Watch Folder example and created a workflow that watched for things like markers indicating an after hours script should create…

• automatic client approvals for your extranet
• content for your web site
• DVD content

..and that’s just a for instance. There is really a ton of juice here and the tools for technically minded folks with help from people like David to really get a lot of “what ifs” off the ground.