JimmyCrackCorn
Registered
I'm working for a production company and they would like me to find a way to keep a track of where media is stored at any given time, it could be stored on a location on a server, large RAID boxes that are attached to edit suites or external hard drives used on shoots and around the office. The media could be stored in any one, two or all of these locations at any one time. I don't have database skills and in any case there is no software here for database creation. All that's needed is a simple text document saying where projects and their assets are stored, I can do this manually but the problem is that it is impossible for me to keep on top of deletions, copies, work done on weekends and all the other shifting around of media that goes on as projects are worked on. Any document I generate might well be out of date too quickly to be useful.
I've looked through automator's list of folder actions and the best sounding actions I could find was a 'create new aliases' action. If I can specify folders and drives and edit boxes to be included in the action I'm hoping I could make it so that all media added or deleted to and from those specified folders has an alias added to or removed from a central folder on the server that everyone can access. This way people can just use finder's search option for that folder to search for a meaningful name like a project name, find all the aliases for that search and use the 'get info' function to find out where a given alias is pointing to.
The system is not without problems and not quite as user friendly as one might hope but it's the best I've come up with so far from the list of actions in automators folder actions library. Unfortunately I'm not quite sure how to make it do all this, so far all I've been able to do is add the create aliases action and specify the destination folder but I can't figure out how to specify which source folder to use or how to tell it to create aliases when media is added or how to delete them when they're removed. Also is it possible to specify folders which exist only when mounted? As in external hard drives?
The solution seemed simple until I tried to get in to the nitty gritty of it, if anyone knows how to do this or has a more elegant solution, could they help me? Another potentially major stumbling block is that while final cut pro project files will likely have meaningful names, rushes will probably use automated camera naming conventions, the project files will link to these but only the locations of the media that that project is using so for example it might only link to low resolution versions of the files that are being used temporarily for editing but won't link to the high resolution masters that will later be used in their place. In this situation I'd need the automator to take the name of the folder in which the media is stored and append it to the alias name as the folder name will be meaningful. Is this possible?
I've looked through automator's list of folder actions and the best sounding actions I could find was a 'create new aliases' action. If I can specify folders and drives and edit boxes to be included in the action I'm hoping I could make it so that all media added or deleted to and from those specified folders has an alias added to or removed from a central folder on the server that everyone can access. This way people can just use finder's search option for that folder to search for a meaningful name like a project name, find all the aliases for that search and use the 'get info' function to find out where a given alias is pointing to.
The system is not without problems and not quite as user friendly as one might hope but it's the best I've come up with so far from the list of actions in automators folder actions library. Unfortunately I'm not quite sure how to make it do all this, so far all I've been able to do is add the create aliases action and specify the destination folder but I can't figure out how to specify which source folder to use or how to tell it to create aliases when media is added or how to delete them when they're removed. Also is it possible to specify folders which exist only when mounted? As in external hard drives?
The solution seemed simple until I tried to get in to the nitty gritty of it, if anyone knows how to do this or has a more elegant solution, could they help me? Another potentially major stumbling block is that while final cut pro project files will likely have meaningful names, rushes will probably use automated camera naming conventions, the project files will link to these but only the locations of the media that that project is using so for example it might only link to low resolution versions of the files that are being used temporarily for editing but won't link to the high resolution masters that will later be used in their place. In this situation I'd need the automator to take the name of the folder in which the media is stored and append it to the alias name as the folder name will be meaningful. Is this possible?