Batch flatten quicktimes?

Does anyone know a way to flatten a batch of quicktime mov's, other then lillipot. When opening a mov in quicktime pro, a "save as" flattens the movie. This is a necessary step in my FCSvr workflow, but so tedious. Lillipot creates files that aren't handled well by FCSvr whereas the "save as" in quicktime does!

Hi Hippie,
I read a post from someone uploading ref movies. I'v tried that and indeed FCsvr asks where or non you want to flatten the movie. But somehow it is different from the self contained save as in Quicktime pro, cause the send to web response stalls at a certain point just as it does with non-flattened movies. So far only the save as workflow works.
Batch importing ref files also seems to make extra copies on the system drive, I believe in the /private/var/temp. In the post I mentioned above I read that the whole disk got cluttered.
HAHA, I see now that this was your post!!
Anyway. What does "save as" a self contained movie does to make it work where every other method fail. I know that there seems to be something is the metadata that is written to the XML file that makes the difference. But I can't figure out what
Message was edited by: Willard Jansen

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Batch Exporting Quicktime mov

so, i'm looking for a way to use jsfl to batch output to
quicktime. i don't want to /publish/ to quicktime (i can do that
easily, but the results are poor), but rather use file>export. i
can't seem to find any documentation at all that shows how this is
done, and i don't see any 'click the menu' objects for this.
there's an exportSWF command that works well, but not an exportMOV
or anything of the sort. is there a way short of applescript of
doing this?
failing that, is the flash interface open to applescript at
all? that'd be ugly, but possibly doable i suppose.
thanks!
t

For anyone who is interested:
In case you are using Flash CC you can use the following javascript command from the Flash-Java-API
// exportVideo( fileURI [, convertInAdobeMediaEncoder] [, transparent] [, stopAtFrame] [, stopAtFrameOrTime] )
fl.getDocumentDOM().exportVideo("file:///C|/myProject/myVideo.mov");
http://help.adobe.com/de_DE/flash/cs/extend/WS849c47c2a95c1007745be14f13b0ac99249-8000.htm l
If not then you have the same problem that I had. In this case the only solution I found so far is to use an interface like autoIt to automatize the buttons and shortcuts you have to press:
http://www.learningapi.com/blog/archives/000063.html
This is quite dirty, and you probably need an extra render machine to run it, as you cannot interact with the mouse or keyboard, without distubing the process.

Batch monitor Quicktime error -50

Can anyone shed any light on what QuickTime error -50 means?
I'm encoding iPod and RTSP streaming files, (with closed captioning SCC files referenced in the additional content area of compressors inspector window.
When the files are encoding in the batch monitor window, many will give the quicktime error -50, if I run them again, most will encode fine but a few may still give the -50 error. Running those that error again a third time will encode fine.
It's very frustrating that this error keeps popping up.
I have completely wiped my boot drive and installed the FCP suit and Mac OS, twice, (formating the hard drive each time) so as to make sure that I had a clean install of everything. I reset all of my minimal settings by hand for the encode templates in compressor and I still get this -50 error only on my Mac Pro.
I also have a G5/quad that uses the exact same settings and version of FCP suite, and it never errors. I have the exact same setup on both machines, same number of internal hard drives, using the same drive name designations in both machines, (identical in every way, that I can make them) as far as using the FCP suite, (compressor especially) and I am still getting this very annoying QuickTime error -50 in the batch monitor.
All software on both machines are current with the latest releases of the Leopard OS, QuickTime 7.6, and FCP suite.
Any I idea of what QuickTime error -50 means would greatly be appreciated. I'd like to stop having to re-run these files multiple times to get them done.

there's also reports of incompatibility with compressor3:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=4968107&#4968107

Batch failed: quicktime error 0

I saw another post about this topic, but no real answer.
I'm cutting a feature film shot on DVCPRO HD 1080 24pa. I've burned several DVD's throughout the course of the edit with Compressor, using the 16:9 Best quality 90 minutes setting. (the project is under 85 minutes TRT).
Last night however, the batch failed and gave me a "quicktime error 0." I don't think it's a ram problem as I have it maxed out at 2 gigs on my MBPro.
Like I mentioned, I've successfully burned countless DVD's this way, so I'm not sure what has changed.
Any thoughts or advice regarding the problem is greatly appreciated.

Jay,
A lot of times that you get that error it's because there's a piece of media in the timeline that QuickTime doesn't like/know how to handle. I ran into this a lot with a documentary that had tons of stills and here and there QT would choke on one.
Try exporting a reference movie (File > Export > QuickTime Movie) from FCP and see if that 1) exports successfully and then 2) encodes properly in Compressor when used as the source media instead of the sequence directly exported from Compressor.
Often times, if you have some media corruption, the export will fail and/or rendering the timeline will fail too.
Brian Gary

How to I create an Automator workflow to batch convert Quicktime movies to

I want to know the best way to create a Automator workflow to batch convert movies in Quicktime Pro using H.264 compression and save as a .mov file?
Thanks in advance for reading and replying to my post,
Sebastian

You might find something in this database.
Automator Actions Database

How to flatten Quicktime movie?

I have Quicktime 7 Pro. I used it to overlay an arrow image on top of my movie, and saved. I then emailed the movie to someone and discovered that when played, it keeps looking for the resource (the image that is on there) - apparently the arrow image is not included in the QT file I sent (which is weird because I deleted the image off my system, and still the movie shows the arrow on my computer, so it must have it somewhere else??). How do I "flatten" the movie file so that everything is in there and I can send that one file to others and they will see exactly what I see when I play the movie here? I tried the program "Lillipot" to flatten it and it didn't work - arrow still not visible in other players (although QT no longer complains about not being able to find it) - it deleted it maybe? I just want a self-contained movie file that has exactly what I see here. What's the right way to save/export/convert that?

Did you try saving it as a self-contained movie? That's one of the options.
Dan

Batch monitor Quicktime error -6662

Does anyone know what Quicktime error -6662 means.
This error was displayed on one of three alternate version of the same file in the batch monitor window. Two of the alternates finished with no errors, and one failed to finish, displaying this Quicktime error: QuickTime Error: -6662

Here's a little more info on the problems I'm having with compressor.
I noticed today when trying to launch compressor, it failed due to no video memory being available. This was due to a KVM being attached to the mac pro and when I shutdown the monitor at night this also diconnects the monitor via the KVM being powered down.
This may have an affect on the video cards memory, causing the video memory to show zero memory in compressor. Only restarting the mac, while connected to the monitor resolves the memory issue.

HELP - batch fails - quicktime error 0

Hi, I sent a qt file from final cut to compressor and tried to used the dvd - mpeg2 best quality 90mins setting.I have tried 3 times and every time, about halfway through, it stops and says "failed: Quicktime error 0. I'm trying to make a file for dvdsp. Im not sure what else to try
Many thanks

There is probably something terribly wrong at that point in your movie. Bad media file, bad render, missing font, no way to know from here.
bogiesan

Please help!! Using Apple Script in Automator for Quicktime

I would like to add some metadata to a batch of quicktime movies and then make the files unable to be altered and re-saved so that I can post them on the web. If I open a movie in quicktime and run the following apple script I can then perform save as of movie A into movie B and movie B cannot be altered.
tell application "QuickTime Player"
set saveable of movie 1 to false
-- save self contained
end tell
I would love to be able to do this on a batch level in automator however I cannot figure out how to pass automator items to the apple script so that their saveable can be set to false, and after this I cannot figure out how to have to movies re-saved so the changes will take effect.
Any help at all would be greatly appreciated.

how are you passing files to apple script? as finder items?
the following should work then
<pre style="
font-family: Monaco, 'Courier New', Courier, monospace;
font-size: 10px;
margin: 0px;
padding: 5px;
border: 1px solid #000000;
width: 720px;
color: #000000;
background-color: #ADD8E6;
overflow: auto;"
title="this text can be pasted into the Script Editor">
on run {input, parameters}
tell application "Finder"
repeat with cur_file in input
set fname to (name of (get info for cur_file) as text)
tell application "QuickTime Player"
open file (cur_file as text)
set saveable of document 1 to false
tell application "Finder" to set new_item to (path to desktop as string) & fname
save self contained document 1 in new_item
delay 1
close document 1
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end run
</pre>
the above will dump the modified files onto your desktop and give them the same names they had before. You can adjust that as you like of course.

Batch Extract Audio Files from .m4a videos

I saw something about using Terminal to extract audio files from a batch of quicktime movies, but I'm not sure where it was. Anyway, is there a way besides doing each manually? There are quite a few of them. I know my way around Terminal fairly well if necessary.

Okay, I kind of solved it (drag and drop, click, drag and drop, click, etc...) by using ffmpegX, which puts each file into a queue and goes through and converts them all. Still, it would be cool if there was a way to do it all in a single batch because if you drop a batch into ffmpegX, it only does the first one.

Quicktime won't play HDV .mov

I upgraded to Lion, and noticed that Final Cut Pro was not playing my HDV .mov clips off of an external drive in the timeline.
Upon closer inspection, Quicktime also couldn't play these HDV clips either. Quicktime X said "The document ... could not be opened. This media may be damaged." Quicktime Player 7 (Pro) says "The movie could not be opened. An invalid public movie atom was found in the movie."
I then take this same external drive to a Snow Leopard installation, with FCP on it, and all clips work fine, and can be opened in both Quicktime X and Quicktime Player 7 (Pro).
I can also open these files in VLC in Lion without an issue, so it seems that maybe it's a Quicktime codec issue. I look in /Library/Quicktime/ and the AppleHDVCodec.component is there.

Thanks for your help with this, it is very kind of you.
As I understand it, a flattened Quicktime file is one where all of the information of the video and audio are interleaved in the data track. In a non-flattened file, this same data can be spread across a resource fork and a data fork, and can cause issues with certain applications. The files my Direct to Edit (DTE) machine makes are not flat. I think I can make my DTE create a different filetype of footage that'll work properly in Lion and FCPX, but my hours and hours of existing footage that is not flat will have issues.
Before OS X, I remember having issues sharing Quicktime files with Windows users; even if they were using Quicktime. The simple fix was always to flatten the file (usually just opening the file in Quicktime and then re-saving the same file--not re-encoding the file to a different codec or anything, just re-saving it), and the file would then be flattened and work in Windows. I've never had any issues with non-flattened Quicktime files in OS X until I downloaded FCPX on a Snow Leopard machine to test it out. I tried to import the media that works just fine in Quicktime and FCP7 into FCPX and it said it was an unsupported media file. Flattening that same file made it work just fine in FCPX.
It appears to have the same result in Lion--Quicktime suddenly can't read non-flattened files. I wonder if another good test of this would be to use iTunes in Lion. Usually, if you have a movie file in iTunes and add metadata or change metadata through iTunes on that file, the file is not flat. I wonder if Lion would then not be able to be read it?

Hardware Configurations for Final Cut Server

I am a small video production shop, currently running 2 standalone FCP stations; one Intel tower FCP7 with about 3T of firewire 800 Raid 1 storage, and one PPC G5 tower FCP6, on a gigibit ethernet network with a central NAS. I am adding a 3d station and a new employee. The problem we have run into is that many assets seem to always reside on the wrong system, and duplicate projects become impossible to resolve and archive effectively. We shoot exclusively on HDV.
This is the setup I am considering....
Convert the Intel Mac Pro tower to Final Cut Server
Buy 3 27"iMacs for edit stations
My plan would be to have all projects reside on the FCPServer and edit on 422 Proxy versions on the iMacs. I understand that each iMac would need a copy of FCP. Would they all need to be FCP7 to work on the same project at different times?
Other questions:
Would working on a gigabit ethernet network be a bottleneck?
Could I ingest video directly to the server? Is there a way to capture 422 video onto the server or would that require a separate copy of FCP on the server to capture from tape? If so could I use the older FCP6 copy withot upgrading just for capture? Alternately could I use a copy of FCExpress on the server just to create a project and capture on the server then open and convert to FCP7?
Any suggestions for what to do with the Dual 2.5G PowerPC Tower?

ProRes wil be much faster for rendering on the client and transcoding on any machine, and will also allow for more realtime effects vs native HDV in FCP. "Full-rez" is a misnomer here, since ProRes Proxy does not sacrifice any resolution and indeed has a higher bitrate than native HDV. You might find that your HDV source looks just as good in ProRes Proxy (it is very high quality, just not as pristine as the higher quality versions of ProRes).
Remember, ProRes 422 Proxy is still a 4:2:2 10-bit codec. I think you'd need to look awfully close to see a qualitative difference. You can choose to use ProRes Proxy at lower resolutions than your source media, but you don't need to. It is designed to work all the way up to 2K and maintain all the color fidelity of a 10-bit codec.
When you check in a project that you are cutting locally with Edit Proxies, FCSvr relinks the project to the original media, but it does not render anything. You would need to open the project on the FCSvr host with FCP to create an flattened QuickTime against the original media (in your case native HDV).
You can recapture, but when you have FCSvr cataloging your clips, you do not want to recapture the same media and duplicate the asset. If you are careful and recapture the clips that were disposed of to the exact same location with the exact same filename as before, FCSvr will re-link the media to the asset automatically. However, that workflow is very human-error-prone and I strongly recommend you not adopt it. Keep your source HDV tapes as a worst-case backup, but if you are going to use FCSvr, use its archive capability to RAID-1 external drives and only go back to the tapes if all else fails. And you'll need to be very careful to match you prior ingest if you do.
Of course, you can always delete an asset altogether when you're done with its media and later recapture the footage from tape and treat it as a new asset. It depends on how interested you are in keeping your asset records and their proxies intact for media you plan to remove from storage.
I'd take a good long look at ProRes Proxy vs HDV for quality. If you can't see a difference, capture to ProRes Proxy and make that your online format. Then you won't be eating up all your storage on the server keeping both the HDV original and a ProRes Proxy for edit proxies. If you don't enable edit proxies, FCSvr just hands out the original media.

Image from Photoshop is getting masked in black or something

I have a file that I flattened in Photoshop. It looks fine. I batch flattened a group from Bridge and it is the only one with this very strange issue. It was a document with a bunch of layers and when viewed in Photoshop or any other way it looks fine. In Premiere the center image is showing but it has blacked out all around it. Has anyone experienced this? I manually flattened it as a psd again and as a tiff and it is still looking strange in premiere.
Thanks for your input!
Holly

It looks like your Alpha Channel (used to create the Ellipse knockout) is coming in and obscuring the background image. I do my Exports before Import into Premiere directly from PS. While I may have an Alpha Channel in my PSD, when I Import as Footage w/ Flattened Layers, the Alpha Channel is not used. If I wish to use it, I'll Import_As_Sequence (in PrPro) and then get a Timeline with all Layers separate.
If the PSD's are coming into PE with the Alpha Channel, try deleting any Alpha Channel, before you Flatten. If you are using this as a Layer Mask (the way that I'd do it), definitely do a Save with all Layers, Alpha Channels and Paths, then remove any un-used Paths and Alpha Channels, Flatten and do a Save_As using PSD and changing the name, say to Image_001_Flatten.PSD, or similar. Import that.
Last, when working with still images, you will be best served if you re-size to the frame size of your Project in PS, before you Import. The re-sizing algorithms in PS are better than those in PE, or PrPro in my opinion. Also, you will not have the overhead of working with large stills. This can cause no end to problems with resources and can even lead to all black, or all green display in the NLE program. If you plan on panning on a zoomed out image, it'll be bigger than your frame size, but should be just barely big enough to do your pans. Steve Grisetti recommends 1000x750 as the max size. That is a very good figure to use as the max. I re-size to exactly what I will use, so most of my stills are smaller than that. Let PS do this re-sizing for you, as you will improve the final output by some degree.
If the Alpha Channel is still a problem, after using my Flatten and Save_As method above, attach one of your .PSD's (in finished form, just before you Import) and e-mail it to me. My e'dress is in my Adobe profile. I'll be glad to study it for you, and find the exact problem. Also, try the re-sizing. In PS I have an Action to do the re-sizing, usually to NTSC DVD 4:3 specs., and just do a Batch Process on a folder full of stills. I can process 100+ files in moments. Then, I Import into Premiere.
Good luck,
Hunt

Only get 1 frame or green background in RAM-Preview AE CS5.5

Hi All,
I've been working with AE for a few years now, and nothing like this has ever happened to me before:
I have a batch of quicktime videos (.mov)(stats are 1080 @24p) that play just fine outside of AE or Premiere. But when I stick them in and do a RAM-Preview, I get only the audio and 1 frame. If I scroll through the video I may get another frame or 2 if i'm lucky, or a dark green background. I have no idea what could possibly be doing this. And it happens in Premeire Pro CS 5.5 as well.
Stats for my mac are 4 gb of RAM and running OSX Mavricks

Codec is AAC, H.264, 2 Channel Audio, etc.
Opening up a file with VLC gives me 516 streams ( ! ) with
Stream 0 having Audio | MPEG AAC Audio (mp4a) | Stereo | 48000 Hz
Stream(s) 1 - 516 having Video | H264 - MPEG-4 AVC (part 10)(avc1) | 1920x1080 | Frame rate of 23.9744...
Some, however, have the (correct) decoding of Planer 4:2:0 YUV, as of which I believe this causes the Purp/Green colors & sometimes dropped frame.
Edit: (More Info)
Due note that the movies where recorded as AVCHD, then opened into Quicktime and then saved as a .MOV for greater flexibility with different programs.
Would it be worth it to try and find the .MTS files again, and use those?
Or, if they have gone missing, what would I do anyways?
Thanks.

Mastering directly to XDCAM Discs in Pr CS6

Hi all,
Apologies if this is covering old ground, I did a cursory search but couldn't see a solution.....
We are in the process of switching from FCP 7 to Premiere Pro CS6 and are looking for a little help refining our workflow. Historically, we have shot mostly on Sony XDCAM format and as such have adopted (for better or worse) XDCAM discs as an archival format. We would export our final sequences through the plugin in FCP 7 and that would be that.
My question is two fold:
1. Is there a quick and easy way (plugin?) that will enable this export direct to XDCAM disc ala FCP 7?
2. How easy is it to create a split track master from a sequence that has already been cut?
Any thoughts/opinions on XDCAM disc as archival format are also welcome - currently toying with the idea of a flattened quicktime on LTO alogside our projects rushes. We shoot a mixture of C300 and Sony formats these days.
Thanks for your time - I'm new to the forums so please be gentle!
Matt

Hi Matt,
Thanks for asking, I am actually having this problem as well when mastering to XDCAM from Premier Pro. Hopefully somebody can provide us an answer.

Batch flatten quicktimes?

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