Command-line -t frameRange wildcard for all frames?

Question

Greetings,
Pretty new to Shake and I am trying to get a seemingly simple command-line workflow going. I have a patch of QT files I need to output as DPXs after being deinterlaced. Where I am getting hung up is with the frameRange. It seems it will only render the first frame unless I give a range. Since I don't know how many frames each individual MOV has, I am getting stumpped. Is there a wildcard or some other option for having shake just do the whole thing?
Here's my command-line:
*shake -v -fi 0003PU.mov -deinterlace 0 1 -fo 0003PU_DPX/0003PU.#.dpx*
I have >80 QT files to convert to DPX, it seems a waste of time to have to open each one in the Shake GUI to find out the total frame count for each one. In the GUI it has the "Auto" button which populates the timeRange field with the full range, surely there must be something I can do from the command-line!

Answer 1

I wish there were such a wildcard! That would make life so easy.
I did figure out a way to generate Shake scripts automatically,
including finding the length of the source file. It will take a little
work: you'll have to learn bash.
Basically bash is a way of taking a bunch of command lines,
and combining them into something you can run as a program.
Here are two excellent resources for learning:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-bash.html
http://www.grymoire.com/Unix/
These two sites are awesome.
__________EXAMPLE ONE
Every bash script includes this line:
#!/bin/sh
Then you just start adding UNIX and/or bash commands.
So copy these two lines into a plain text editor window
and save them as amnesia.sh
#!/bin/sh
whoami
In Terminal you can run your new program!
Use cd to navigate to where amnesia.sh is,
and type
bash amnesia.sh
You will be reminded of your identity.
__________EXAMPLE TWO
Jumping ahead really quickly, here's a technique for
making a loop that will call up the name of
every Quicktime movie in a folder and send
it to some function in your bash script:
cd ./folder_containing_movies
for i in $(find . -name '*.mov');
do
my_fi=`basename $i`
my_function $my_fi
done
__________EXAMPLE THREE
Now we'll define that function: it prints out the name of the movie.
This part of the script must be above the loop
from which it is called.
So here's the complete bash script:
#!/bin/sh
my_function ( )
echo $my_fi
cd ./folder_containing_movies
for i in $(find . -name '*.mov');
do
my_fi=`basename $i`
my_function $my_fi
done
__________EXAMPLE FOUR
In order to have shake do something with these movies,
you could, in the example above, replace
echo $my_fi
with
shake $my_fi
but then you'd just get the first frame, and you'd
have to quit each Viewer to see the next movie.
For normal fully-tweaked dozens-of-nodes Shaking, one would use
shake -exec my_script.shk
The problem is that it's difficult (impossible?) to pass variables
like my_fi into my_script.shk. I was unable to do it--
probably because I'm just a beginner--
so I used bash to replace key words in a template,
scriptTemplate.shk, to write one shake script for each movie.
To do this, you need to replace parameters in the Shake script
with words that can be searched and replaced. In your Shake
template, the FileIn filename can be something like SEDmy_fi.
In bash you can use the sed command to search and replace
the expressions in the template:
sed -e 's/SEDmy_fi/'$my_fi'/g' scriptTemplate.shk > ./scripts_out/${my_fo}.shk
This does the search and replace, then writes a shake script
named automatically by my_fo, another variable you've created:
my_fo=`echo $my_fi | sed 's/.mov/_output/'`
__________EXAMPLE FIVE
At this point your head is totally spinning. Don't worry.
This is not a tutorial; I'm just trying to sketch out
the broad ideas here. You'll still have to learn bash
for this to make sense.
As a special bonus, here's a really useful bash command I stole from Olli
at vfxtalk.com to get the timerange of a movie using shake -info :
timerange=`shake ./folder_containing_movies/$my_fi -info 2>&1 | grep Duration | sed 's/info: Duration: //'`
You could then use $timerange elsewhere in your bash script.
Hope that helps,
Les