Quicktime export using applescript/folder actions

Question

I have about 500Gig of encoded H264 footage.
I want to be able to "bulk" change video properties on all of the video so that when I view it in front row it isn't letter boxed.
I can do this manually, save as a .MOV and all is fine.
anyone tried something like this as an applescript?
I have scripted eyetv quite a bit so I`m quite familiar with applescript, just being lazy I suppose!
any help greatly received !
* looking in the quicktime applescript library *
Steve

Answer 1

The nature of your question implies that you're unfamiliar with Folder Actions...
I'd like to skip them or write the AppleScript in a way that handles this.
By their very nature, Folder Actions are passed a list of newly-added files. Your Folder Action script should look something like:
on adding folder items to my_folder after receiving the_files
  -- your code goes here
end adding folder items to
where, in this case, the_files is a list of the newly-added files. It won't include pre-existing files, so all you need to do is iterate through the_files and you're set. Something like:
on adding folder items to my_folder after receiving the_files
          tell application "iPhoto"
                    repeat with each_photo in the_files
                              try
                                        import each_photo to album "Europe 2012"
                              end try
                    end repeat
          end tell
end adding folder items to
The only caveat here that I can think of is the fact it's a DropBox folder, so there might be some odd latency in the files appearing in the directory, but I don't use Dropbox to know.
Note that in the above I import each photo independently, via a repeat loop. This might not be necessary, and you might be able to pass the entire the_files variable to the import command to have all the images imported in one go - I haven't tried that, though.