Workflow Automation

Question

I need to learn more about FCPS2 capabilities when it comes to Workflow Automation. Here's my situation... We are a small, growing podcasting network and recently have been presented with an opportunity to host content from a big name in cable television. At this point, we do weekly uploads to our website and the amount of videos each week is not too large a number that me and 2 other editors can't handle the editing, encoding and uploading. With this offer though things will be different. The end result of this deal would wind up being that we would receive almost 90 videos EVERYDAY through FTP. These videos do not need to be edited, only re-purposed for our website by adding our watermark in the bottom corner, and logo bookends in the beginning and end. Would anyone be able to walk me through a process where this can ALL be AUTOMATED. If that is not at all possible, please describe how I could do a batch encode for 90 finished videos (most likely they'll be sending QT H.264 320x240) to FLV. Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

Compressor has some interesting automation hooks. You can set up a watch folder that will use a preset batch and can even email you when the job is done. There's a whole section of the maul that deals with adding actions to a setting, see chapter 22. However, it's this part that gives me pause:
These videos do not need to be edited, only re-purposed for our website by
adding our watermark in the bottom corner, and logo bookends in the beginning and end.
If you want to add video to the front an back ends, you must edit the video because you are changing the export before it becomes input for Compressor. If your playback serving system can be automated (and it can be, just takes an übergeek) you can tell it to bookend the clips for you whenever anyone accesses any clip on the site. You shoudl even be able to tell your streaming server to put in a watermark on playback.
bogiesan
bogiesan