Re: Final Cut Pro 3
Re: Final Cut Pro 3
- Subject: Re: Final Cut Pro 3
- From: "John C. Welch" <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 05 Dec 2001 12:34:44 -0500
On 12/05/2001 11:45, "Jeff Handy" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
What were you hoping to do with AS for editing? Our Media 100 systems
>
are AppleScriptable and I barely use those functions of the program.
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About the only useful scripting is for exporting stuff. Other than
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that, editing is a very human-needed task. Most of our automation is
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done with QT AFTER the stuff is exported from the editing system.
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That's where AS really comes in handy.
Depends...if you are doing a lot of canned movies, like commercials, where
you have a lot of standard elements, and you just need to change the clip
you are adding in, that's scriptable.
Showtime uses a LOT of applescript with media 100 systems, primarily for
stuff like that. If I am doing a lot of canned work, why do it manually at
all. If I have a lot of the same parameters, why not script those? If I have
clients with certain hard requirements, script those. If I want to use
Filemaker Pro as a media database, I need scripting to make it more
integrated with FCP.
AppleScript is an extension mechanism. The more you have, the more you can
do. In general, if I can do it through a UI, I should be able to do it
through a script.
<rant>
I hate this line of "Why would you need that?" Well, the truth is, you don't
know. It never occurred to me to use Photoscripter, OE, and FMPro to create
an automated image conversion system with Email replies for approval
disapproval until I talked to a guy from Sony at MacWorld one day. He was
complaining about how actions sucked, because they are brain dead, and it
was dumb to pay a designer to do monkey work like TIFF to JPEG conversions.
So we talked a bit, and on some scrap paper, and a laptop, figured out how
to automate damn near the whole thing.
You cannot assume what someone will do with AppleScript. You just have to
make it as integrated as possible. Who thought that you could use AS and
QuickTime to create a chat client? I got tired of bad LDIF file conversions
because Netscape is dumb, so I created a script that used BBEdit to cycle
the file, then dumped it into OE's address book. AppleScript makes your
application infinitely more useful than any amount of customer surveys and
feature requests ever will. I mean, most of the Internet is built on
scripting...some of it even AppleScript. I was thrilled to see SOAP and RPC
support in AS. I'm working on using it. But it's there, and AS just became
infinitely more useful because of it.
No, scripting is not glamorous, and sometimes you'll never know who is going
to use it, but it makes a difference. You think people use Quark as much as
they do because they like the company? Or because Quark is known for being
nice to the people who send it money? Not even close. AppleScript is the
main reason. InDesign is probably going to eclipse Quark in feature set, and
lord knows, it'll beat Quark to Mac OS X. But unless you can set up a one -
step script converter, the library of scripts written for Quark will give it
a few more years of dominance.
Don't bother trying to guess what scripters are going to do with your
product and AppleScript, you'll get it wrong. Don't bother trying to decide
what should be scriptable. Just make *everything* scriptable, and see what
happens.
</rant>
john
--
"Who Dares, Wins."
British Special Air Service (SAS)