Automating Compressor 4.5 with Automator Folder Actions.

[Music] hey everybody today we're going to do a quick video on how to use apple's compressor to automatically transcode and send footage to a networked location using automator and folder actions so let's jump in okay so the first part of this automated process is to set up our target directories i'm going to refer to one of them as our drag and drop directory and the other as our target network folder since we are going to be using compressor to send footage to a network location uh that'll make more sense in a second as we get our folders set up here so let's take a look we are going to go ahead and connect to the server that we want to access and here i've already set up a folder it's called editing room submissions right here okay that's going to be our network folder and next i'm going to make a new desktop folder and we're going to call that drag and drop send okay so next we're going to want to check our permissions and make sure that everyone who needs to read and write to these folders can and we do that by just hitting get info on the selected folder and scrolling down to the name and privilege sections so we can see read write read write read only change that to read and write and you can do that for whichever folders you are going to be using throughout this process uh namely this drag and drop folder here and the network location folder since we're going to be relying on this drag and drop folder i find it helpful to just change it up a little bit make it look a little different to that end i've made just this quick little graphic of an arrow on a folder icon very simple the way to change a folder icon in mac os it's very easy just open up the target image copy it and hit get info on the drag and drop send folder and paste it okay so next we are going to make sure that our computer is automatically connecting to the server at startup and the way to do that is through the users and groups menu in the system preferences and under login items we're just going to enter our password and just drag uh my folder is my server is called video share so we're just going to drag the server right into the login items option we can check hide if we don't want to see it pop up immediately after we log in great so now our computer will automatically connect to the server with our network target whenever it uh is logged in okay so next we're going to open up compressor this is compressor version 4.5 although this method does work on other versions of compressor some small differences now if you're familiar with droplets you'll know that you can simply drag and drop an old nexus droplet into a new version of compressor and it will read the settings if it doesn't let you drag and drop try making a new group and then dragging and dropping okay so i have my old compressor droplet imported you don't need a bold compressor droplet for this you can make a brand new one the droplet i'm using in this case is called nexus with some specific settings for my projects and what we're going to do is set the output of this nexus droplet to our network folder the way to do that is by adding a new location so we're going to go to the locations tab here compressor and we are going to choose our network folder edit room submissions okay and as you can see that's just been added to the custom drop down menu under locations so back on our nexus settings we're going to switch that from desktop to edit room submissions great and now we can save this as a droplet i'm going to name it nexus send to network folder now here's a funny thing just make sure that you know where you're sending it because it's going to ask you where you want to save the droplet and it's also going to ask you to choose a location so make sure that you save it to wherever you want to in this case it's desktop but then you select your correct network that you select your correct location okay so here we go here's our new nexus droplet if i open it up i can see that it's using my nexus preset and the location is correct i can slide this old one over here don't need that anymore i'm going to put this nexus droplet in my drag and drop send folder you'll see why in a minute okay so now the fun part here's automator we're gonna open up a new automator session we are going to select a new folder action now if you've never used automator before don't be intimidated there is a lot of crazy stuff you can do with it but this folder action that we're going to make is actually very simple so our first prompt in automator is to select which folder we want to use for our folder action so we are going to select not our network folder but actually that drag and drop send on our desktop which as you remember we just put our nexus droplet into so we're now going to add an action called open binder items okay now that open finder items is in our workflow we are going to click on the menu here and select not compressor but we are going to select our nexus droplet the droplet is a dot app it's basically a one usage app telling the compressor exactly what to do so what we're setting automator up to do is open any item that's been sent to that folder with our nexus droplet before we get any further we have to open up folder action setup and just check and make sure that is enabled if you've used automator before if you've used folder actions before it probably is enabled but it's always worth double checking if you don't have it enabled nothing's going to happen the next item that we're going to add to our automated workflow is one that wasn't necessary in uh past iterations of compressor for whatever reason apple decided that compressors should not be allowed to run automatically anymore but there are ways around that and that's what we're going to do right now so we're going to add a watch me do action watch me do again if you're familiar with uh automator sometimes it's really awesome and sometimes it's really awful in this case it works out okay we're gonna open up our compressor droplet with my little test video here i'm going to hit record on watch me do and it's going to ask me to allow it in the system preferences it wants permission just to use accessibility features so we'll just quickly open that up put in our password allow it and hit ok now we can go back and do that again so we're going to hit record we're going to hit start batch and stop recording that's it so you'll see that under watch me do we have exactly one action and that is click the start batch button now we can save our folder action you can save it you can name it whatever you like i'm going to call mine edit room 1 folder action and we can see it appear in folder action setup so now there's one small thing that we have to do if i run my folder action by placing this test video inside my drag and drop send you'll see that my compressor droplet appears but nothing actually happens watch me do doesn't work the reason for that is that we actually need to manually enable folder actions dispatcher in our system uh security and privacy settings so we're gonna scroll down to accessibility and we are going to enable folder actions right here there we go now if i run my compressor droplet by placing my test footage inside the folder it will run and we'll see watch me do do its job and if i open up my network target there it is there's my test video so this process was done on catalina uh but i have also done it on big sur i know it works using compressor 4.5 so there we go that was a quick way to automate your output workflow to a network [Music] environment

Channel: Roman DeSimone

Views: 416

Keywords: apple, compressor, 4.5, automator, droplet, mac, automation, automating, compressor 4.5, folder actions

Id: Hr97dF2OWF0

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 08 2020