ProVideoTech.org

A while ago, I wrote an article about using qt_tools to generate proxy previews for PresSTORE Archive.  While this solution is relatively simple, because of the toolkit it was relegated solely to Quicktime enabled Mac systems.  It made codec support easy, but also came with its own set of problems.

As Linux/Windows becomes more common for PresSTORE installs, I thought it might be nice to find a cross platform solution.  Enter ffmpeg, imagemagick, and ffmbc.  All of these open source toolkits allow us to encode preview movies from a variety of sources to a variety of platforms.

I will not go into installing these tools onto your system as there are already a multitude of sites on the internet that go through the process, but if you would like to learn more about each of these tools, here are their websites:

ffmpeg - http://ffmpeg.org/

ffmbc - http://code.google.com/p/ffmbc/

ImageMagick - http://www.imagemagick.org/

ffmpeg and ffmbc are great tools for video encoding, and ImageMagick is a tremendous tool for still image manipulation.  But enough about the tools, you can read more about them in the links above.  Lets write some PresSTORE Preview Generation scripts. I won’t show an ffmbc example here, but once you understand how ffmpeg works, you should be able to relatively simply intermingle the two to figure out which is the best fit for you in your environment.
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In a natural extension of the PresSTORE/CatDV work I have been doing, I have written a more unified installer and configuration tool for the scripts on Mac OS X.  The project is called Castor and it has its own page now here on my blog.  Check the page for updates to the scripts or if you have any questions.

Recently I have been using Quickbooks 2012 to manage my business, and while I can’t say I’m in love with the software by any means, it is what I would consider “good enough” for what I’m doing currently. I have the multi-user edition and run the database using the Quickbooks Server application. I frequently travel or work off site, so having access to this offsite was something that I wanted to do. Since I use the standard OS X Server LT2P VPN server, bonjour services don’t “just work”. This is because L2TP (among others) doesn’t support multicasting, which is what bonjour uses in a local subnet to broadcast. After doing some research, I learned that WAB (Wide-Area-Bonjour) does not support private namespaces, so that was out. The other option was to use a VPN server that supports multicast, like OpenVPN. I liked using the built in Apple VPN client and I didn’t want to go through the hassle of compiling and configuring OpenVPN when my current VPN was working just fine for this.

You might ask, “why are you writing about Quickbooks on a video and storage blog?”. Simple: the tools in use very well may be useful for other Bonjour enabled applications that don’t give you way to connect via direct IP address.
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While not optimal, sometimes you don’t want to spend the extra money to get a robust tool for doing scheduled ingest from companies like Softron or ToolsOnAir.  I had an inquiry on how you could do this using the free tools that come with AJA hardware after my write up on scheduling the KiPro using iCal. Considering that the free download from AJA’s site, VTR XChange, is Applescript capable this task is actually quite easy.  We don’t need to write any shells scripts or interact with any command line utilities this time.  In fact, we only need two scripts in total.  One will start our VTRXchange Application recording, the second will stop record. Our first script is pretty simple:

set StartTime to do shell script "date '+%Y.%m.%d-%H:%M'"
tell application "AJA VTR Xchange"
	activate
	capture to StartTime & "-iCalSchedule"
end tell

The first statement simply grabs the start time of the recording and uses it to name the file in the second statement. The second statement starts VTRXchange if it isn’t already running, tells it to start capturing, and names the file in the format YYYY.MM.DD-HH:MM-iCalSchedule.mov Our second script is even easier:

tell application "AJA VTR Xchange"
	activate
	stop capture
end tell

Save these scripts into ~/Library/Scripts as “Start Kona Capture” and “Stop Kona Capture” respectively.   Then use the setup method in the article above on KiPro scheduling to add them to iCal. Enjoy!

For a full overview of getting CatDV working with PresSTORE Archive, click here.  This article discusses updates due to changes in CatDV 9.0.

After doing some work with CatDV 9.0, I discovered that the XML schema has changed slightly.  The changes are actually just a more verbose XML output and adding some additional sub-fields to the USERxX elements.  In CatDV 8.x XML, these were actually fields and therefore returned the contents. Read the rest of this entry »