I am not an Automator-aton

October 29, 2009 7:41 PM

How can Automator help me save a bunch of files?

I have ~200 video files. I would like Automator to open them in Quicktime X, and perform a "Save as" in a different folder with the same filename. I know it sounds like I'm just duplicating them but bear with me. I'm totally clueless in using Automator and recording the actions isn't working, perhaps I'm doing it wrong.

posted by Scientifik to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

I don't know enough about Automator to directly answer your question, but depending on the format you want to use, you could probably also use the command-line and something like mencoder or ffmpeg. If you want XviD, AVI or MPEG-2 output, this could be the way to go. If you're not familiar with the UNIX command line, this is probably too much to learn to be worth it.

You can message me if you like. I've done a significant bit of hackish batch transcoding of video.
posted by krilli at 7:53 PM on October 29, 2009

Response by poster: Its not a matter of transcoding them, I have Compressor to do that, however when I use compressor the videos come out either 3x the size or lower quality, I've been messing with this for days, Final Cut won't open the videos, QTX will, when QT saves the videos, FC can open them fine; random problem, random solution.
posted by Scientifik at 8:03 PM on October 29, 2009

OK Weird
posted by krilli at 9:06 PM on October 29, 2009

It looks like you can do this with AppleScript. I opened up Script Editor and looked in QuickTime Player's scripting dictionary (Window → Library) and it does support the open and save commands (with filename arguments). At least in Leopard, it doesn't look like you can do this with Automator, though I'm not an expert in that. If AppleScript can be a blunt tool sometimes, Automator is even worse.

Here's a start of what a script like that would look like. You'll need to look up the stuff about path manipulation and the exact loop syntax.

tell app "Finder"
  set filenames = files of folder "..."
  loop with file in filenames 
    set newFilename = ...
    tell app "QuickTime Player"
      open file
      save file in newFilename
    end tell
  end loop
end tell

posted by serathen at 11:08 AM on October 30, 2009