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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
May
13
(2005)
Automator Freaking ROCKS!
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: 10.4-tiger, projects.
For the Mavericks project, I get to transcode 9 DVD-ROMs worth of high resolution TIFF images into JPEG images for use during authoring by Pachyderm (I could use the TIFFs directly, but that would tax the system more than I’d like to during beta testing).
At first, I was wondering what to do about this. Back in the day, I’d use Debabelizer Pro, or a Photoshop action or something.
But, I just fired up Automator.app, and in less than 60 seconds had whipped up a Workflow that finds all TIFF images buried within a selected folder (or volume), copies them to a designated folder on my hard drive, then transcodes them to .jpg files. Exactly what I needed. In under a minute. It’s going to take a while to run (copying and transcoding roughly 40GB of images may take some time), but the process is now almost completely Automated. I couldn’t find the Finder action for automatically swapping DVDs unattended, or I’d just let this sucker run unattended all weekend…
In my books, this one task just paid for my Tiger upgrade.
Update: After it’s done processing the first DVD, I’ll see if I can tweak the Workflow to display status information. Right now, it’s slowly copying files from the DVD, and there’s no direct way to see how much is left to go (I can go into Terminal and ls -1 | wc -l to see how many files are in the target directory, and hit Activity Monitor’s “Disk Activity” tab, but a nice shiny thermometer progress bar would be nice…
Please let us know how you make out with the status thing.
I really like the possibilities that Automator offers, but I find it frustrating that I’m not able to work with more information about an item in the pipeline. For example, I wrote a workflow (installed as a folder action) to convert sound files (.wavs, really) into AACs (so that I can make podcasts out of Car Talk’s live broadcast…). There’s an iTunes action that allows me to set the metadata on a track, but there’s no way to set a tag based on the input file.
No joy. I checked the “Options” widget, and it just gave the option to be prompted on a couple of parameters. Not what I was looking for.
I’d like a “provide status” option…
1. If you want to record public radio shows (or anything else from an online stream) and save it to your iTunes/iPod automatically, check out Rogue Amoeba’s line of Audio Hijack products. (rogueamoeba.com)
2. Could you create an Automator action that would run that bit of Terminal code you indicated (or otherwise perform that “count” action?) and then display the results in a pleasing way? That might be nicer than constant trips to a command line.
Automator really needs a status action/option. It could be as simple as window that comes up or even in the menubar appended to the current spinner.
Johnathan, the problem with having a separate Step or Workflow providing the feedback, is the “copy items to folder” step seems to be tying up Automator, so it would need to be able to provide its own feedback.
Steve, you’re right. Something like a “Show progress for long actions” option on a Step…
I don’t have Tiger yet (waiting for 10.4.1), but so I don’t know if this will work. Apple’s site for Automator says this, however:
“Expand your library by downloading new Actions from third-party developers or create your own using AppleScript.”
Note the last word: AppleScript. It’s ridiculously simple in AppleScript to display either a thermometer bar or the barber pole to show a progress window. I think you can write an AppleScript to poll the number of files to be processed, the number of files that are done, update the progress window. Then call the script from Automator periodically. And remember, you can also use command line in AppleScript to make it faster. Just a suggestion.
root: thanks! I had thought of that, but if I was going to be writing code, I’d likely just do a bash script using ImageMagick or something… The beauty of Automator is the no-code programming, and falling back to write code to fill the gaps just feels wrong
[...] sted in News | D’Arcy Norman has made the astute observation that “Automator Freaking ROCKS!”, with a workflow he whipped up on-the-fly [...]
I see. I think it’s complex to implement such a thing from Automator, though, because Automator needs to know the beginning, the end and how the progress bar should be updated. If each Action has its own progress bar, then it’s going to be really messy once you string a bunch of actions. OTOH, if you group several Actions into a single process then there needs to be sections where the information is inserted in the workflow and from what I’ve seen (granted, not much), Automator does not have much room for this. In the end, I think Apple left this out because of the simplicity for the target market: average users.
However, with lots of alpha geeks really getting into Tiger, I am betting that you see ways to do this before long. You may even be able to find such Actions for downloads soon. Anyway, good luck.
is there any way to set the JPEG quality/compression setting??
Seems like converting to JPEG is useless if you can’t specify the compression level.
I didn’t find a jpeg-quality setting. I would have just set it to “full” or “100%” or whatever, which is what it appears to be doing anyway. I was really just needing a way to get the images down from ~30MB each to ~1.5MB each so they can be processed by the authoring software more easily.
[...]
Monday, May 16, 2005
Automator Freaking ROCKS!
D’Arcy Norman: Automator Freaking ROCKS! “In my books, this one task just paid for my Tiger [...]
The problem with doing progress bars in Automator is: each Action receives its entire data in one batch, and produces its entire data in one batch. Thus, short of Apple providing additional Automator API, you can’t write a progress-monitoring Action, since by the time the Action was called, the previous Action has finished and the next Action has not yet been called. And since Automator effectively relinquishes control to each Action, it would have no idea when the Action is going to complete either.
That said, if you guys have any suggestions for UNIX-based actions, please check out my Shellac UNIX tools as Automator actions product and send me some suggestions!
http://www.pixelglow.com/shellac/
For setting the jpeg-quality, you can use this: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/adobeillustratorsaveasjpeg.html