First of all, I should say that the Elgato Turbo.264 hardware encoder is fantastic. Not only is it a sleek, small USB dongle that can be easily moved between machines – it also produces very decent-looking h.264 content in near-real time (29.97 fps). One drawback, however is that its settings are, for the most part, hardwired and not very customizable. It can only output files in an .mp4 container, which is readable by Quicktime, but not as versatile as the .mov container. And it might create some compatibility issues for older machines or for some software like Portfolio.
So, I’ve been working on a way to automatically strip down and rewrap .mp4s (or any other QT readable format for that matter) as self-contained .movs . I was able to compile a fairly simple applescript to create the equivalent of a “watch folder.” Any files dropped into the chosen folder are automatically opened in QT and rewrapped as a MooV (i.e. .mov). The relevant code is as follows:
on adding folder items to thisFolder after receiving added_Items
tell application "QuickTime Player"
repeat with theFile in added_Items
open theFile
set NewFile to text 1 thru -5 of (theFile as string) & ".mov"
tell front movie
stop
with timeout of 500 seconds
save self contained in NewFile
end timeout
close
end tell
end repeat
end tell
end adding folder items to
It’s also possible to make the watch folder the same as the Elgato export folder, so that, when a file is completed, it will automatically be converted. This requires a delay of x number of minutes as the script loops to confirm that the file is complete. The relevant code is as follows:
repeat while isNow ≠Was
set Was to size of (info for F)
delay 30
set isNow to size of (info for F)
end repeat
This will employ a 30 second delay. The upshot is that, once the file is the same size for more than 30 seconds, the conversion process will begin. I was also able to put together an applescript droplet that will locate and rewrap media files in any given folder. Since some of the Seth Fein videos are in .mov containers and some of them are in .mp4 containers, this will help expedite the process of making them uniform. The droplet is affectionately titled “Convert to MooV” and is available on my iMac, or upon request.
The next big step will be automating the capture and encoding processes. But, in theory at least, this should only require a slight modification of my watch folder script.
