Batch vs individual operations

Most watch actions create a separate task for each clip or file being processed. This is suitable for actions which involve doing a full file import (full media file analysis and thumbnail extraction) or transcoding and where each task can take a signficant amount of time.

In some situations it is more efficient to operate on a large group of clips as a single task however, though in these cases you won’t be able to perform operations such as a transcode on each file. The following batch operations are available:

• Setting up a file watch folder with the “Folder Sync (Quick)” importer. Any new files that appear in the watch folder are quickly added to the catalog in one go, without doing any per-file analysis.
• Importing a CatDV XML file in immediate mode (see below) using the “CatDV XML File (Quick)” importer. This will quickly create clips using the data provided in the XML file without doing any per-file analysis.
• Importing a CatDV XML file in immediate mode (see below) using the “CatDV XML File” importer. This will do a full import of all the files referred to by the XML file in one task, so care should be taken with this option as the whole operation will fail if one file has an error and you also don’t get the benefit of scheduling different tasks across multiple processors if the import takes a long time.
• Performing a “Bulk Query”. This will perform a server query to find clips to process but rather than creating a separate task for each clip will process all the clips in one task. It is suitable for doing a bulk update of clips and then publishing changes back to the server but where no transcoding or media file analysis is required.