BROWSE CATDV SUPPORT MANUALS

In the current version of the worker you can only have a single work set. The work set includes the name of a task list file. This file is important as it contains the queue of tasks, both completed and currently running, and other information. In most cases you can use the default task list file but if necessary you can specify a different task location by clicking on the name to display a file chooser. The file name you choose should have extension .xml.

If you will run the worker node under your user account a good place for the task list file is in your own home directory, as you will need read and write access to both the file and the directory that contains it, but you might also decide to have the work file on a network volume and have several worker node instances all sharing the same volume – whichever worker node is free will pick the first task that is queued and perform it.

You can define any number of watch actions in your work set, each of which defines a watch folder and tasks to be performed on any matching file that appears in the watch folder. Press the ‘+’ button to add a new watch action or use ‘Duplicate’ to copy an existing watch action (you can then edit the copy without having to enter common settings again).

Note that you can have a work set without defining any watch actions on it. This would create a worker node that performs compression on existing tasks in the queue but doesn’t add any new files to the queue itself. (Although not currently implemented, in future the CatDV and Live Capture Plus applications might add items to a work queue for compression without implementing a watch folder, for example.)

Editing watch actions

A watch action has two distinct parts. A definition of which clips or files should be processed (based on conditions such as where they are or what type they are) and a definition of what operation(s) should be applied to those files.

An action can be triggered based either on files appearing in a watch folder (or being dragged onto the worker icon), or based on clips saved to the CatDV server that match particular query conditions. If an action is triggered by the appearance of a file it must first be imported using one of CatDV’s importers (for example, analysing the file using QuickTime to extract metadata such as the file format, duration, timecode, etc.) whereas for a server-triggered action the clips have already been imported (either from a CatDV client or perhaps by another worker task) and so the file pre-processing and import stage is omitted.

The ‘General’ tab defines the name of the job, its relative priority, whether to send an email notification on completion of the job, and whether the job is triggered by a file or by a server query.

For file-triggered tasks, the ‘Trigger’ and ‘Conditions’ tab define the files to be processed, while the ‘Pre-processing’, ‘Conversions’ and ‘Post-Processing’ tabs define the actions that will be performed. For server-triggered tasks a ‘Server Query’ tab defines the query used to select clips for processing, while the ‘Conversions’ and ‘Post-Processing’ tabs are as before.