Executing Commands

As part of a job you can run an arbitrary operating system command invoked via a command line interface. Such commands might include copying a file by FTP, using an external transcoding engine such as FFmpeg or Telestream Episode, or running a batch command or shell script, and provides a very powerful way of extending the capabilities of the worker.

For example, under Mac OS X you could write

/usr/bin/ftp –u ftp://user:password@host/public/upload/ $l

to upload all the converted movie files to the /public/upload directory on ‘host’ via ftp. The ‘curl’ command gives even more options for copying files to an external server (including via https, sftp, etc.)

Up to three external commands can be performed, at different stages in the processing. The first command is intended for external transcoding or other pre-processing, the second command is intended for interaction with external systems via XML and supports updating clip fields as a result, while the final command could be used for FTPing completed files or performing notification that the action has completed.

To pass parameters to the external command you can either export the clip(s) being processed as an XML file (using an optional XSLT file to translate the file to another format from CatDV’s default XML format) or pass them via the command line using a variable expression. To update clip fields as a result of processing the command check the ‘parse output’ option and write updates to the standard output of the process using fields ids such as NT for notes, one per line. For example:

INDEX=0                                                       – if we are processing multiple clips specify which one

@STS=Complete                                            – set the clip Status field

@U5+=Processed by my command       – append to the User 5 field

See below for a list of variables you can use use on the command line to refer to the original file being processed, the file(s) it was converted to, and more.