Any way to export a list of cues ?

[gpeeler]

I have searched the forums but i must be using the wrong words and cannot find an answer to this:

 

Is there any way to export cues and media in use to some kind of text document with their time positions ? 

 

Thanks in advance for any answers or smart work around ideas.

 

gpeeler

[jfk]

Not easily, not impossible.

 

The information exists in the .watch file, in text form, but it is not in an immediately useable format.

Dataton does not document internal file structures, but by the same token they do not hide the data.

 

All of the information that defines every object (cue., layer, display, media, aux timeline, etc, etc)

in the .watch file is there in text form.

You would need to filter it and turn it into a form useable for your purpose.

An example of a third party application that does something along those lines:

WATCHOUT Forum - topic: Import Layers from Photoshop

The app shown externally generates new media items, a new composition,

populates the compositions with advanced media cues on multiple layers and

then imports all that into a current watchmaker session.

 

If you would like to see what a text representation of a media cue looks like,

open watchmaker, select a media cue, copy it, open Notepad, and paste.

 

The now discontinued WATCHOUT System Manager toolkit included a developers api.

But it did not include a media cue list or a media list export function.

The api existed to support third party control applications.

One of its functions extracts (and optionally filters) a list of watchout control cues by timeline,

as that had purpose from an external control perspective.

[TimFranklin]

I'm not sure if this will work for your exact goal here, but you can get cue name and in time from pasting a timeline into a text document. You can organize this data using excel.

To find file name and time do the following -

1. Paste the data delimited by commas and tabs into excel.
2. If there are comps, control cues, and media cues you must use 3 filters -- (took a picture) -https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B8aHFFwB6M8TRmF6X0hRSVZxUVE/view?usp=sharing
3. Copy and Paste resulting names into a new sheet.
4. Then to get the in times just filter L by mStart and grab the data from J and copy and paste those next to the names on the new sheet. The duration should be right next to it as well if you need that too.

I guess, if you were to do many timelines at once maybe you could also find a way to filter by timeline name and somehow organize it that way.

 

Will this help?  Where I work I can't really install any third party software, but I do have excel so this is the only option I've had to do this.

-Tim

 

(edit- in the picture I forgot to change one of the conditions, the condition should be "contains" for all three. )

[gpeeler]

Thanks for the replies guys.

 

I had pretty much gotten that far but i didn't know what some of the extra data was and whether or not it might be useful. 

 

I just copied the layer with my control cues and pasted that to notepad saved as csv imported to a spreadsheet. then i realized i could easily write a python script to extract the "good info". Which is what i am doing now.

 

Tim your method might be more straight forward, i don't use excel but i will look for the filters in libre office.

 

Jim i tried the same thing with the watch file but it was just too much stuff to filter, but again if i can find the right stuff to look for python could spit that to a list or table.

 

Thanks a lot, still would be a good feature request i think.

 

gpeeler

[Mike Fahl]

The data saved by WATCHOUT 6 is a bit easier to deal with here, since it adds a comment to each line in the file with the name of the  corresponding field as a trailing line comment. Makes it a bit easier for us mere mortals to find what we're looking for.

[gpeeler]

Also good to know Mike, thank you. i haven't had the chance to use 6 yet but soon i will.

 

gpeeler