Export my sequence name to the spreadsheet using AUTOMATION BLOCKS

[evelyn_6350]

Hello,

I am working with a script on Premiere and can't for the life of me export my sequence name to the spreadsheet using automation blocks. Is there a way to export my sequence name as the spreadsheet instead of "mySpreadsheet.csv"? It would be ideal if I could get a new spreadsheet for every sequence I export.

Any info would be greatly appreciated!

thank you!

Evelyn

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi @evelyn_6350,

Our Adobe Expert, @Mathias Moehl  should be able to help you with this. Be sure to use the SDK tag next time. I did that for you just now. I hope that's OK. I hope the answer was helpful.

Thanks,
Kevin

[evelyn_6350]

thank you Kevin! I'll remember to use the SDK tag next time:)

[evelyn_6350]

Hi Mathias, 

I hope you are doing well. I have one other question that's been driving bananas. I created a script to export a spreadsheet which includes all the metadata in my sequence. The spreadsheet looks amazing w/ the exception of a few empty rows in columns D, E & F. I am only testing w/ a couple of clips for now and hoping you can shed some light. I am attaching a screengrab of my script and the exported spreadsheet. any idea of what I am doing wrong here?:(   
Thank you so much in advance for your help.

Ev

[Mathias Moehl]

Hi Evelyn,

concerning the file path: Since they are just texts, instead of using a file block, you can create those with any text blocks:

(code is attached). 

[Mathias Moehl]

Concerning your second question:
Each "add row to spreadsheet" block adds a new row. If you keep fields empty while adding a row, they will stay empty when the next row is added.

I also don't really understand why you want to have the marker data and the clip data in the same table. In your example, you have three markers and three clips, but clip 1 and marker 1 are not really related, right? There could be many more markers than clips or vice versa, so why should they be in the same row of the export. WOuld it not make sense to export markers and clips into two separate spreadsheets? Or keep it as is and have first a lot of rows with only clips and then a lot of rows with only markers.

[evelyn_6350]

Hi Mathias,

thank you so much for your help and taking the time to asnwer my questions. To answer your second question, I am working on a workflow to help the producers on our end when submitting shot requests to post production. We need the file name of the clips which contains burnt in metadata (slates, scrnr takes, VFX ID etc). This is to help the production team track where the files originally came from so they can gather that footage and sent back to us in a higher resolution when creating promos. So because I cannot copy and paste burnt in metadata, I have been adding that metadata in the markers comment box to make it easier to export that in one spreadsheet. But I can't get the markers metadata/comments to export to the same row where the clip name is exported to. I just was curious if there is any way to move those up to the top row of the colum since that info corresponds to the clip file name.  Please let me know if you need more info or another example. I wuld be happy to share mor einfo w/ you.

thank you again so much for your help and time.

Ev

[Mathias Moehl]

I see. Here is a basic example which puts

- in row 1 the name of the first clip and the name of the first marker
- in row 2 the name of the second clip and the name of the second marker

...

We use a variable "clip number" to count upwards with each iteration of the loop to know which clip number we are currently at. Then we can fetch the corresponding marker easily.
Note that this expects that if you have 100 clips, you also need at least 100 markers.

Also, maybe you want to use clip markers instead of sequence markers? Like just having one marker on each clip. Then the markers move with the clips if you move the clips around. And instead of doing the counting, you could just retrieve the first marker of "my clip" instead of a marker of the active sequence.
Also, if markers are missing, the export will then always stop at the clip, which has no marker. With the sequence markers, the export will stop at the last marker and not really notice if one is missing inbetween.

[evelyn_6350]

This is amazing @Mathias Moehl thank you so much for your help. Do you know if in the future automation blocks will have an OCR feature that will read burnt in text from files? 

[Mathias Moehl]

We have no plans for such a feature at the moment.

You could write an Automation Blocks script, which first exports a frame to an image file and then executes a custom bat file on Windows which itself runs a OCR tool like Tesseract on the exported file. On Mac OS you could execute a shell script instead of a bat file. But I haven't tried that yet and it would definitely be some work to set up such a pipeline.

[evelyn_6350]

Hi @Mathias Moehl I hope your day is going well. I have been using the "Render Frames at Markers" from the scripts in the Library - under Examples-> rendering-> Render Frames at markers. There seems to be an issue w/ the script when I tried using it today. It is exporting hundreds of black still frames along w/ the correct jpgs. I had a sequence w/ 10 files and exported the jpgs using this, it did exported however it also exported 486 other jpgs - all black. Do you know why this is happening all of a sudden? I am adding the copy of the script here for you to review if possible and if you have time. 

[Mathias Moehl]

Have you checked your marker panel? Maybe you have additional markers before the beginning of the sequence or after the end of the video content?

[evelyn_6350]

OMG you are the best! that was the issue. Thank you so much for all of your help, Mathias!! Happy Holidays!

[MakePPROgreatAgain]

What is automatation blocks?

[Mathias Moehl]

It is a paid third party extension, which I am developing.

You can get it here:
https://aescripts.com/automation-blocks-for-premiere-pro/

[MakePPROgreatAgain]

Can it do what I want here: https://community.adobe.com/t5/premiere-pro-discussions/is-there-a-tool-extension-free-native-that-l...

[Mathias Moehl]

Automation Blocks can only read and modify the attributes of clips in a sequence, which are exposed by the scripting engine. But as Bruce mentioned in the other post, there is no API around everything. So you will be able to export and import the list of clips with in points and out points, for example, but not all other details like effects and transitions, for example.