On April 18th, Noah Chamow and I taught a session on automation in Post-Production. Here are a few of the things I mentioned during my section on manipulating text with and without using Regular Expressions. If you’re looking for material on Noah’s sections, it’s at avidsupergrouper.com/class
View the Presentation Online (or as PDF)
Text Editors
Regular Expression Resources
- Learning RegEx
- Practicing RegEx
This might be a bit dated now (I reference Avid Marquee!), but I wrote a post introducing RegEx a while back that might still have useful tidbits in it.
Shell Scripting Resources
- Codecademy
- Khan Academy
- iTunes University (search in iTunes for something like Python, Ruby, or Javascript)
- Code Avengers
Converting a shell script into an OSX application: Platypus
If you have questions, you can find me on Twitter as @schiffty, or use the contact form on this site.
Hey Evan, it’s a been while since the seminar, but I have a question. Is there an easy way to save a simple regex find/replace operation as a droplet or runnable application? I’ve created something to take the locator text and make it a clip comment for VFX pulls, and I’d love to make it a standalone app I can distribute to the other AEs on this show rather than having them copy/paste the regex string in Atom.
P.S. It would be fun to have a place we could all share the little tricks we’ve come up with.
You might check out whether Atom has macro support, then you could make a macro of it and just run that. You’d still have to open your locator file and run the macro, but it’d save the copy/paste of the regex pattern.
If you want to get a little fancier, you could make an automator workflow that runs a shell command. There are shell commands that will read a file and do a find/replace with regex, but if you go this route do some testing before you distribute it. There are some differences between regex in Atom and regex in Terminal.
I wasn’t able to make it to the live seminar so I pleased to see it on the MPEG site. It was so informative. Thanks for putting it together!
Hi Matthew, if on OS X, you could always wire up an interface in Platypus or Pashua that puts a pretty GUI on your regex.
https://www.bluem.net/en/mac/pashua/
http://www.sveinbjorn.org/platypus