Compressor Droplets can be extremely helpful- but recently I ran into an annoying issue with them. You can’t just drop any file on to the droplet- this is a good thing if you accidentally drop, say a text document, on to the droplet. But it’s frustrating when you can’t drop something legitimate onto the droplet.

Why won't it let me drop?

I ran into this with .caf files, a perfectly legitimate audio file, that I knew Compressor could actually handle from past experience. Whenever I tried to drop a .caf file onto a droplet to convert it to a .aif, nothing would happen. I could open up the droplet, and drag in the .caf, but what’s the point of a droplet if you can’t drop?

It turns out there is a solution. Right click the droplet and choose “Show Package Contents”. A new Finder window will pop open with all the guts of the droplet. Open up the file “Contents/Resources/Info-Stomplet.plist” in a text editor. I prefer TextWrangler, but TextEdit should work.

Next, find the line that includes “CFBundleDocumentTypes”. Under that, it will have an “array” node, and then a “dict” node. Select from that to the next “dict”, about 13 lines. Copy that, and paste right before what you had selected. Edit it as follows-


<dict>
<key>CFBundleTypeExtensions</key>
<array>
<string>motn</string> // UPDATE to the file extension you want the Droplet to support
</array>
<key>CFBundleTypeName</key>
<string>Motion Project</string> // UPDATE to the name of the file type
<key>CFBundleTypeRole</key>
<string>Viewer</string>
<key>LSTypeIsPackage</key> // REMOVE if not a package
<true/>  // REMOVE if not a package
<key>NSPersistentStoreTypeKey</key>
<string>Binary</string>
</dict>

Save the file. Now, open up the Terminal, which is located in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app. Type “touch”, and then a space. Drag the droplet from the Finder into the Terminal. The command should now say something like “touch /Users/username/Desktop/droplet.app”. Hit enter. This command reminds the application to update.

You should now be able to drag other files on to the droplet.

See? Making movies is easy.

Note that this doesn’t mean that Compressor will actually be able to use the file. It only means that you can make the Droplet try to submit it. For instance, if you try to turn an AIFF into a image sequence, that won’t work.

If you’re still looking for that perfect April Fool’s Day joke, this may be just the thing you are looking for.

Imagine this- your hapless assistant editor is editing away, la-de-da, when all of a sudden they come across an offline clip.

To do this- go to your Applications folder. Right click on Final Cut Pro.app, and choose “Show Package Contents”. A new window will appear, with the guts of Final Cut.

Navigate to Contents/Resources/English.lproj/, and find Localized.plist. Make a copy of this file somewhere- you will want to restore this to the original after the joke is over, and have a backup in case something goes wrong.

Find the line “DrawString(“Media Offline”, 0, -r[2].v/10, r[2].h/320*4, dest, kWhite, 1)”. You can change the “Media Offline” to anything you want.

You may also want to change the text size in the line above, “SetTextSize(48*r[2].h/320)”. Only change the “48”- the rest scales it so it looks the same across all formats.

Disclaimer- you are messing with the inner coding of your livelihood. Be careful. Keep a backup, and restore after the joke is done. Remember this may show up while a client is in the edit bay. Please don’t blame me if this all goes horribly wrong. Also, I know this works on FCP6, haven’t tried it out on 7. Let me know.

And yes, I realize this would be much cooler if it was for the unrendered effect. However, that code is apparently stored in “Localized.rsrc”. I attempted to change that file, and Final Cut refused to launch, and then launched without any labels on any of the windows. Below is the save dialog I was presented with. I was able to fix everything because I had a backup.

Let me know how it goes for you!

One of my clients does a lot of shooting, and needs rather quick turnaround on timecode window burns. We could set up the DVD recorder, and play out through the Kona card, but that is real time, and occupies an edit suite for the entire time. Final Cut has a timecode reader filter, but it has long render times, again hogging up a suite.

So I turned to Compressor, to see what it could do. It has a timecode generator filter as well, but it is lacking one major thing- readability. There is no built in background, bar, or shadow that ensures it will be readable no matter the background. White text may disappear on a beach shot, for instance, and black text will disappear on dark night shots.

So I figured out how to use the Watermark filter in conjunction with the Timecode generator to give that transparent background.

First, I made a graphic for the watermark, a transparent 720×480 with a simple black bar near the bottom. It should work for 16×9 or 4×3. You can download my .psd here – no use in reinventing the wheel, as it took a bit of tweaking to get it positioned correctly.

To make the preset, open up Compressor, and duplicate the MPEG-2 6.2Mbps 1 Pass preset from the DVD: Fastest Encode 90 minutes folder. Here’s how to do it in Compressor 3.

You can do this with the 120 or 150 minute presets if you want, but I rarely get a tape longer than 90 minutes. The preset is set up fine as is – we want to take a look at the filters tab in the Inspector window.

Turn on the Watermark filter. Hit the “Choose…” button, and choose the tcwb.psd file you downloaded earlier. Change the position to Upper Center, and make sure Scale by is set to 1, and Alpha is set to .5.

Now, turn on the Timecode Generator filter. Set the position to “Lower Right – Title Safe”. Leave the Alpha at 1. Change the Text Color to white. Click “Select Font…” and up the font size to about 50. You can change the font if you wish, but make sure it is readable.

Important note- Compressor applies the first filter in the list, and then moves down the list. You’ll probably need to move the Watermark Filter above the Timecode generator – otherwise, the watermark will be in front of the timecode, and make it hard to read.

Save the preset, and you’re ready to convert away. To make it really easy, set up a droplet. I used Final Cut Server to make a watch folder, so my edit suite is completely free for other work. The only thing left is to burn the DVD.