Peters Flexible RenAmiNg Kit (PFrank)

jlye · Joined: 29 Nov 2009 Posts: 6

Hi,

This one sounds very tough for me .. not sure how workable is this .. maybe need more than 1 steps to accomplish this.

I have a lot of old archive video clips from my camera. Each video clip comes with a video file and a thumbnail file.

I compress the video file from avi into mpg file. This resulted in me having the same filename with different extension

Eg
video001.mpg 05/01/2009
video001.thm 01/01/2009

The datetime for the thumbnail file is the day the video was taken and the datetime for the mpg file is the day the conversion was done.

1) Am I able to use the datetime info from the thm file to rename the mpg file?

or

2) am i able to modify the datetime info for the mpg file using the thm file

What i hope to achieve in the endresult is to get my mpg file with the filename 20090101-video001.mpg

Cheers
johnny

admin · Site Admin Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 448 Location: Canada

Hi,

The feature you are asking for exists but only for inserting text, video, music, or image data into filenames. You can see it in the options panels as checkboxes labeled as:
'Insert same meta-data for names with same prefix'

See the 'Video Information Insertion' options panel for an example.

I suppose I should have added it for file properties insertion too.

The way it would roughly work is that with the option enabled you could insert the filename suffix before the name. For your example that would add 'thm 01/01/2009' to the start of both the mpg and thm files. Then you would use further custom commands to eliminate the date from the end of the name and massage the prefix to convert the date format.

No promises but I'll see what I can do in the next week.
Would you be willing to try out a beta version?

Peter.

jlye · Joined: 29 Nov 2009 Posts: 6

I will be more than willing to try it out .. looking forward to the beta

admin · Site Admin Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 448 Location: Canada

Hi Johnny,

The beta load is at:

http://www3.telus.net/pfrank/PFrankSetup2.312.exe

Install it. If you need a Vista/Windows7 version then let me know and I'll post it too.

To use it:
1)
go to the options window and select the 'insert file properties' panel.
Change the default insertion to %Extension%
AND
check the box that says 'insert the same file properties meta data to files that have the same prefix'
2)
Go to the main window. In the custom renaming creator, paste the following entries (do not include the single quotes):

Row: 1
Search:
Replace: '*Insert File Properties before*All*'
Custom Format String for Insertion:
'%Extension%'
Row: 3
Search: '^(mpg|thm)'
Replace:
Row: 4
Search: '([0-9][0-9][0-9][0-9])([0-9]{4,4})'
Replace: '\2\1'
Row: 5
Search: '_'
Replace: ' '

There is a shortcut you can use to enter all of the above. TO insert everything at once you can block select this entire reply and copy. THen go to the main Pfrank window, select it, and press ctrl-F2

3)
Press Scan. This will result in a preview showing the date from the mpg files being inserted in the .mpg and .thm names.
4)
Now reorder the names by clicking on the newname header of the preview list. This should reverse the order of all the entries.
Now press the 'redo last scan' button located at the bottom of the preview panel.
5)
The names should now be prefixed with the date from the thm files
6)
If you like what you see then press the rename button.
This will also rename the thm files but that's ok. You can rename them back to their original names by using PFrank again with a new custom renaming list and removing the leading dates in the names.

Hope that helps.
Let me know if you have any questions.

Peter.

jlye · Joined: 29 Nov 2009 Posts: 6

Hi peter,

I am using Vista.

admin · Site Admin Joined: 09 Mar 2007 Posts: 448 Location: Canada

OK you can get the vista version at:

tttp://www3.telus.net/pfrank/PFrankSetupVista2.312.exe

Peter.

jlye · Joined: 29 Nov 2009 Posts: 6

Hi Peter,

Thanks for the update .. it works fine .. Great Stuff

While waiting for your update ..
I wrote a perl script to do the same thing ..