Use of path wildcards

Silverstack offers you a very flexible folder renaming feature, which allows you to create a custom folder structure on your offload and backup destinations.

For every copy destination you can define individual folder structure options. If you start a copy process to different destinations, you can have different folder structures on every destination. Or you just can create a clone of your source material.

There are a variety of software tools in the postproduction process which require a specific folder structure. To simplify the organization of the clips related to the different folder structure requirements, Silverstack offers this useful feature that automatically helps you to structure the files.

To determine the names of folders you can add a various set of metadata placeholders – called wildcards – that will be replaced by the actual values of each clip during copy.

This means that Silverstack is able to automatically save your clips in a specific, individually determined folder structure. So for example your files can be stored in folders according to their submission date and carry the project name and submission time in their file names.

Wildcards can be added in the destination selection step (figure 1) of the “Offload” and “Backup” wizard. Therefore you first need to choose a drive and a folder (figure 1 #1).

 

figure 1: the Backup wizard. Choosing the destination path.

 

 

Document Wildcard Handling

You are able to decide if you want to preserve the original folder structure for the non-clip files or create your custom structure inheriting the metadata from the clips, having this way all the sidecar documents with their parent clips. By default, Silverstack will inherit metadata from clips. To choose between this two options, go to Preferences > Copy and choose your Document Wildcard Handling as “Inherit metadata from clips” or “Always preserve folder structure”:

Document wildcard handling

Document wildcard handling

It is important to have in mind that when selecting the “Always preserve folder structure” option, all files not considered as clips by Silverstack (such as: non fully supported camera formats, image file sequences, sidecar documents, PDFs…) will be copied in the same path of the clips. All documents will preserve the same folder structure of the original medium – that means all clips are in the folders you have created.

Now, to make use of the helpful feature of wildcards, click on “Path wildcards” (figure 1 #2) and the wildcards wizard opens…

 

Important – Need to know

  • Make sure that the path you have determined by choosing a drive and folder (figure 1 #1-3) is not changed or deleted unintentionally in the editable path field of the wildcard wizard (figure 2 #1). Just add wildcards to the already existing path components.
  • In the path field you have to separate the single wildcard tokens by a slash (“/”) if they are supposed to mark a folder structure. Separate them with a dash (“-”) to combine different wildcards for one folder level.
  • Filenames should contain some wildcards in order to make them unique. Silverstack checks the uniqueness of all created file paths and warns you if necessary.
Figure 2: wildcard wizard

figure 2: wildcard wizard

Path textfield and example label

The wildcard wizard (figure 2) at the top shows the full destination path (figure 2 #1) which is editable. You can either type path components in the text field directly or drag and drop wildcards there from the list below. Beneath the text field you can see an example of the pathname including wildcards using one of the clips you are going to copy.

Wildcard table

All available metadata fields are shown in the wildcard list. So you can name your files and folders according to information as submission date and time, project name, various clip information and others.

The tokens (figure 2 #2) can be drag&dropped into the path field (figure 2 #1). The next column (figure 2 #3) contains an example of every token as it will be seen in the final path- or filename. The third column (figure 2 #4) tells you how many of the previously selected files contain this metadata information.

 

Multi-optional wildcards

Some wildcards like the submission time (figure 3) offer several options. You can choose between those by clicking on the small triangle.

  • For submission and shooting time you can choose between the formats: HH_MM_SS and HH_MM
  • For submission and shooting date you can choose between the formats: yyyy-mm-dd, yy-mm-dd, yymmdd, yyyymmdd
  • For the path components wildcard you can choose the amount of path components of the source folder structure of the clip – this information will be include in the path of the newly generated folder structure. So if you choose “3”, the last three levels of the folder structure of the original clip are included in the new clip’s path.
  • For reel characters it is possible to choose parts of the reel name as wildcards. You either can select the first or if applicable the last characters of the reel name.

figure 3: Wildcard wizard: wildcard with several options

 

 

RemovedFromPFDStart

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Backup Clips

Offloading Clips

RemovedFromPFDEnd

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