I am shooting 130 shots a day to the SxS card and the Samurai Prores HQ card at the same time. At the end of the day I have to send the transcoded XDCamEX footage to CA by Fedex each night after I select the best shots and hold the ProRes file in NY. When the show decides on the shots I then send the all Prores files on a hard drive to CA. I am forced to eye match the Samurai ProRes files from the transcoded SxS card footage each night to keep empty cards for the morning. It means selecting twice which is not working very well and I am sure to loss a shot.

Is there a way to use time code to match? Because I never see the time code on the ProRes file transferring the data from the samurai drive to the hard drive. I never go into Final Cut because there is no time for rendering. I need sleep.

Help Obi Wan your my only hope!

Well if you're not scared of writing a little shell script, you can probably handle this with an awesome little utility I found a few years back. The name of the utility is aditc. When you run it and include a video file as an argument, it prints out the starting timecode of the file.

Here's an example run:

/usr/bin/aditc SWIFT-F3-A_WATER-0003_01.mov

prints out "20:46:20:12". I've written lots of scripts and I can already see this one in my head. Just have the script run through the two repositories of files from the F3 and the Samurai, decide beforehand which has the master file name. When you find a match, rename the non-master file. At the end of the script print out any unmatched files that couldn't find a master and any orphan files that exist in the non-master but not in the master.

This is not a hard script to write. You can make it as fancy as you want or just keep it very basic and probably 25 lines or so. You probably could do some other checks like, check the lengths or number of frames of both files and report massive differences, etc. Contact me offline if you need some help with it.