I'm working right now on a project that could allow me to generate movies based on the user input. User will upload some samples (photos, movies) to the web app and web server should generate movie based on that input and some predefined movie compositions.
I know that there are plenty of libraries for ffmpeg that could let me connect movies, photos programmatically (for example https://github.com/schaermu/node-fluent-ffmpeg for node.js) , but I was wondering if it's possible to use Aftereffects for that purpose since I have some knowledge in that software. I imagine that there should be set of scripts in Aftereffects that could import user uploaded data, fire the movie renderer and save output to the given location.
Do you think this is achievable using Aftereffects? Or maybe someone had similar problem and solved that differently ?
Cheers!
I have done the exactly same thing.
I DO NOT suggest you use script to do it. I have made the same mistake. Script is fine for a small job, but when you try to use it on a web server and run constantly for days and days it's very unstable. You will be facing a lot of crashing.
I would suggest you use sdk to do the job. It's much more difficult to use sdk than using script, but is more stable and much faster! When you try to create a web service app, you want it to be stable and fast, don't you?
Yes, this is definitely possible. There are existing scripts for rendering and uploading via FTP, and the possibilities are pretty much endless. The part that jumps out at me as needing clarification is "scripts in Aftereffects that could import user uploaded data". This suggests a need for a back-end that "looks for" or "waits for" elements to "appear" in a directory to kick off the ExtendScript script in AE. This is where it gets slightly dicey in that you have to devise a way to do this with a "daemon" in your preferred operating system using any number of languages -- python, Java, AppleScript, shell, batch, etc. The rest of it ("import user uploaded data, fire the movie renderer and save output to the given location") could be done in ExtendScript.
Related
A few days ago I decided to make my own "interface" to make it easier to organize (and work with) some of my personal files. You know when a lot of related data, pictures and links are right in front of you and you can change them in a couple of clicks, this is very convenient.
I started by studying HTML, CSS and JS, because I thought that the changes made to the local page would be saved somewhere on my PC so I can just run Index.html and do whatever I want. But they didn't. Refreshing the page erased all changes.
Using browser localstorage does not suit me, because if I change the browser, the data will be lost. I wanted it to just open with Index.html and work fine even if I change my browser or move the site folder to another computer.
Then I decided to learn more about server-side languages (such as PHP or Node.js) because they are directly related to databases, so I was hoping to save changes through them. But these languages required me to really open the server, with ip and port tracking. And I just wanted to open a local page through one file, without any ports or connections via the console. So this method scared me off quickly.
So is there an easy way to make a local page like this? Maybe I have not studied well one of the above methods and it has this opportunity?
Or the best I can hope for is a simple application that will use that local page as an interface to interact with data? I accidentally heard about this possibility a long time ago. Then I will ask you to give at least a hint as to which language to choose for this.
I don't understand well everything that lies outside of vanilla HTML, CSS and JS, so a complete study of a complex language like Java or Python will be too difficult for me, and the goal is not worth such a lot of effort.
I hope I understand correcly what you are trying to do.
If your goal is to make an application to manage your files, I think the simplest solution will be, as you said, to look into NodeJS and the File system api which will let you interact with your files through javascript code.
Your program will have to be in two part that will have to interact:
the "front" html page
the "back" nodejs script
The downside is that you'll have to go deeper into your study of the language to learn how to create the interactions you want between your html file and your NodeJS application.
However, there is no need to open your server to the web to make it work. The NodeJS application can be set to listen to requests from only the computer that runs it (localhost).
I obviously can't get too much into details without knowing precisely what you want to do but you'll probably have to learn to make a local server with node (search "nodejs http" or "nodejs express"), then make requests to it via the html page's scripts (search "ajax request").
What you need to look into are (web based) content management systems. like strapi or "grand old dame" WordPress.
I have a simple audio sequencer application using javascript and HTML5. The goal of the application is to let users make a beat and save it so other people can open it up, add on to it, then re save. The issue I'm having is the save/open feature. How Do I add this? Or at least where can I start looking fro this solution?
If you are asking for an only-JS solution to this:
Opening Files
You can use the FileAPI to open the files from your users local machine, as long as its your users who are selecting the files manually(you are not digging into the file system yourself).
Here is nice demo for this functionality: http://html5demos.com/file-api
Saving Files
However, saving files was a W3C recommendation that got ditched so your only choice here is to allow your users to download the file. See this relevant question I made some time ago
If I were doing this for a class or prototype I might use PUT or POST requests to save the beat sequence in json form to a web server. When it's time to save your work, take your beat sequence data, convert from a js (I presume) object to a json string and PUT it to an appropriate url on your server. Give it a name and use the name in the url path, like "myserver.com/beats/jpbeat1.json".
When you want to retrieve that beat, issue an HTTP get to the url you saved. You can, of course also maintain and rewrite a directory page in json or html, or you can just navigate the directory offered by your web server. Most developers will think this crude, I imagine, but in a race for time, crude can be good if it meets the requirements.
Choose a web server, the easiest one for you. I might use Amazon S3. Costs money, but available to the internet, has authentication, security features, and supports http GET, PUT of static files. There are many other site hosting services.
For a local install, I might use Node.js. Also very easy to set up to serve static content. For example, the Express framework has static content service and easy examples how to set it up if you are comfortable with Javascript. With Node, you can make the site a bit fancier, by writing server side code to maintain an index, for example. Any real world implementation would require at least some server side code.
There are many other choices. Most developers would want a database, but you don't have to have one if simple files are ok for your class project. It all depends on your requirements.
I hope those ideas are helpful.
I want to create an internally used web app that can be run with just a copy of the web app and the DB (anything from a text file to MS Access/Excel would work fine). Is this possible? I don't want users to have to setup a SQL server to get the app to work. Having the files necessary to run the web app stored on a shared network drive would be ideal, for example. The problem is that JS can't write to a DB. Is there anything that can use to do this?
Like mentioned, I can assume that Access/Excel are installed, if there's anything that might help there.
It's most certainly possible. W3 has put up the specs for a client side database that can be accessed by JavaScript. The modern browsers have good support for it, and since this is for an internal application, you would have some level of control I believe.
Checkout this slide that shows a live demo of Indexed Database. The full spec can be found here. See this link for browsers that currently support IndexedDB. Here's another set of slides showcasing how to use IndexedDB.
However, with this approach, each user's browser has its own DB locally. If you want a centralized DB, then you will need a server.
You can perform database transactions with JavaScript. This is generally discouraged, because it has terrible security implications. However, in a completely local environment, you are probably not causing any additional security risks. (Because, your database is already on the user's machine.) You can see an example of how to use ADO in JavaScript at How to connect to SQL Server database from JavaScript in the browser? .
Possible, yes, Like Making cars that can float in the sea but could not work on dry roads.
Use winforms or something similar. Use the right tool.
If you insists, Firefox plugins can behave in the way you mentioned, and there is a way to bundle a web application with it's server (check the beginner tutorials for RoR to have an example for something similar with webrick).
If I understand your requirements, you might look into ColdFusion.
For example, you can run a DB query pretty simply, check here, in Adobe
I am working on a Google Gadget that will collect some data through Google API's. What I am getting stuck on is how to collect the data and then save it somewhere to be processed later. The final idea being that I would run the gadget on my own computer it would collect the data and then save it to somewhere on my own computer. (I guess I want to emphasize that this is, for now, a small personal project and does not necessarily need fancy server scripts, I want to be able to run this all on my PC running XP).
Is there a pure Javascript way to save a file on a computer?
Can I use other languages besides XML, HTML, and Javascript to add functionality to my Google Gadget?
Edit: The goal of this is to be able to log how many of my contacts are signed into gchat over a period of time. I decided on a Gadget because that was the only way I could figure out how to access that information. Any other ways to approach this idea are welcome!
No, Javascript alone cannot save a file automatically. And be careful, javascript is affected by the no cross domain rule. If you're hosting the project on your own computer, why bother writing a complex Google Gadget?
I suggest a simple PHP script, and MySQL, if you like, to store the data. By itself, PHP should be more than enough to run most tasks. If you would like me to add in more info about this, please tell me what type of task.
In increasing order of flexibility:
The options object is almost certainly the easiest approach - not really designed for that kind of usage but I suspect it would be fine for your use case.
On windows you could use system.filesystem to get hold of the WScript FileSystemObject which you can then use to create files and write to them.
Also see the Google desktop API blog for embedding an SQLite database in your gadget (looks pretty easy).
I've written a simple web page that uses Javascript to control a Quicktime plugin for movie playback. There's also some AJAX stuff using jquery to get info on the movies from an MSSQL database. The web page is served to the user from an Apache 2.0 server, this also hosts MSSQL. The end users will view the page in IE6 (unfortunately).
My problem is that the end users now want to use an RS422 jog/shuttle deck control to drive the movie timeline, in place of another jog/shuttle unit that relied on emulating keypresses which was easy for me to detect.
As I'm not a programmer I'm at a loss what to start looking at for a solution to receive the RS422 data and then send that to the Javascript to control the timeline. Is this something that a custom activeX bit of code could do? I've googled ActiveX with Javascript but it's unclear to me (as a novice) how the two work together, or whether this would be suitable at all.
If anyone could give me an overview of what to start researching that'd be much appreciated.
Many thanks.
Jon
JavaScript runs in a sandbox and has no access to the computer at all (for security reasons; you really don't want to make it any more simple for frauds to get at your credit card data).
ActiveX would work but it's a security risk, too. ActiveX is written in C++, no JavaScript there. You'll find information about that on the M$ Website. Note that ActiveX is usually disabled today because of said security risks. Depending how serious your client take security, the virus scanner might not allow to start an A/X control.
Another option would be to write small program which is installed on the client's computer that reads the serial port and send that to the web server where your JavaScript can query it. Okay, that's more than a bit convoluted but probably the least risky.
Or you write a program which transforms the serial codes into key presses (just create the event and post it to Windows). Again, you need C++ or maybe Python with the win32 package.
Your client must understand that this is something which sounds incredibly simple but you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops to make it work. A web browser is not a local application with full reign of the hardware (and it must never be).