TABLE OF CONTENTS Incredible though it might seem to the more cynical among us, computers were indeed conceived to make our lives easier in particular by relieving us of the drudgery associated with repetitive manual tasks. Perversely though, as computers and software have become more powerful, the drudgery element hasn t exactly faded into extinction; it s just evolved into a more complex form. Anyone involved in media production will attest to this.
Dedicated applications often handle a specific task such as color-correcting a video clip wonderfully well. If you must perform this task over and over again, though, the shine quickly fades as it turns into a chore. A complex production workflow may involve the use of several such applications to process and integrate the various media elements that are combined into the finished piece of content. Content producers are always on the lookout for any means of automating some or all of these tasks that eat up so much of their time.
Sample scripts for this chapter are available at
www.skylark.ie/qt4.net/Samples/WSH/
The Mac has traditionally been the choice of professionals involved in content production, and this has mainly been driven by the quality and sophistication of the applications available on the Apple platform. But another not insignificant factor has been the ease with which parts or even all of the production process could be automated using the easy-to-use and mature scripting environment that is AppleScript. Eschewing the syntactical complexity of traditional programming languages, AppleScript is a more natural almost English-like scripting language...
