Generating And Uploading Thumbnail Images For Each Title

THL Toolbox > Audio-Video > Technical Processing of Audio-Video - Log, Edit and Compress > Generating and Uploading Thumbnail Images for Each Title

Generating and Uploading Thumbnail Images for Each Audio-Video Title

Contributor(s): James Graves, Eric Woelfel

A. Generating Thumbnail Images

Note: This process requires BBEdit to be installed on your computer, and that you have already completed compressions of the given video material.

  1. Download the script "QT7export folder of stills.scpt"under Applescript.
  2. Run the script.
  3. Select as your source folder your folder of "high" compressions.
  4. When prompted to select a destination folder, create a new folder called "thumb-sources" and select that as your destination.
  5. This should generate a .PCT image file for each compression that you have in the given source folder.
  6. If your computer has Photoshop, or some other program by which to convert .pct files to .jpg, then proceed to step B below.
  7. If your computer does not have Photoshop, you need to transfer these files to a computer that does, whether by emailing or (if at UVA) by uploading them to the server, and retrieving them from the server on a computer with Photoshop. If uploading to the server, use the program Fugu to transfer the .pct files to "lv3>thdl>thumbs" where you should create a folder with the day's date.
  8. Download these .pct files from the server to a computer with photoshop.

B. Converting to .JPGs

  1. Open the .pct files in Photoshop.
  2. For each image, go under the "image" drop-down menu to "size."
  3. Resize the image to be 129 x 97 pixels. (click "OK").
  4. Now click "save as" to save this .pct file as a .jpg file. (In the lower part of the menu that pops up when you click save-as, you should see a drop-down menu for file-type; choose JPEG here.) Add ".jpg" to each file name - and be sure to delete ".pct" or "high" or "med" or anything like that. Save this .jpg file to a folder called "thumbs" in your compression destination folder, alongside "high", "low", "sup-high", "audio". Each image should be around 90 kb - no more.

C. Uploading the .JPGs to the Server

  1. Once you have a batch of .jpg files corresponding exactly to the .pct files, upload (using the "Subversion" program) the .jpg files to the following folder on the server: lv1>thdl>avarch>mediaflowcat>thumb . * Contact Dan Haig for help using Subversion. (Once our server setup changes, there may be a new method.)
  2. Once the .jpg files are placed in this folder, the audio-video database (AVDB) is programmed to detect them, and show them with their corresponding titles on the AVDB.
  3. Navigate to each of these video titles on the AVDB and check to make sure that the thumbnail image appears.

This page is provided courtesy of the external link: Tibetan and Himalayan Library.