Show Cue System

Sometimes I'm using a lot of soundeffects. In the pre-production process I'm used to collect my files and sort them in different folders (e.g. "underscores", "pistols and guns", "cars" etc.). By collecting all my files in a production folder, this ordering is undone. It would be nice to have the option to use folders relative to the folder where the cue-file is in ($cue/underscores, $cue/cars).

Example:

I have a show C:/Production/Show.scs11 and a folder with 6 different thunder samples (C:/Production/Weather/Thunder01...06.wav). You see I collected six options, but in the end I'm using only 2 different samples (#1 and #5).

When collecting my showfile I would like to see
$cue/Show.scs11
$cue/Weather/Thunder01.wav
$cue/Weather/Thunder05.wav

Is this possible? Would be a tremendous help in keeping track of all the different samples.

Jaap Schledorn
sound designer

If I'm reading this correctly you want the program to automatically remove from your created production folder any sound effects you are not using. Why bother?

Well, that would be a nice side effect, yes, but not the main reason. I'm a sound designer for productions where sometimes the number of samples and pieces of music is 100+. When SCS collects my files it will dump all material in one folder. It would be very handy if you could maintain a set of subfolders related to a certain root folder.

It's mainly a matter of staying organized instead of "cleaning up" automatically.

Could be done, but there are a number of issues that would make the enhancement fairly complicated.

If any sub-folders are to be created then first of all there should be an option in Collect Production Files to create sub-folders based on file type, eg "\audio\", "\images\", "\videos\".

Then there could be an option to retain the name of the parent folder (eg "\Weather\") of any collected file, but this option should probably also be set per file type, so if required could be set for audio files but not set for video files, etc.

As you can see, it gets fairly complicated. It's a reasonable request, but I want to point out that it may not be particularly simple. Note also that whatever options you choose should be remembered by SCS or you could end up with a mess if you run the collection several times but unintentionally with different options.

I can see the difficulties in this now Mike, thanks for your response.

I don't necessarily want to sort on filetype because we also sometimes work with several groups or companies having their own material. Would be nice to store that in one folder per group so the content doesn't get mixed up (people all tend to start with image01.jpg and Audiotrack01.wav )

Maybe if you assume that "$cue\" is the root folder where the showfile is stored unless otherwise specified?

Most professional DAWs start with asking if you want to import your files to a production folder (relative path) or use the "original file" (absolutue filepath).

Regards,
Jaap