My first exposure to Python was via Codcademy in 2014. Around this time I was doing a lot of conforms (returning edits from offline to online resolution) for my previous role as an Assistant Editor in Screen Scene. Rushes were generally stored on numerous drives which needed to be plugged into difficult to access computers. Software did exist which could grab specified files from all drives but it was heavy and frequently crashed and didn’t fit seamlessly into our workflow.
With my newfound Python knowledge I tried to solve the problem. The goal was to take an Avid Edit Decision List (basically a tab delimited list of cuts in a film) retrieve the source files from a variety of drives. After a couple of days I had a functioning command line prototype which satisfied the basic requirement using os.walk() and shutil copy.
My coworkers were not familiar with command line utilities so to help them use the system I developed a GUI using wxPython. In the following couple of months I added other features such as a files remaining notification and multiple file types.
On reflection, it wasn’t the most efficient solution possible but it did get me interested in writing software for real world problems and getting user feedback from my co-workers.
Below is a demonstration of how the program works and here is the code.