Automating with Hazel

- [Instructor] In a previous lesson, I showed you TextExpander, a really cool app that helps you save time by automating repetitive typing tasks. In this lesson, I want to take automation to another level and demonstrate an incredibly simple, yet very powerful tool called Hazel. Basically, Hazel is your own personal assistant working 24/7 in the background without you ever having to think about it. The possibilities are limitless, and I simply don't have the time to demonstrate the power of this application, but I am going to show you how you can set it up to design your very first script.

And just this one script alone could be a game-changer for you, especially if you work in post-production with mountains of media. So right now, I'm at the homepage of Hazel, which is Noodlesoft.com, don't ask me why, but that's where you find it. So you can download a test trial version or you can buy it. Now I'm going to show you what a fresh install of Hazel looks like. It's basically going to be an application that's located in the System Preferences of your computer. So you go to System Preferences, you go to Hazel, and essentially what you're going to do is program it for specific automations.

For this specific script, I'm going to show you how you can organize media automatically. Now you'll notice that on this tutorial system, we have a very clean desktop. I will bet good money that your desktop probably isn't quite this clean, and I'm going to show you how you can continually dump media on your desktop without thinking about where it belongs at all, and Hazel will automatically keep everything organized. So here's how we're going to do it. I have two folders, one of which is going to be a folder that has a whole bunch of random media in it.

And I'm going to open up a new window and this is going to be a very clean and neatly organized version of how I would like my folders and my media organized when I'm done with it. So we can see that I have a folder for after effects projects, for audio files, I have broken down a folder of images into JPEGs versus PNGs. I'm saving movie files, and another example I want to show you, is if you have a folder that's for a specific project that has a code on it, remember in a very early lesson, I demonstrated how I used a three or a four-letter code at the head of sequences? I also do the same thing at the head of all media files so I know what project it belongs to.

So we have a specific test project and it's going to contain the movie files. So I am going to start telling my computer how to organize all of this automatically. So if the folder is my desktop and the media is put in there, what is the rule that I want to set up? Well I'm going to set up rules so you can see how I can organize these files automatically. So I'm going to start with our after effects projects. So if our extension starts with A-E-P, I want to move the file to Media, After Effects.

That simple. I want to create another one, we're going to call it M-O-V and if the extension starts with M-O-V, I would like to move the file to Movie Files. You're probably already getting the point. I'm going to do it again, I'm going to make one for audio files, for WAVs. So, if extension starts with W-A-V, I would like to move the file to Audio Files.

Now, I would like to organize my images, so I'm going to organize all of my JPEGs, so if extension starts with J-P-G, I would like to move it to images and JPEG. Going to do the same thing for my P-N-G files. Once again, extension starts with P-N-G and I'm going to move it to Images, PNG and hit OK.

Now you'll see that I basically run the gamut of everything that's here, however I want to make sure that this M-O-V file that has the code P-R-O-G at the front is not just thrown into the movie files, I actually want it to be movie files that are part of this test project, so I'm going to create a new script. And this is going to be Project MOV Files. So if the name starts with P-R-O-G and it needs a second variable, if the extension starts with M-O-V, then I would like it to go into specifically the Test Project and Movie Files folder and I hit OK.

One further thing that I want you to note is that it is going to run these scripts in order. So let's say for example that I had this one here, what's going to happen is it's going to process everything with .MOV before it processes things that have P-R-O-J at the front and then the extension M-O-V which means that any of these M-O-V files will go to the wrong folder. So I want to make sure that this is on top of this. So now I've set up our template scripts. Imagine that you have a giant folder of tons and tons of media or imagine that you're saving from your application to your desktop, you never have to search for which folder, where does it belong, you can always just default to the desktop.

All I'm going to do in real-time is select all these files, I'm going to drag them to the desktop, and there we go. All of our media has been organized exactly where we want it to go. Our regular movie file is under generic Movie Files, our test movie file with the prefix P-R-O-J is under the correct project. We have after effects projects with After Effects. Audio files in Audio, and so on. So once you set up your scripts once, you can send anything to the desktop or any watch folder that you set up, and you can create these automations.

And like I said, this is just one of those applications that has so many possibilities, but even if you purchase it for just this one single use like I've demonstrated in this video, in my opinion, Hazel pays for itself the minute that you buy it.