11.2 Sending EDL scripts to fsc2

The fsc2_guify conversion tool (or, more exactly, the script created by this tool) starts a new instancere of fsc2 by using one of the programs

fsc2_load
fsc2_test
fsc2_start

These programs get passed an EDL script on their standard input and then start a new instance of fsc2 with the EDL script. From the names of the programs their functions should be obvious: the first one tells fsc2 to just load the EDL script, the second one tells it to also test the script, and the third asks fsc2 to start the EDL script after a successful test run.

You could e.g. invoke these programs from the command line, type in an EDL script and when you're finished, you would see the program launch fsc2 with your newly typed in script displayed in the main window. Of course, that's not what these programs are really meant for. Instead they should allow scripts etc. that create EDL scripts to send their results to fsc2 without having to deal with any of the details about how this is done. So such a script just starts one of the above programs, passes it the newly generated EDL script and then should just check the return value.

In C code you probably would do this using the popen() function, requesting a stream for writing (for sending the EDL script), while in e.g. Perl you would open a new pipe to write to as in

open( F, "|fsc2_test" ) or die "Can't run fsc2_test: $!\n";

The success (or reason of failure if you're unlucky) can be determined from the return value:

`0'

Everything's ok, program finished successfully, i.e. fsc2 accepted the script.

`-1'

An internal error has been detected in the program starting a new instance of fsc2 (please send a bug report!).

`1'

fsc2 could not be started (probably because its executable was not found).

Using these programs you are able to send EDL scripts to fsc2, created with whatever method or programming language you prefer. A few example scripts written in Perl can be found in the edl subdirectory (or the subdirectories there-in, to be precise) of the main directory of the package - they typically have an externsion of .EDL. You could also examine one of the scripts created by fsc2_guify but be warned that these scripts may not be very easy to understand because at least some of them were written by a program that doesn't care much about proper indentation or human readability etc.

This document was generated by Jens Thoms Toerring on September 6, 2017 using texi2html 1.82.