Chapter 2, Navigating and Browsing
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Library Browser |
Chapter 2, Navigating and Browsing |
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Accessing the IFFFS Libraries on the Network Using Wiretap
The Import Browser lets you create compositions by importing media. Each media file you import becomes a composition--see About Media and Importing Media.
The Import Browser contains the following main areas and buttons:
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| Item | Description |
| Folders list | Displays the file system on your machine, including all mapped drives, as well as Wiretap. Using this area, you can navigate to the media you want to import. |
| Folder contents area | Displays the contents of the folder currently selected in the Folders list. |
| Common navigation buttons | Use these buttons to navigate through folders and files--see Navigating in the Browser. |
| Import and Import/Cache buttons | Click one of these to import the currently selected media--see Importing Media to understand the difference between these two buttons. |
When you select an item from the Folders contents area, information about that item will be displayed at the bottom of the desktop in the Information tab of the Tool UI.
If a network drive is selected, the following parameters appear in the Information tab.
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If a folder is selected, the following parameters appear in the Information tab.
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If an image is selected from a folder, the Information tab displays information about the media and also evokes the Options tab and Mini-Player. The Mini-Player previews the selected media. You can play the media, scrub through it, or enter the full-screen Player to view it--see Using the Mini-Player. The Options tab displays color management options you can set--see Importing Media.
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Toxik supports Wiretap, an enabling technology that uses client-server architecture to enable applications running on a client system to access projects, libraries, clips and frames on a remote storage device. The data is presented in a tree-like hierarchy and is accessible via the Wiretap Client API. The ability for Toxik to support Wiretap improves interoperability between Toxik and IFFFS applications. Wiretap is comprised of a Client API that taps into the remote storage filesystem through a Wiretap Server plug-in running on the remote system via a high-performance network protocol.
To access images on the IFFFS filesystem and network, the Wiretap servers running on IFFFS workstations must be configured to offer Wiretap Path Translation Service--see the Autodesk® Stone® 2.6 and Wire® 2.6 Release Notes.
To ensure efficient browsing of the Wiretap network, here are some basic Wiretap concepts:
Wiretap Network -- A collection of Wiretap-compliant servers that reside on a network domain.
Wiretap Server -- A single Wiretap-compliant server that exposes a proprietary database as a tree-like hierarchy of Wiretap nodes. A Wiretap Server is typically a daemon running on a host machine.
The IFFFS clips database is identified by the name of the host on which the Wiretap server is running (for example, Wiretap:/<ServerName>). You can access Wiretap as you would access any folder.
Start Toxik and open a project.
Open an Import Browser and navigate to the Wiretap folder.
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Expand the Wiretap folder.
Wiretap displays a list of available servers.
If a Wiretap server does not appear in the list, it may be because it was not running when you started Toxik or because an older version of Wiretap is used, in which case you can add the server manually to the list by typing its path in the text field (for example, Wiretap:/myServer/... where myServer is the name of the Wiretap server).
Note: If a server is offline, its content will not be available.
When you import media from a Wiretap server, the Information tab displays information about the media and its path.
Note: The path to clips is displayed, but not the path to images.
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You can access a subclip by specifying the range in the path field.
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You can import single images, as well as image sequences. You can also import certain images from a sequence of images.
In general, it should be possible to import all Wiretap clips. In practice though, it may happen that the media is not supported in Toxik. In this case, the images will display a red X to indicate media that is not accessible--see Supported Media Formats.
An IFFFS clip can be made up of different types of formats. For example, it can be made up of standard file formats from a NAS, or it can be made up of images from a framestore or stonefs, or both. An example of an unsupported file format is the stonefs 12-bit compressed.
Note: Contrary to standard imported file formats, no Gamma or Cineon correction options are available for Wiretap clips.
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