MAC MAINTENANCE

[hairyj]

Hi

I work in a TV production company where we have a two imacs (specs below) which is used by a large group of people to cut DV footage on i-movie (recce footage, not actual programmes!) (yes I know people should people should use FCP, but there's a lot of freelancers and we.

Controlling where people save i-movie and i-dvd projects to (including music and JPEG imports) is a nightmare. It's not my team's job to manage these imacs - but it is often put upon my us (we're Avid Edit Assistants with no time to spare!) and we are usually roped in when users have a deadline for a recce cut and there's no space on the imac and no one wants to delete old projects!
We end up getting it in the neck when things don't work out!

WELL NO MORE!

In the past we have asked people to save to an external 1tb drive in a specific folder, but this seldom happens and before you know it the i-macs are crammed full, slowing them down, project and media everywhere.

To stop this from happening, and to force users to save to the external drive I want to do three things, but I don't know how. It would be great if someone could help me.

1 - lock (block) saving to the desktop
2 - lock (block) to the documents/movies/music etc
3 - set up i-movie and i-dvd to save to specific pre-determined folders...

I know these goals go against the way macs are intuitively and symbiotic designed to be used, but most of the users don't use macs regularly nor care about using the macs in this way (sadly they are recce editing work horse only).

We see this as the only way to stay atop of the problem! If there's any better solutions (that don't involve educating the masses of staff/ourselves spending more time looking after the macs!) then please do let me know.

mac 1 -
Leopard v10.5.7
2.4 Ghz Core 2 Duo
1 GB 800 mzh DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon HD 2400

mac 2 -
Tiger v10.4.9
1.83 Ghz Intel Core Duo
2 GB RAM DDR2 SDRAM
ATY Radeon X 1600

Many thanks in advance.

J

[chasm]

You could accomplish 1 & 2 via User-limited accounts, but 3 isn't going to happen.

Just write a note on a sticky and stick it to the iMacs:

IF YOU DO NOT SAVE YOUR WORK IN (CORRECT DRIVE & FOLDER) IT WILL BE DELETED AT THE END OF THE DAY.

Then enforce the rule.

"You learn fast when you have to."

[bluecabbie]

Create a folder on the 1Tb drive called "Lost&Found". Then write an applescript that scans for movie files, and moves them to Lost&Found. Set it to run every night. Write another script to look at Lost&Found, and delete any files that are over x days old.