Filename in Phocus v1.0

[Chris Crumley]

In Phocus v1.0, right pane > Job Info > Preset > Edit > Date I think this is where we define how we want Phocus to generate filenames. Choices for dates are:

No Date
Short Date: 05-31-08
Medium Date: Sep 30, 2008
Long Date: September 30, 2008
Full Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2008

But, I can't find the most important date form for sorting, naming, chronological use, etc..... YYMMDD (i.e. 080531 no dashes necessary or desired unless an alternate choice).

Am I missing it?

If it's not there, Nick, can you pass to the Danes. The other dates are useless for file naming.

[JoSayer]

Someone on the Ruinous Landscape forum said that the date order is set based on the system prefs.

Haven't tried it myself but maybe thats a help!

Jo S.x

[Chris Crumley]

Jo,

I looked in Phocus Preferences and there are only 4-5 things to set. None are filenaming or date related.

I also looked in Mac OSX System Preferences for something that might feed a defined date format to Phocus and didn't find anything.

Do you think it's worth rooting around in Ruinous Landscrape?

[Chris Gahran]

From the LL Forum:

"When you rename files when importing, Phocus did the date 'incorrectly' as it did day-month-year, which is useless for filing/sorting as 29-05-2008_name_001 ends up next to 28-05-2001_name_001. I prefer to use 2008-05-29_name_001 and 2001-05-28_name_001. So I wondered if Phocus does it according to how one's system is set up as it's British, not American in order as well. So I went into System Prefs and went into customised on the date preferences and you can reorder the year/month/ day order. So now Phocus labels the images 'correctly', i.e. as I want them."

[Chris Crumley]

ChrisG,

Thanks; I found the Custom settings in Mac > System Preferences > Data & Time.

True it is, I can change the Mac system to a different date format which Phocus could use. But, none of the options works for my filenames.

I use 08 versus 2008 (a hundred years was enough for me and saves me two database characters in filename)
I use YYMMDD (i.e. 080601) without hyphen, dashes or slashes between year, month and day

So, I'm back to needing a good custom date in Phocus. Nick? Danes?

[Chris Crumley]

I finally figured out how to get my filenames right!

At start of session, in Job Info > Name, enter the shoot date in the format I use "080601" is today; I'm okay with entering the date; Phocus doesn't need to have a YYMMDD format.
in Sequence, enter the first sequence number I want for the shoot, i.e. 1001, 2001 or whatever sequence won't conflict with other bodies used that shoot day
in File Name block, choose "Edit" and build the filename format
   Job Name, a hyphen(dash), Sequence and an "A" (A-Z are the versions of that filename from post production work)

The resulting filename for today looks like this: 080601-1001A.fff
Flexcolor then produces a .dng going to Lightroom 080601-1001A.dng
A third post production version of the file might look like this: 080601-1001C.psd

Perfect.