Not really vmix related, but also not the type of question to ask in another forum, since most filmmakers don't sit on the same type of archives. So..

We are sitting on 32 TB of archive video files in a NAS. This is our archive of the last year and a half or so.

All files are in folders per gig, with subfolders when there are multiple stages or days. They're super big files, recordings of 4-20 hours each.

Most videofiles are .ts or .mp4, but some are older avi or other filetypes.

We want to free up NAS diskspace, so we were thinking to compress the oldest material to 10 megabit mp4 files, and put them on a new 8 TB drive so they can be archived. Since on average the bitrate is 50 megabit, this should be doable.

The problem is adobe media encoder doesn't include subfolders in it's watchfolders, and we also don't want to manually drag every file into the media encoder, or have to set up the exact same folder structure on the target drive. We really want to keep the folder structure, so that when we have to re edit anything, we can simply replace the footage in premiere pro, and have everything linked up very fast.

We could hire a student to do this for us, and pay him a few days, but I would like to make some kind of automated solution, so we can keep up with archiving every few weeks. This would allow us to keep the original files for some time, but compress it once the gig is over for at least a year and clients will not ask any changes anymore. Since most projects are web delivery anyway, a 10 megabit file will do just fine. We use our NAS to edit from, so we can open the projects on multiple pc's (to speed up rendering), buying extra NAS servers is an option, but looks like a dumb solution since we won't doing much anymore with the oldest footage anyway.

I've been looking for automated solutions, but couldn't find any program that can do this task for us.

Any suggestions?

Look at Handbrake. It may allow some automation. I simply make the encode part of my workflow. After a gig, I load the files/folder and run the encode over night.

https://forum.handbrake....288be9f721123f6c46e61149

https://forum.handbrake....arch.php?keywords=script