Noodlesoft Hazel

- I'm just finishing up my afternoon's work. I've edited a video, and I'm about to send it to my editor. So I've gotta compress the video, and do a little bit of file management, and about 15 or 20 minutes worth of work to finish things off and for the day. But, it's only gonna take me a few moments because I'm using a file management tool, an automation tool called Noodlesoft Hazel. I know, it's a great name. Noodlesoft Hazel for the Mac. If you're in the Windows world, there's a very similiar product called File Juggler that will do exactly what I'm about to show you. But, if you want to create some processes, to automate some file management systems, to save you time, almost every day of the week, stick around today on Dotto Tech. Steve Dotto here. How the heck you doin' this fine day? I'm just, as I said, I'm just finishing up a day's work. I've recorded a new video and I have to take that video and I now have to send it to my editor who's going to finish things up. Now, there's lots of different administrative processes that we do on a daily basis on our computer that become repetitive tasks. Now, there's some automation tools that are available for both Mac and Windows that can make those tasks really easy if you identify them, and end up saving you a substantial amount of time. Now, I don't use this particular tool for a lot of things. It's a tool that I bought, it's called Noodlesoft Hazel. It's an automated workflow organizer for my Mac, and just this one thing that I'm going to show you today, makes it worth me purchasing this software on an annual basis. Would you like to see? Let me walk through how it all works. Effectively, it's all folder based. What happens is, you have a file that you need to do something to. You need to modify the format of the document, you need to rename it, you need to organize it. What happens is, we create a folder that has actions attached to a folder and when we drag a file into that particular folder, then the action takes place and it's an entirely automated process. Let me show you the process that I am replicating and saving myself a fair amount of time on a daily basis with. I'm just going into my finder here, into my file management system, and here I've got a disc, a scratch disc, where I store all of my videos as I'm editing the videos. And this is the little video here that we're going to be working on in just a few moments right here. This is the video here. Now, typically speaking, what I do, is I record one of these videos, like this one that I'm doing right now. I'll be doing this exact process with this a little bit later on, probably tomorrow. But once I've done a rough cut of the video in the video editing application, I take the editing file and I have to compress that file. I have to zip it into a single document and then share it with my editor. And I can share it in Dropbox or some other file sharing service. Now, in order to do that, I manually would go in and I would right click on the file itself and I would say, "compress." Now, watch what happens. This is about a 17 gigabyte file that I'm about to compress here. And when I click on compress, it'll give me a notification and it's gonna take about seven minutes for it to compress the file. So, typically speaking, I will just make sure that I hang around and maybe do a few other little administrative things while this file is compressing. Once it would be completed, I would then take this file and I would drag it into Dropbox, and I would drop it in Dropbox. I would let Liz know that it's there, and it'll take a little while for it to sync, but at that point there, most of the process is done. It doesn't seem like all that arduous of a task, does it? Yet, every time I do it, it takes seven to 10 minutes of time. If we do, say, three videos a week, that's 30 minutes a week that I'm spending, kind of in limbo, doing this particular task. Let me show you how Noodlesoft works. It's a download. You can purchase it. How much does it cost? I forgot how much it costs. It costs $32, is what I paid for Hazel. I purchased the software, I installed it, and it installs just as a utility within your computer, and it's here in the menu bar. We can see right there, is the menu for Hazel. And what it's doing, is it is basically just monitoring what's happening on the computer, waiting for it to be told to do a process. Now, this is the interface for creating a process. Now, I created a folder, let me go back into that folder so you can see exactly where it is. On the scratch disc here, I created this folder here, called compress and share. This is the folder that I created. Now, it doesn't look like much, but effectively what happens, is in Hazel, I choose the folder here in Hazel. I go in and choose the folder, and then I assign a script. I create a script. And it's a fairly simple scripting language. But if you take a look here, it says just a series of rules. It's not really a lot different than IFTT or Zapier in some ways because when you start a process, then the next thing in line is going to happen. So, when a file is dropped into compress and share, if it has any name at all, so if it's a file, then I want you to do these things. The first thing I want you to do, and if you click on any of the commands, you can get an idea of the assortment of commands that you have. I want to archive this. Now, it's a little bit of a misnomer here. I wanna compress it, but it doesn't have a compress feature. But, archiving is the exact same because it compresses the file as a part of the archiving process. So, I want to archive it. That's step one. Once that is done, then I want to copy it into, and I designate a folder. I say into my Dropbox folder or my shared folder for Liz to work with. But, I am smart. I go, you know what, I've got a huge backup machine. I'm gonna back these files up at this point as well, just in case anything happens, so we always have this stage backup. My rough cut edit backup which has all of the raw files in it. I'm also gonna make another copy of that and back it up onto my backup server. Now, as I said, if I was to do that with this particular file that we just looked at, it would take me probably 10 minutes or so to do. But all I do now, is watch this. This is a thing of beauty. I'm gonna take the file here, I'm gonna drag it into the compress and share folder and I drop it. And as soon as I drop it, Hazel fires up. So in a few moments, we'll see a notification that Hazel is starting up. I know that it is taking it and you see how it's converted the other ones into zip files? It will start this entire process. I can go away now and know that this file is being uploaded and it will be there for Liz in the morning when she comes into the office. It is that simple a process. If you're unsure that it's happening, we can go in and we can view the log, and we can see all the different processes being launched and evoked here within Hazel as we go along. Now, here's one thing that you need to think about when you start looking at using a tool like Hazel and deciding if you're gonna invest $32 in purchasing an app like this or as I say, a similar product in the Windows world which is called File Juggler. How much does that cost? Let's quick check, quick check, I didn't check to see how much. $40 in the Windows world. You pay a Windows premium I suppose. You have to identify these repetitive tasks. But then, just run the math in your mind. Let's think about it for a second. If I do three videos a week, 52 times two is 104 hours. 104 hours of saved time a year. This isn't an inconsequential amount of time. Every single time we do a simple task, it might not seem like very much, but over the year it really adds up. A simple tool like Noodlesoft Hazel, can make things so much more streamlined. This is just the tip of the ice burg. Take a look at other YouTube videos, so many people have great ideas of different ways to use Hazel for organizing their files. I use it for this alone and it makes it worthwhile. Imagine what you could do just by paying attention to your repetitive tasks, and then applying a great automation tool like File Juggler or Hazel. I hope you found today's video useful. Share with me, your favorite automation systems and tools in the comments below. I love to see your comments and suggestions. Remember to subscribe to this channel and make sure you ring that notification bell so you hear when we upload new videos. 'Til next time, I am Steve Dotto. Have fun storming the castle.