How to change media path?

[Graham Bernard]

Do you have the AVCHD media on your Desktop? And did you get a warning that the files weren’t present on your Desktop when you openned the Vegas Project?

If you answer “yes” to both questions then all you needed to have done was to allow Vegas to find where the same Media files resided on your Desktop.

I have almost the same setup where I swap out hardrives and I too need to remind myself to ensure I have the correct hardrive plugged in. If I don’t, Vegas quickly reminds me.

Grazie

…

[Jason Yip]

I’m thinking that what happened is that when I opened the project on my desktop, I let Vegas search for the file. It found the first one labeled 0000.mts and I accepted it. Turns out, it was the wrong one. So a bunch of the clips on my timeline are now wrong. Do you know how I can change the path to point to the correct clips?

[Matt Crowley]

If you haven’t done any/much editing since the clips got mixed up, then simply close the mixed-up project, copy the project file from your laptop again (think of the laptop copy as a backup) and then, when Vegas asks for the missing files, manually browse to the correct folder.

Alternatively, you can manually re-assign the media files in your project. Go to the Project Media window, right-click on the first incorrect file and click “Replace…” then choose the correct file. You’ll have to do that for all the incorrect files.

[Matt Crowley]

PS get into the habit of either renaming your media files (maybe the number plus something descriptive) or using the supplied camera software to transfer and auto-rename/date the files. It gets very confusing after a while with multiple files of the same names… 00001.MTS 00002.MTS etc.

[John Rofrano]

[Matt Crowley] “PS get into the habit of either renaming your media files (maybe the number plus something descriptive) “

I can’t stress enough how important this is. I’ve noticed this too. In the days of tape capture, the tape name was always prepended to the capture file. Now with these tapeless cameras all the filenames are the same. You have to get into the habit of keeping them unique again.

The only way to undo the damage now is to manually replace each file in the project media pool. Not fun. 🙁

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jason Yip]

Thanks for the tips. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can change the clips in the media pool because the clips they were changed to actually appear earlier in the video. So I need them as well, just not twice. Is there any way to just reassign the ones that show up again?

Also regarding renaming. I was told when dealing with AVCHD to never alter anything within the PRIVATE folder. I know this is more of an issue with Final Cut and other editing software, but I thought I’d just leave it just in case I wanted to do something with it in the future or send it to somebody who doesn’t use Vegas. Any merit to that? If renaming is the way to go, what is the best way to do that? Windows always seems to mess up my numbering when I try to use Windows Expolorer.

[John Rofrano]

[Jason Yip] “Unfortunately, I don’t think I can change the clips in the media pool because the clips they were changed to actually appear earlier in the video. So I need them as well, just not twice. Is there any way to just reassign the ones that show up again?”

No. Once two events have been assigned the same piece of media there is no way to reassign them again. You’ll have to add the new media as a take and then remove the old take.

[Jason Yip] “Also regarding renaming. I was told when dealing with AVCHD to never alter anything within the PRIVATE folder. I know this is more of an issue with Final Cut and other editing software, but I thought I’d just leave it just in case I wanted to do something with it in the future or send it to somebody who doesn’t use Vegas. Any merit to that?”

Do you work with a lot of FCP editors? If so, ask one of them. I know FCP is pretty picky and I wouldn’t be surprised if it still couldn’t use your files because they are not on the camera any more.

If you don’t work with other FCP editors, then why do you care? Just give them the files you have on a hard drive and let them figure it out.

[Jason Yip] “If renaming is the way to go, what is the best way to do that? Windows always seems to mess up my numbering when I try to use Windows Expolorer.”

I really like Bulk Rename Utility. I use it all of the time for all of my still images and video files (and it’s free, but if you use it a lot, don’t forget to donate to the author). 😉

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Matt Crowley]

It sounds like there isn’t much you can do apart from manually delete each incorrect event on the timeline and drag the correct video into its place, or revert to a version of the project from the laptop before you started work on the desktop copy. Get into the habit of saving the project with a new name every so often, like Ski Holiday 1, Ski Holiday 2… that way you have a set of backups that you can roll back to if something goes badly wrong.

As far as I know, Vegas doesn’t care about the structure of the PRIVATE, BDAV etc folders on an AVCHD camera’s flash card/disk. I either just use Windows Explorer to copy the MTS files to my working hard drive (then sort and rename as needed), or use the camera’s software to “extract” direct from the camera and auto-rename the video. I use Panasonic’s HD Writer, which is clunky but renames the 00001.MTS scheme to YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.m2ts (the date/time the video was shot) and guarantees unique file names.

I have also used a handy free utility called Renamer to batch rename the 00001.MTS type names to the same scheme as the Panasonic software – the format for the renaming is very flexible, so you can use “file’s modified date” for example.

[John Rofrano]

[Matt Crowley] “I use Panasonic’s HD Writer, which is clunky but renames the 00001.MTS scheme to YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.m2ts (the date/time the video was shot) and guarantees unique file names.”

Vegas Pro does this too (I almost forgot). If you use the Device Explorer (Ctrl+Atl+7) it will prepend the date to the file name guaranteeing uniqueness. (i must admit, I just drag and drop ’em from the memory car too) lol

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Matt Crowley]

I completely forgot about Device Explorer. It’s in VMS 10 too, but is not very flexible. AVCHD files get renamed to 00001_yyyymmdd_hhmmss.mts (where 00001 is the original clip number) and they always get imported to My Documents\Imported Media (you can’t choose a different folder).

I had tried that when I first got VMS10, but gave up on it in favour of the software supplied with the camera or simply copying from camera/card in Explorer.

Bulk Rename Utility appears to be very similar in functionality to Renamer, but with a different interface.