Taking my Vegas pro Project on the go

VEGAS Pro

Taking my Vegas pro Project on the go

Posted by Anthony Diaz on March 30, 2012 at 4:57 am

Hello,

I have a problem with Vegas pro when trying to open my project on my laptop. I have my project and all the files on an external hard drive. I edit on my desktop but now when I try to open the project through my external hard drive on my laptop, Vegas cannot seem to find a majority of my files even though they are on the external hard drive.

It goes through all steps of asking me to find the file but I have to do it one by one, as there seems to be no option to specify vegas to look through my external hard drive for the rest of the missing files. I have heard that the reason why vegas cant find the files is because the letter of my external drive has changed, which I dont know how that happened. If thats the case, how am I suppose to know what the letter to change it back? Is there an option in vegas for the “media offline” files to show up and to have vegas find the files? Also if I find a way to fix this on my laptop, will that mean that this same problem will pop up when I try to edit on my desktop again?

This has never happened to me before in past vegas versions when I jumped from one computer to another.

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you

Nigel O’neill replied 14 years, 1 month ago 6 Members · 7 Replies
7 Replies

Roy Van der westen
March 30, 2012 at 9:12 am

Hello Anthony Diaz,

I think there is a very simple explanation for that.

Sony Vegas uses the files located on your hard-disk but it used to locate it on your desktop as (for example): “H:yourprojectyourfile.mov” because you plugged your harddisk in the “H” usb port of your desktop.

When you plug it in your laptop it may be changed to (for example): “J:yourprojectyourfile.mov” because you plugged it in the “J” usb port of your laptop.

But you can easily specify a new location for your files. And yeah, if you go back to your desktop you’d probably have the same problem.

-RvdW

If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find me, maybe you can hire me
Steve Rhoden
March 30, 2012 at 4:00 pm

Roy made a very good point…There is a feature named
Offline Media Resolver that i find very very useful in
my workflow, and its from Peachrock Veggie Toolkit. Would
automatically save you a lot of headaches on the go.

Steve Rhoden
(Cow Leader)
Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
1-876-832-4956
Anthony Diaz
March 30, 2012 at 9:31 pm

Thanks Roy for the response. I actually tried changing the letter of my external drive to match the port on my desktop but when I open the project in Vegas again on my laptop, it still gives me the same error. Whats weird is that I specify a new location for one of the files but it doesnt give me the option to “yes to all” in terms of vegas finding the other missing files in the same drive. I even did a fresh install of my OS on my laptop, factory condition, but still it wont work.

There has to be a way in Vegas for me to transfer my project from one workstation to the other, Vegas is too high end to not have that feature, and its common for editors to have to move from place to place. I have heard of the “copy media to project” check box in the “save as” in Vegas but I tried that and it only copied some of my sound effects and music, not any video files. I don’t want to have to be stuck editing all the time on my desktop, as I will be moving around and want to take my work on the road.

Any help is appreciated, and thank you very much.
Tyson Onaga
April 1, 2012 at 12:43 am

This is why I used SUBSTituted drives when working with Vegas. Consider:

G:\ThirdParty\DigitalJuice\... G:\ThirdParty\VASST\... G:\ThirdParty\Vegasaur\... G:\Vegas\... G:\Work\...

But perhaps everything doesn’t fit on one HD. More like:

G:\ThirdParty\DigitalJuice\... G:\ThirdParty\VASST\... G:\ThirdParty\Vegasaur\... H:\Vegas\... I:\Work\...

SUBST to the rescue; consider T: for ThirdParty, V: for Vegas, W: for Work. E.g.:

subst T: G:\ subst V: H:\ subst W: I:\

I.e., all .veg projects on W: will reference media located on T:, V:, or W: … ONLY. If these HDs were connected to a different machine and G:, H:, I: become F:, G:, H: then the subst commands are:

subst T: F:\ subst V: G:\ subst W: H:\

The subst commands can be placed in bat(ch) file:

subst T: %1:\ subst V: %2:\ subst W: %3:\

and executed from within a DOS box as:

MyVegasSubst.bat G H I <--- for machine 1 MyVegasSubst.bat F G H <--- for machine 2

which will create T:, V:, and W: as needed.
Moving the HDs from machine to machine is effortless and all the work is consistent (work .veg projects are always on W:, always referencing media on T:, V:, or W:).

The key is to always work from T:, V:, and W:.
Stephen Mann
April 1, 2012 at 2:54 am

Wow, Tyson – can you make it any more (unnecessarily) complicated?

I put almost all of my projects on external drives in USB docking stations. I can’t count on them ever being assigned the same drive letter by DOS on every computer when I plug it in.

3930_makedriveb.bat.zip

Just put this batch file on your external drive. By running this batch file, the external drive will always be drive “B:” (You can change the target drive letter by editing the .bat file).

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com
Tyson Onaga
April 1, 2012 at 3:15 am

Your solution works on the assumption you can always fit everything onto a single HD. If a laptop figures into your workflow and you don’t want to carry a 3 TB paperbook size HD (with power supply), then you probably will have files across multiple HDs, in which case, your solution doesn’t work.
Nigel O’neill
April 1, 2012 at 1:10 pm

Steady on Tyson, Steve was only trying to help.

You can get 1TB Buffalo Ministation drives that run off USB2/3 port, no external power required.

What would we do without good old DOS?

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