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The Case of the Disappearing Subclip Names…
Hi everyone,
Happy to be here at the COW. Intermediate-advanced level pro Vegas user on WInXP sp 2 with a burning question/ peculiar mystery to be solved…. here it is:
I have spent the past month trimming clips from over 30 hours of footage for a documentary film. The director has captured the clips in DV format to an external hard drive. We have trimmed all the clips down from 30 hours to around 5. We now have all the footage that will be considered for the final edit, organized neatly into bins, identified by subclips using a naming convention like so:
ACTOR – KEYWORD1; KEYWORD2 – CATEGORY1 – CATEGORY2
So, if we need to pull up all the clips where any of our 37 interviewees are talking about the ADVANTAGES (one of the CATEGORIES), we just do a Search and presto, we have 28 clips identified for editing together our ADVANTAGES section. Nifty, huh?
Now that everything has been trimmed and logged, we want to reduce the load on the hard drive – so, of course, in good ol Vegas 6, you do a SAVE AS, and select “create timmed copies of media” – Vegas will then make copies of just the media you have flagged for use. I saved these in a different folder and erased the rest of the caps.
When I re-opened my project this morning, I was *mortified* to see that in the Project Media window (Media Pool), my clips had all been renamed as versions of the original media! ie
John-political;debating team – advantages – future.AVI
had become
John Clip 008 – 003.AVI
All my keywords had been lost, and, subsequently, it looks like our clever media management system may be defeated.
The one saving grace: Vegas kept our subclip names ebedded as the Active Take Name – the clips on the timeline contain that information.
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SO
—How do I rename the corresponding source media by its Active Take Name?
Is there a script to do this?
If not, how can I write one?
DO I have any other options for searching the Active Takes (I can’t figure it out via the Media Manager)?
Is there any other way to restore what I have done? (I still have the pre-archive .VEG files, before I did the SAVE, but the original source media [the caps] have been deletedAnyone have any ideas?
Any and all suggestions and debates greatly appreciated!
Thanks,
Unk.
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4 Replies
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Scripts can definitely read the “Active Take Name”. Of course the script won’t be able to rename the file with the file OPEN. I suppose the script could read the active take name, active take media file, remove it from the timeline, and then rename the file(s) (remember, you now have TWO files for each clip – one video in a standard DV-AVI and one audio in a W64 file).
Alternately, the script could write out a text file with the active take name and media file name in a format that could be searched in something like Excel.
You probably would have been better off initially by dragging all the subclips to the timeline, having a script that put regions around each piece putting the Take Name as the region name and then having it “render” the regions to new DV-AVI files (i.e. audio + video in ONE file)
Edward Troxel
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Hi Jedi – thanks for the prompt reply.
I actually still do have my subclips on the timeline (that’s where I can see the Active Take Names that I entered as subclip names).
– what would be the procedure for doing a re-render of the individual clips on the timeline (using regions, I believe you said)
– if I re-render DV clips, will I lose quality?
– should I be using the native Vegas DV codec? (the sony one, right)Deperately wanting *not* to rename 700+ clips…
:-0
Unk
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[Unkhakook] “what would be the procedure for doing a re-render of the individual clips on the timeline (using regions, I believe you said)”
Excalibur has a Marker/Region tool that will add a region around each clip and will name each region from the Take Name. It also has a “DVD Asset Collector” tool which can be used to then render each of those regions to a new file using the Region Name as the file name.
[Unkhakook] “if I re-render DV clips, will I lose quality?”
Straight DV-AVI to DV-AVI will simply be a “file copy” – NO loss.
[Unkhakook] “should I be using the native Vegas DV codec? (the sony one, right)”
Yes. Stick with the Sony Codec.
Edward Troxel
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YES!!!
Jedi, you have saved my proverbial A$$! Excalibur worked like a charm! I managed to rename and export all the necessary clips with the demo version.
Why does Vegas get rid of the clip names when you archive? Isn’t that a bit counter-prodcutive? Sure was for me. ANyhow, thanks a MILLION; I would love to purchase your product when I get a little fancier with Vegas; it seems to have many neat tools. Scripting rocks.
thanks really really a lot alot…
Unk.
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