Tips for working with large projects

[Edward Troxel]

First of all, I turn OFF “auto ripple”. I don’t want things moving without me knowing about it. Secondly, I usually break the project up into pieces and then combine all the pieces into a “Final” project.

Edward Troxel

[Bradley Mowell]

Ed,

Thanks for the response.

How large are the pieces that you are talking about from a time standpoint?

I wish that I would have had your autosave script the week before last when my problems occured. Sony just sold another copy of vegas 8 because of you.

Thanks,

Brad

[Edward Troxel]

For the projects I do, a “single piece” could be anywhere from 2 minutes or 1 hour or so.

Edward Troxel

[Mike Kujbida]

Brad, long before Vegas 8 and Edward’s script came along, I got into the (highly recommended) habit of saving a project as a new version number after every few changes.
For example, a 10 minute video I did last summer was up to version 75 by the time I was done 🙂
I’ll also echo Edward’s recommendation about leaving Auto Ripple off as it gets more people into more problems than almost any other option.

[Bradley Mowell]

That’s a good idea, Mike. I’d thought of doing that myself.

Currenly, I’m using acronis backup software, which I do not like, and have been incrementally backing up my vegas project folder every hour…but it only works about a third of the time. Saving under different file names would be much easier and probably work more consistenly. Acronis is garbage, unless all you want to do is just do a single backup of your PC IMO.

Auto-ripple has gotten me into trouble several times.

I’ve kind of gotten into the habit now of grouping and locking areas of my project that I am not working on. I can’t tell you the number of times that things would move off-screen that I would not notice until after I saved the project a couple of times.

Thanks,

Brad

[Kert]

I recently completed a movie project (about 90 min). http://www.solovereturns.com

What I did was I made a separate Vegas project for each scene (4-5 minutes each). Then imported each scene into a Master Project. There were about 20-25 scenes.

In the Master Project the nested (scene) projects handle as a clip, you can shoten them etc. But most importantly each sub (nested) project can be reopened and edited separetly and when closed all the changes show up in the Master Project.

Worked out well.
JK

[Bradley Mowell]

John,

That’s really great advice.

I appreciate you input and will try to take a peek at your movie.

Thanks,

Brad

[Edward Troxel]

If you’re in Vegas Pro 8, you can download my “Auto Save” custom command and it will automatically give you a series of date/time stamped backups. You can specify how often you want it to back up and it will give you up to two backup copies each time.

Edward Troxel