I’ve been having this problem too. We shot 122 very short clips and Vegas 10 was not able to put more than a couple dozen on the timeline at once.
This thread gave me the clue I needed: It’s not about the actual volume of data; it’s about the number of clips. So the trick is to reduce the number of clips losslessly.
I had a hard time finding this answer, so I’ll post it for all.
In the bin folder of ffmpeg, I created mylist.txt with the clips to be concatenated / merged / joined. It looks like this:
file ‘R:\It’\”s my first file!.mov’
file ‘R:\It’\”s my second file!.mov’
These are fictitious filenames but that’s the proper way to escape a single quote, I also had to learn.
I generated the list of filenames in Windows using this old trick I had lying around from ages ago; I don’t know that it’s the best way, but it still works in w7, if you run it in a command window in the folder where your movs are:
dir /a:-r /b *.mov >> “mylist.txt”
Then I did find-and-replace to make it look like the above, placed mylist.txt in the ffmpeg bin folder, and ran this:
ffmpeg concat -i mylist.txt -c copy x:\output.mov
If you have mp4s or something else, this should work if you change all my ‘mov’s to ‘mp4’.
The resulting output.mov file is exactly the contents of the individual files, but Vegas has, so far, had no problem working with it!
I didn’t find this solution anywhere online, so here it is.