Ron Shook
Forum Replies Created
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Adam,
[Adam Rose Esq.] “IME.”
“In My Estimation?”
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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Adam,
[Adam Rose Esq.] “well, not only the idea of multiple instances of Vegas open, you can NEST one .veg file inside another project. You just drag n drop the veg file on to the timeline.”
I’ve got a lot to learn and Dave had been waiting some time for an answer. I knew about the nesting but hadn’t done it and wasn’t sure how to explain it. I knew someone would pipe up about it and thank you. Is this process quite reliable?
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Dave,
[Dave Morgan] “need to know if the concept of sequences is valid in Vegas. I would like to create multiple timelines and string them together within the same project as is the case when using Final Cut Pro.”
There are no multiple timelines within the same project in Vegas. Kinda wish there were, if only from an organizational standpoint. Vegas, however, has a feature that no other NLE has that I’m aware of. Like a browser, you can open multiple instances of Vegas at the same time, with different timelines, on the same computer and cut and paste between the timelines. This allows you to, for example, be rendering one timeline while you are editing on another in another instance of Vegas.
So yes, you can edit any number of sequences and cut and paste them together into the timeline of another or a new sequence, but each sequence is a new project, not a new timeline within a project. It’s different but has some unexpected advantages.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
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[Bruce Quayle] “the ocean.”
Zowie! I imagined lotsa things, but not that. Quite an adventure.
Best of luck,
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Danny,
[Danny Hays] “Well I didn’t have any luck last night with the test I did.”
Well…, Poop! Excuse my French, but this is pretty much a buzzard in the ointment. Leave it to grand dad to to play well only with himself. Perhaps you’ll figure a way to link up the files with the timeline. Did the Avid timeline show the correct source timecodes for the clips?
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Rick,
[Rick Wise] “I am trying, so far with no success, to find a way to add an offset to SMPTE code in Excel. A client has sent me a list of ins and outs, but his DVD version has time code offset from what Vegas recognizes. I don’t know if Excel can be adapted to do this — one would think so. There are dozens of free SMPTE calculators on the web, but using one means I have to manually enter the code for each cut, introducing more possibilities of error and taking up more time.”
If I undertand what you are asking, (which is no sure thing (g)), you are going at a complex solution to your problem from the wrong side of things, and the solution is quite simple. If you are looking to make corrections to your Vegas edit where he has sent you running time numbers (not really timecode, but the same format) and instructions from a DVD that had no burned in timecode, then you line em up on your Vegas timeline by changing the start time of the timeline to reflect the running time numbers of the DVD.
Once you’ve got ’em lined up close enough to understand what his instructions refer to then make the necessary changes in your Vegas timeline in reverse order, i.e., from the last change to the first. If you start at the beginning of the project making changes that involve removing or adding material you will throw off the sync of his notes for everything after that change.
I hope this addresses your problem and makes sense.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Oops, forgot to go on,
[Bruce Quayle] “However I do need to be able to produce DVDs on location as will as have the ability to upload video to the internet occasionally. I believe that Vegas should be able to do this for me.”
Yes
[Bruce Quayle] “So perhaps I need to keep the drives separate and use one for the programs and the other for the media. Do you think that this would work?”
Yes
[Bruce Quayle] “I gather that 7200rpm drives are essential, correct?”
No, not essential. I think that 5200 speed drives should work fine, particularly for cut editing. You might have some dropped frames during complex transitions with multiple audio tracks, but that’s no big deal since you can render trouble spots when necessary, but…, I hope others with more experience will chime in here.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Bruce,
[Bruce Quayle] “I need to keep my mini suite down to manageable proportions as space and power consumption are both key issues. Although I would prefer to offline on location, this is not essential. I can do this when I get back to civilisation if necessary.”
I think that we need to have more specific info on what you are about inorder to zero in on the best advice, not necessarily the doco subject matter, but how long are you on the road, how much crew, how tight a schedule, how well you know your new camera, how isolated you are liable to be from power for how long, what sort of housing, etc? The fact that you can put off to a large degree off-lining is a big help and may be the saving grace of this project. You may find the time to do some off-lining but obviously the first priority is getting the source material in the can, backed up properly, and communicating as much as possible with home base.
I’ll assume that it’s pretty imperative that you keep to schedule and I’m a firm believer in redundancy when ever possible, particularly when dealing with a pure file based workflow. For example: You’re out in the sticks and your computer goes south, and if your computer goes south your whole production goes south once you run out of limited, expensive SxS cards. What do you do? Maybe the best bet is to have 2 inexpensive laptops rather than one honkin’ laptop capable of near desktop editing performance. You can pick up 2 Ghz, dual proc AMD laptops with express card slots and DVD writers for about $600 now. They’ll get you by for cut editing and keep you running if one goes down. Just an example.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Bruce,
[Bruce Quayle] “2×160 gig ata hdd in RAID 0 format”
We’ll see what others think, but I’d be leary of such an arrangement. Sure it runs faster but if you save internal drives for the operating system and programs, you don’t need a lot of speed for that and a safer arrangement would be to use the two drives mirrored, so that if one goes hinky you can keep going with the other until the bad one is replaced. It’s a bad idea to mix your programs and source files on the same drive or drive system as it’s not only slow but runs a danger of loosing everything in one fell swoop.
If you put your source files on external drives and save your project files to a mirrored system drive, you’re never far away from recovery in case of a hardware failure. You’d probably want an external, two drive, raid 0, e-sata drive to work well with the EX1 files and then could use large/cheap USB drives to back up the source media, preferably more than once. Remember you have no tape to archive with the EX1 and you have to be certain that you organize and wrangle the data with utmost redundancy before wiping the SxS cards for further recording. This cannot be emphasized enough.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit* -
Danny,
[Danny Hays] “I’m not sure about EDL files from Vegas working in Avid. The Sony Vegas manual says their EDL’s are not the same as traditional NLE’s and are not intended for a project interchange with other editing apps. Vegas will however save as “Avid legace AAF” .txt file and with the media files in the same folder, Avid should open it. Since you have Vegas now, a simple test will show you. I’m curious now and if I gete a chance I’ll try it and let you know.”
I think that this is very good advice, if the Avid Legacy AAF works decently. The Vegas developers were never hot on taking the time to make a relatively bullet proof EDL functionality because they figured that broad Industry acceptance of AAF was always just around the corner. Trouble is the other NLE manufacurers kept proprietizing their AAF schemes and AAF functionality between systems has always been a moving target in multiple directions. That’s why it takes a $500 3rd party program to translate between Avid and FCP AAFs.
Bruce, you really need to run some tests with a typical project and see what translates reliably and what doesn’t from Vegas to Avid via AAF. Make sure before you go too much further, i.e. buying a laptop, that the functionality you need is there between the two systems. For example, find out how far beyond cut editing you can go before translation anomalies make the enterprise too goofy? Do dissolves and wipes, opacity settings and other simple compositing, audio level and pan mixing, etc., etc. translate properly? You need to find out whether Vegas will do the job you need to get done before committing to the max. Perhaps Danny can help get you some quick answers.
Ron Shook
Shoulder-High Eye Productions
CreativeCOW Forum Host for Discreet edit*