Can someone tell me about Excalibur?

ikhider wrote on 9/8/2022, 5:02 AM

On the forum here, someone mentioned Exclaibur, and I missed it before but just checked it out now. What does this do? The site does not get into main details. The price looks reasonable, but of course, want to understand this first. Is this like Vegasaur in any way? I am always down for more Vegas tools, if someone can share her/his experience, I would appreciate it. If others can share more such tools, I am always eager to learn.

Comments

vkmast wrote on 9/8/2022, 5:28 AM

From @jetdv (the developer) here: "You can install Excalibur and it will run as a trial for two weeks". I'm sure he'll comment.

RedRob-CandlelightProdctns wrote on 9/8/2022, 8:40 AM

Yes it's like Vegasaur insomuch as it extends Vegas functionality with a variety of extensions with an intuitive tab-based user interface. We used Excalibur almost daily for many years as its superior multi-cam workflow allowed us to efficiently produce live event videos long before Vegas had native multi-cam capabilities.. was truly worth every penny (and more!) than we paid. We added Vegasaur some years later and I've had similar experience -- it's saved an immense amount of time on a whole lotta projects.

Which will best serve your needs would depend on your use cases :-)

Vegas 20.214

My PC (for finishing):

Cyperpower PC Intel Core i7-7700K CPU @ 4.2GHz, 32GB mem @ 2133MHz RAM, AMD Radeon RX470 (4GB dedicated) with driver recommended by Vegas Updater (reports as 30.0.15021.11005 dated 4/28/22), and Intel HD Graphics 630 driver version 31.0.101.2112 dated 7/21/22 w/16GB shared memory. Windows 10 Pro 64bit version 10.0.19045 Build 19045.

My main editing laptop:

Dell G15 Special Edition 5521, Bios 1.12 9/13/22, Windows 11 22H2 (10.0.22621)

12th Gen Intel Core i7-12700H (14 cores, 20 logical processors), 32 GB DDR5 4800MHz RAM, Intel Iris Xe Graphics, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti Laptop GPU w/8GB GDDR6 RAM, Realtek Audio

 

 

jetdv wrote on 9/8/2022, 9:23 AM

@ikhider, I think I can tell you a little about it as I wrote it! Excalibur was the first commercial script to be available for Vegas Pro 4 back in May of 2003 under the days of Sonic Foundry. I was doing a lot of multi-cam work at the time and started making a script to help me with my multi-cam. As it developed, I added a few more tools and decided that if it was that useful for me, it might be that useful for other people. So Excalibur 1 was released:

Version 1.0
Excalibur - Tools to slice through your editing tasks.
A Collection of Wizards

1. Sync Wizard
2. Tally Wizard
3. Multi-Cam Wizard
4. Gap Wizard
5. Voice-Over Wizard
6. Unsplit Wizard
7. Randomize Wizard
8. Marker Wizard
9. Velocity Wizard
10. Orphan Wizard
11. Align A/V Wizard
12. Fade Wizard
13. Duration Wizard

The first three tools dealt with Multi-cam, Number 4 would create or eliminate gaps between events on the timeline. Number 5 would reduce the audio on background tracks when there was voice present on the voice track. Number 6 would take two events that had been split and "unsplit" them. Number 7 would take a number of events and randomize them on the timeline - great for slideshows. Number 8 would create/remove all types of markers as well as convert between different types of markers. Number 9 would work with velocity on events. Number 10 would take a video or audio event whose partner had been deleted and add the missing audio or video back to the timeline. Number 11 would align audio and video whose partner was out of sync. Number 12 will add fades to selected events for the selected amount. And number 13 would adjust the duration of events on the timeline.

You will note that some tools are redundant with things you can do in VEGAS now (like numbers 10 and 11, parts of 4, and - somewhat - 1, 2, and 3) but none of these were available directly in Vegas Pro 4.

Over time, the plugin has grown. Version 1 as strictly a script (Custom Commands did not exist at that time) so you had to run it each time you wanted to run a tool. Over time, Vegas improved it's scripting capabilities (some features at my request) and, eventually, custom commands were introduced.

Version 6 released for Vegas 8.0a in 2008 was the first version to run as a custom command where it could be docked and continue running all the time for easy access. Many more additional tools were also added over the years. In fact, I had released three total tools and Excalibur 4 combined all three of those tools into a single product in 2005 meaning there are many more tools available today over the original 13.

In short, it provides tools to automate tasks so it takes less time for you edit. Beyond Multi-cam, one of my favorite tools is "Select Events" because I often want to select "everything after the cursor" but there's no easy way to do that in VEGAS. So with a click of a button, it's done!