Peter: Oh, okay . . I do realise this, but maybe my warped sense of humour. Getting a bit "Thread Bare"! So to speak . . . .

Grazie

I usually enjoy your "warped" sense of humour Grazie, but you've lost me this time!

peter

All the time you spend setting up bins, I'm half finished with the project already. And you still have nothing in the way of organazation for the future OUTSIDE of the current project you're working on. Like I said... different strokes for different folks. No one way is best for everybody.

I often use bins as a sort of temporary conceptual organizing structure to help me visualize the "spine" or outline of the piece I'm working on. This structure is really of no use once the final piece is assembled, and isn't really related to finding a particular clip for archival purposes. Instead, it's more of a "storyboard" or outline to help me organize my thoughts about how I want to put the piece together.

For example, I have a clip of Professor Jones talking about the uses of fear in selling war to a reluctant citizenry. But the speaker also mentions, say, Victoria Clarke, by name. I might put this same clip into three different bins, "Uses of Fear," "Professor Jones" and "Victoria Clarke." Takes a couple of seconds to drag and drop into a new bin.

If I'm working on a scene about "Fear" with multiple speakers, I'll go to the "Fear" bin. If I'm doing a scene of everything Professor Jones says from multiple interviews and tapes, there they all are in a bin. If I want to put together a sequence of different people talking about Victoria Clarke, I can find them all in the appropriate bin. If I just want a cutaway from a particular location, I go to the Cutaway bin. (This is where drag and drop subclips would be a huge boon) On the other hand, if I realize that organizing by individual speaker isn't going to be necessary, I can delete the "Professor Jones" bin in its entirety and not have to worry about losing the individual media files from the disk.

Folders on the A/V drive, however, are based on the source tape, to facilitate archival and retrieval at a later date.

Keep in mind that I work in long-form documentary: no script, I don't know what I'm going to get until after I've shot it, and perhaps hundreds of hours of raw source tape for a 60-70 minute piece. If I were working on a scripted, fictional narrative with a lower shooting ratio, I would probably organize things differently.

BB, could you please name some of those low priced database.
Thanks.

One I like a lot is cheap $39, based on Microsoft's Access Engine so still powerful and fast. Its called CATVids.

http://www.fnprg.com/catvids/features.html

The interface till you get use to is a little confusing, but you get a ton of features and save yourself all the hassle of programming a database. You basically just enter the data you want. Because it supports images, I take a snapshot of various scenes from the Vegas timeline and then write as lengthy a note as I need under comments and of course a final snapshot for each finished project.

Me being me of course I chaged just about every field, and shuffled the report fields around which isn't hard, the instructions say how.

If not your taste try searching for video database there are many out there. I tried most and liked this one the best.

Thanks BB, I found it and going to try it out.

"Takes a couple of seconds to drag and drop into a new bin. "

I do like the sound of your approach. From where? At what point are you actually previewing the event? On the T/L? Is this part of the Event/Clip or have you somehow Edited it out of an Event, and placing it in a separate Bin?

Grazie

Grazie,

I generally preview clips into the Trimmer, then drop them into bins from there. I have Vegas preferences set to "double-click loads into Trimmer." I also use the Trimmer to set regions related to topics of interest within a longer clip.

I've been lobbying Sonic Foundry to add a feature that would let you drag a region from the Trimmer to a Media Bin and get an instantaneous subclp that would include only the information within the region. You could then use the subclip the same way you would use an ordinary event. Believe it or not, Premiere has had this feature since version 5.0. It really makes it easy to grab only the portion of the media file that's of interest.

As it is, in Vegas, you have to live with replicating the entire event in different bins. But, at least it's easy to grab the right media file. Then I can double-click the event in the Media Pool, load it in to the Trimmer and select the Region of interest to put on the timeline. (The sub-clip feature described above would avoid having to go back to the Trimmer.) Or, if it's a single-topic event with no regions go straight from the Bin to the Timeline.

The only other option is to render out a Region as a separate file, but I find this too time-consuming and wasteful of disk space.

Curiously, you can grab just the named region by selecting it in the Vegas Explorer window (with "show regions window" checked) , but not in the Media Pool. Go figure.

Hope this is clear. Let me know if I can explain anything better.

BS - Thank you . . No wonder your original post went over my head! What you've now explained is close to the "Tales of the Unexpected"! - I was trying to understnad something that was going against my logical approach to V4 and life in general . . silly me - Huh . . .

Okay, now that you've taken the trouble to spell it out I'm going to persist with this Cack-Handed way of doing the "Bin-2-Step" - didn't there used to be a dance called the Madison?

Your point about replicating an Event in another Bin, just to get the Region you want - was the clincher. NOW I know this I can sally forth . . . Again, it isn't a duplication of the Event, it's a duplication of the errrmmm... Shortcut, to that Event.

So it's the Trimmer you view your Captured clips in - right? Okay. This must mean you Captured using Scene detect. New Scene - New Clip - New Clip - New Name. Yes?

Now, the "you can grab just the named region by selecting it in the Vegas Explorer window (with "show regions window" checked) " I'll work on!! - Maybe I need to lay down in a dark room for a bit...... Why aren't things simple? Where were we Editors when the SoFo, hard working programmers were beavering away? Hmmm? Hmmm? HM?

I've used the Trimmer for things and I've used, of course, the T/L for majorally massive edits. I've always pined for a way to "sort" my stuff into some sort of a semblance of logical/storytelling . .. that's what Editing is about - I believe?

I still love my Vegas4 . . .

. . I've calmed down now Chaps . . . okay?

Kind regards,

Grazie

>"I was trying to understnad something that was going against my logical >approach to V4 and life in general . . silly me - Huh . . . "

LOL! Sorry, I didn't mean to give you an existential shake-up to your world view!

>"Again, it isn't a duplication of the Event, it's a duplication of the errrmmm... >Shortcut, to that Event."
Exactly. A much better analogy than what I was fumbling with.


>"So it's the Trimmer you view your Captured clips in - right?"
Yes.

>"This must mean you Captured using Scene detect. New Scene - New Clip - >New Clip - New Name. Yes?"
I use 1 of 2 methods, depending on the nature of my source material and how lazy I'm feeling when I'm actually capturing:

1. Capture entire tape using scene detect. Good for shorter projects where I'm shooting short takes, with lots of camera stops and starts.

2. Batch Capture. Manually log clip in and out points in VidCap, shuttling through the DV tape. Then tell VidCap to batch capture selected files. This is best for long projects, with lots of source material on multiple tapes, with long, single takes (like a long, sit-down interview). By telling VidCap where each "scene" begins and ends, you can avoid some of the problems with subclips I described earlier.

In either of these methods, each new clip is automatically assigned a new name.

>"Now, the "you can grab just the named region by selecting it in the Vegas >Explorer window (with "show regions window" checked) " I'll work on!! - >Maybe I need to lay down in a dark room for a bit...... Why aren't things >simple?"
Actually, it IS quite simple. (I think I misspoke when I described how to do this before)
1. Open a media file in the Trimmer.
2. Set a region in the Trimmer, name it and hit the "Save Markers to Media File" button. (You can also set Vegas preferences to do this automatically.)
3. Open the Vegas Explorer window and navigate to the file you just opened in the Trimmer
4. Go to View|Regions (or cycle through the views from the Explorer Toolbar)
5. You should see a list of the names of the Regions you created in Step 2.
6. Click on the name of the region in the Vegas Explorer window, and drag it to the Timeline.

>"I've used the Trimmer for things and I've used, of course, the T/L for >majorally massive edits. I've always pined for a way to "sort" my stuff into >some sort of a semblance of logical/storytelling . .. that's what Editing is >about - I believe?"
Walter Murch couldn't have said it better! ;-)

>"I still love my Vegas4 . . .
And it loves you, too.....

Best wishes.

Brian

Brian - hoooo first names terms, after all this time eh? - Well thank you from the bottom of my Sartre Heart [ nice eh? Just thought that one up too . . .] .

Now I really do understand, thank you. Esp, the bit about Regions and Trimmer.

It's now 8:00pm in London.. .partner is making Cottage Pie downstairs . . . I'm off line now . . . . ho go look at the thread about making Media Generators from Audio input - neat ideas on that one . . . Ho, just landed a Community Video thingy today . . Yeah for Grazie! . . . .I'm off for the nite - tarah!

Thanks Brian,

Grazie