Seeing as how I've been adding non sequential images from cameras and scanners to the Vegas T/L for over a decade I figured something must have been broken between V9 and V13.
I just tried doing this with 100 non sequential images as I've always done it with V13 and nope, it still works as quickly and painlessly as always. I can tell Vegas how long I want the images displayed for from 1 frame to many minutes. I can tell Vegas to add crossfades of a specified length between my images.

I vote NO for a waste of my money adding a feature to Vegas that already exists.

Bob.

This is for an IMAGE VIDEO SEQUENCE - not separate editable Images.

So this is NOT the same feature at all.

Grazie

We can do it indirectly by using a nested project...

i'm sorry, but i really don't understand what's the problem.

obviously we're not talking about an animation sequence, but bringing in other media (stills?) as a sequence? i do this all the time the same way as bob does.

for renaming i simply sort in explorer select all and use f2 to rename.

am i missing some thing? (other than a few brain cells...)

I too do what you and Bob do. What I have asked for is that the IMAGE SEQUENCE be Imported as a VIDEO. Unfortunately this is NOT possible IF the Stills are out of sequence.

Yes you have misunderstood me as did Bob.

Grazie

No I didn't misunderstand you.
You don't seem to understand that it doesn't matter which way it gets done the result is the same.
If you really want to be pedantic about it, do as altarvic suggests above and nest it.

Bob.

" . . it doesn't matter which way it gets done the result is the same. "

And NO. My point is that it is EASIER to have an option to IMPORT an out-of-sequence set of stills that can come in as an IMAGE SEQUENCE video.

So NO, it is not the same. The process I'm asking for is a one click option.

Grazie

For example some cameras will shoot a 3 exposure sequence of the same scene but Vegas will not import this as a sequenced clip unless you first rename the clip image sequence in an order Vegas recognises using something like “advanced image renamer”

Even if you try and set up the sequences as 1 image per frame with crossfade etc this won’t work, in fact I did try this a few years ago.

I had this issue 2 years ago when I was experimenting with HDR sequences. I am not sure how nesting will help? As i would need three nested veggies one with each of the corresponding sequences then.....what? I still can’t do anything with those sequences and I can’t composite them into one image sequence.

It only takes me a click and drag, hardly a huge impost.

Quite aside from anything else there's a good reason why one would very, very rarely want to have disjointed non sequential images one frame long as video. It will be impossible to deliver, any codec that uses temporal compression will turn it into garbage.

Bob.

Rory Cooper said:

[I]"For example some cameras will shoot a 3 exposure sequence of the same scene but Vegas will not import this as a sequenced clip unless you first rename the clip image sequence in an order Vegas recognises using something like “advanced image renamer”

Even if you try and set up the sequences as 1 image per frame with crossfade etc this won’t work, in fact I did try this a few years ago.

I had this issue 2 years ago when I was experimenting with HDR sequences. I am not sure how nesting will help? As i would need three nested veggies one with each of the corresponding sequences then.....what? I still can’t do anything with those sequences and I can’t composite them into one image sequence."[/I]

There's no simple solution to that problem.
I would assume one would want each frame that was taken with the same exposure offset on the same track and above / below the frames taken at the same time. Maybe AE already has some facility for this, don't know as I've never tried. Either way though preprocessing all the frames assuming they following some logical naming convention first before importing into any NLE or compositing app would make a lot of sense and again hardly a great impost. I'd imagine there's no agreed industry standard for how HDR sequences are named to further compound the problem for anyone trying to code a solution.

Bob.

Grazie, it might help a bit if you describe the circumstances and reasons for wanting this feature, beyond the 'one click' aspect of course. What is it you're trying to accomplish that makes this desirable? How often do you really want a series of disjointed images to become frame-at-a-time sequences, and if we may be so bold as to ask ... *why* do you want it?

At the moment i'm with Bob here as i see almost no practical reason for this. Please show us what the reason is.

Yes, i have from time to time created a video that had a few hundred disjointed images playing a frame or two at a time. In my career in editing several thousand videos, i may have done it twice. So for me it's been about a 0.1% activity, which hardly merits being made simpler and easier when there are so many other issues that are used much more often that could use improvement.

And, i'll also note that even if we didn't need to have the images named/numbered sequentially, one my still have to select them in the desired order which often is not the sort order of the file names. In this case you still couldn't achieve a one-click solution as this wouldn't necessarily give the order of sequence you desire. In these cases you'd still either be hand picking one at a time, or renaming them to be in order (and if you did rename them, you might as well rename them sequentially anyway), which are precisely the activities you want to avoid. Importing a disjointed sequence still wouldn't avoid this manual labor beforehand.

I also agree with Bob: there are so many good reasons to only import images that are totally in sequence, and no good reason to import images that don't follow the sequence. It is so trivial to rename images so they have sequential numbers that I don't understand why this thread is still alive. In addition to the amazing Bulk Renamer, I've been doing this renaming, since the mid 1990s, with the great old file viewing product (which I still use every day), ACDSee. You just select all the photos, which are presumably sorted by date, press F2 to rename, put hash tags where you want the numbers to appear, provide a starting number, and press Enter. [edit]The program is still available on some sites as "ACDSee Classic."

In addition, I really don't understand why Grazie is going on about this because he actually offered exactly the same advice he is receiving, back in this thread:

Naming and importing timelapse files

Hey Rory, speaking of timelapse, that is the key to solving the groups of three import problem. That happens with tape-based cameras when they attempt to do timeplapse. The problem was common enough that I wrote a script for it. This may be good enough to do what you want. The script used to be available from VASST, but that site long since got reorganized and took away the scripts. Here's a link to the file on my Dropbox account:

One Frame from each event (for time lapse) (updated for Vegas 7).js

Updated for Vegas 7 .... I guess I wrote this awhile ago (golly, the copyright notice I put in the header says I wrote the initial script eleven years ago ... yikes!)

To use this, simply drag your video to the timeline, select the events, and run the script. It will take the last frame from each event and discard the rest. If you want faster timeline performance, render the result out to an intermediate using Cineform, MXF, etc.

I take photos all the time for VegasPro timeline - be it timelapse, HDR, non-sequence or in sequence and there is really no problem whatsoever in managing the process. There are infinite utilities and helper tools to do this.
If some third party wants to take up a unified tool -so be it. VegasPro at the moment has it right and comments by Bob and johnmeyer are right on.

To expand on my comment that "no good reason to import images that don't follow the sequence," the reason I said that is that in most cases, the gap in numbering indicates that an image has been removed, or that the sequence has been interrupted. This would provide a discontinuity on the timeline which you might not notice until you had rendered, or perhaps even delivered the result to the client.

Bob's method gives you the results you want, and you can then treat the result like video with a nested project, as he already described, or you can render out to an intermediate.

FWIW, VirtualDub has this same feature, and it operates the same way as Vegas.

[edit] ... and the timelapse script I posted will streamline the workflow Bob described because you don't temporarily have to set the length of imported stills to one frame: just drag the images to the timeline and then run the script. It will take care of making every event exactly one frame long, and removing the resulting gaps from between the multi-frame images.

Thanks guys for ALL your input. Really essential reading.

Bob recently SKYPE-ed me saying that the Video Event of this Sequence would fall down if only one of the underlying Photos or Stills goes AWOL . . . . ! This has given me pause . . .

Cheers

Grazie

The idea that a sequence would fall down if one of the images goes awol would be true for any application that imports image sequences, so it seems to me you'd do what you always do, which is to have backups and not lose images. You might run into problems with file corruption, I suppose...

Modeling programs and programs like AfterEffects often output image sequences, which is what Vegas' ability to import image sequences addresses. These sources probably would never have out-of-sequence images in their output without human intervention.

It's quite possible that you might be doing stop-motion animation (or optical printer work) and have a bucket full of sequential images to import into Vegas. In this case it's much more likely that you'd have some images to discard, especially in the stop-motion example. Think clay-mation or puppets. Maybe you interspersed some shots of slates or note cards, maybe you flubbed a shot...you might have frames here and there that you want to skip but you don't want to renumber because then you won't know where that slate or note shot was supposed to go.

So, yeah, I can think of reasons to add some refinement to the image sequence import process. On the other hand, I have no real feel for which approach would be better. Import the image sequence, which makes a media clip in Vegas, or import the individual stills and drop them on the timeline as 1-frame events? Each probably has its selling points.

Is it a waste of time for SCS to make existing features better? No, I don't think so but I'd still rather they make Vegas crash-proof. I'm sure they can work on more than one thing at a time, though.

Rob

rmack350 said:[I]"
Modeling programs and programs like AfterEffects often output image sequences, which is what Vegas' ability to import image sequences addresses"[/I]

Not to mention the growing number of cheap cameras that record image sequences e.g. the BMPC @ $500 :). Using that camera as one crew I spoke to recently discovered it's not hard end up needing 15TB of SAN to store and playout your footage.

There's not just moving images, there's sound involved and that's got to stay in sync with the vision, lose a single frame and there's a problem. That's probably why when SoFo wrote the Import Image Sequence facility they decided to insert black frames for any frames found missing from the sequence, to keep sound and vision in sync.

Taking that on board, there are issues with Vegas and it's ability to import image sequences that do force users to use 3rd party tools and they're not free. If SCS are to spend any time on the Import Image Sequence function of Vegas it first off should be to make it do what it was written to do correctly. Asking SCS to expand the scope of the function without first fixing the in-scope issues is daft and damaging to the product's reputation to my way of thinking.


I've also been at a loss to understand the objection to using the alternative way of getting a disjointed sequences of photos into Vegas. Yes, they end up on the T/L with each photo as its own event. I cannot image why I'd want them as a single event.
Every time I've imported a slab of photos I've found good reason to do work on them as I've seen them played back at speed. I might change the sequence, pan / crop some to align elements, CC some and change the length and/or add dissolves.
Doing any of this is a pain when all the photos are combined into a single video event. I see almost no positives to having the photos as a single video event on the T/L and a considerable number of negatives.

Bob.

15 TB?

Omg lol.


VMP

I might change the sequence, pan / crop some to align elements, CC some and change the length and/or add dissolves.

It really depends on what you're working with, I'd think. With a lot of stop-motion I really can't see wanting to work with individual frames in Vegas, nor would I want to do that with the output of a 3D modeler. Time lapse, maybe I'd want to remove an offending frame here and there, and if it was a collage of disparate images I might want that too. Vegas can accommodate either approach.

I doubt I'd have synchronous sound available in any of these scenarios.

When I read the parent of this thread a few days ago I'd just shot several sets of BIOS screens with a still camera. They're not for use in Vegas but rather in Flash where you can click on buttons and menu items to move from screen to screen. But I shoot it all locked off and treat it like stop-motion. It's not a disjointed sequence. So that's what I have in mind as I think about this rather than some Dadaist image collage.

In any case this all seems manageable without improvements to Vegas, as long as you understand what Vegas is doing. The problem with that is that it takes a bit of trial and error and people get stymied when they have a vision of how it ought to work and can't grok how id does work.

VMP, i'm putting together an 8TB RAID1 network storage box for my home network right now. Will probably expand it to 32TB next summer. So storage space that large isn't really a stretch anymore.

On the other hand, i can't foresee myself using all that for ONE project!

John thanks so much for the script, I will try it out. I am unable to get it from work so I will try download it from home tonight, much appreciated.

I have a method of rendering three exposures out from Vegas the run all three merged through separate application then back into Vegas it can be a major schlep renaming and trying to keep tabs when you are working with multiple sequences.

Chienworks, That sounds handy indeed.

But how do you backup such a project?

My camera outputs files of around 11 GB an hour so a documentary can be backuped to around 3-4 Blurays (25 GB discs) per project (by using the save media with project function in Vegas).

I am curious to which media you use to backup such gigantic projects :-).
As far as I know common portable drives go up to 6-10 TB.

VMP