Enhancements for Project Archive

TeetimeNC wrote on 4/29/2010, 5:58 AM

JR, I submitted part of this to SCS but I'm thinking this might be a nice future enhancement to PA.

I just finished archiving a two year old project that had about 10 nested vegs. Obviously, PA really simplified the effort. But I had a lot of tedius prep work prior to using PA because this project was done on a previous computer and some of my folder structures had changed so I had some missing media. Also, many of the nested vegs had clips in the project media that weren't actually used. So I spent over 30 minutes opening each veg, finiding all missing media and invoking the clean project media tool.

It would be great if PA could do something like the following:

1. Let me specify a parent veg to be prepared for archive, and the location(s) to be scanned for missing files.
2. Scan the parent and all nested vegs and display a dialog showing all media that was missing, and the proposed new location. If duplicate new locations are found, color code these line items in red and require that I check the one I want to use. If no location is found let me resolve these via an action selected from drop down (l.e., Ignor, etc.).
3. When all missing media is resolved, let me optionally specify to clean project media across all the vegs prior to archiving.
4. Process!

Nested vegs are a great concept and PA has made archiving projects that include nested vegs practical. I think the above suggestion would be useful for those of us who do a lot of nested projects.

One other enhancement I would find useful is to allow me to manually specify other folders I would like to include in the archive. Typically I create a DVD folder under my project folder where I put the DAR and any materials used to create the DVD, and I currently manually move these and other similar folders to the archive. Not a big deal but would be a nice finishing touch for PA.

/jerry

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 4/30/2010, 5:44 AM

Hey Jerry, I love this idea! Yea, the missing media in nested projects that wasn't even used is a drag. I don't see anything here that couldn't be added to the archive nested project function. ;-) Thanks!

~jr

TeetimeNC wrote on 5/1/2010, 2:03 PM

JR, glad you like the idea. I have some additional thoughts based on my most recent project archive. I hope these will be useful as you consider this enhancement.

I just archived the most complex project I have done in Vegas 9c. It started with AVCHD source but I eventually transcoded to MXF and replaced all the project media because 9c (both 32 and even more so 64 bit) choked on so much AVCHD in many stacked tracks.

After transcoding to MXF I was able to render in 9c 32 bit without too much drama. But I really had to work hard to get this one archived.

The finished MSF project is about 80 GB. There are 12 nested vegs under the main. I ran PA 10 or more times trying to create an archive with the nested vegs in sub folders. In most every case Vegas would stop responding after it had archived the nested vegs and was working on the main veg. In most of those, it would stop while building peaks for the largest clip in the main veg (over 2 GB).

I finally got it to work by doing this:

1. After the freeze up I salvaged the nested veg sub foldes and cleaned out the parent veg archive fragments.
2. Then I used the regular Vegas "Save As" to create an archive in the parent archive folder.
3. Next I removed all the nested vegs that "Save As" created in the parent archive folder.
4. Finally I restarted Vegas, opened the newly archived main.veg and resolved the "missing" nested vegs to their PA subfolder locations and saved the main.veg.

I'm documenting all this because I don't know if there is anything you can do to the archive process to make this kind of problem less likely to occur. Unfortunately I don't know exactly what was causing it but I suspect it is a memory issue in Vegas 9c compounded by Vegas building peak files for such a large number and size of files in one session. By the way, I tried this with 9c 64 bit with even poorer results. And i tried both with dynamic ram down to zero too.

Perhaps you could give the option of not building the peak files? Or, another option might be for PA to keep a log of its progress, and in case of failure let it restart at the last known valid completion state. That sounds overly complex and I bet you might think of something simpler.

At any rate, PA saves me a ton of work archiving these complex projects and this is the first one I have had so much trouble with. When I get brave I'll try it with 9d.

/jerry

wombat wrote on 5/18/2010, 6:44 PM

I have just finished archiving a project - multi-camera, different video formats, many stills, multi-soundtracks, takes, nested vegs, lots of unused files etc., and just like TeeTime, found it a pretty tedious process getting things hooked up in the archive with single copies of the source video files, elimination of redundant files, and nested vegs working. However no freezes like TeeTime, in 9e.

I have been on the cusp of ordering PA, and the thought that it might be developed to eliminate such problems, or at least simplify things, would make it a no-brainer to purchase.

Steve