I think this started in VP8. It's supposed to make it possible for extensions to go in appropriate menus but I've always just found it confusing.

Rob Mack

It might be modeled after Macromedia's Extensions, but not quite as sophisticated.

It's been a while since I've bothered to install an extension in DreamWeaver but I think they can appear as menu items, or as "behaviors" (aka, javascript). There an Extension Manager tool that allows you to turn extensions on and off, or go to Macromedia Exchange (now Adobe Exchange) and download/buy extensions from a central store.

I think you could say, in general, that Vegas needs a better way to manage your "stuff": templates, scripts, window layouts, FX presets, etc, etc. It'd be nice to not always have every single template you've ever fiddled with in your render menus, for instance, but still be able to load them from someplace you saved them. Ideally, this'd be incorporated in the Media Manager.

Rob Mack

One is for scripts, one for extensions, the other is also where I get a bit lost.

You can organise your scripts. For example I have several variants of the Add Markers at Intervals script. One for 1,5,10 minutes. Each one in named appropriately and put in a subfolder called Add Markers at Intervals and that folder appears as a menu item in the scripts menu. By expanding that I can select which variant I want to run.

Extensions are quite different beasts to scripts, I suspect this is why SCS have them separated. Their software needs to know how to interface to them. They could rely on the file extension but that may open another can of worms.

Bob.

The explanation can be found if you think about the menus themselves:

The Edit menu has items like Cut, Copy, Paste, Ripple, Normalize, etc. None of those commands have a user interface. They simply do their thing. Likewise and extensions on the Edit menu cannot have user interfaces.

The View menu has all of the tabs that you can display in Vegas (e.g., Explorer, Mixer, Trimmer, Video Preview, etc.). These make up the various windows of Vegas. All of the scripts that are converted to command extensions which have user interfaces must use the View tab because that's how you invoke all dockable windows in Vegas and it's the only menu extension that allows a dockable window that is always open.

The Tools menu item are "specialty" tools when you think about it (e.g., Audio Open in Sound Forge, Clean Prerendered Video, Burn Disc, Clean Project Media, etc.). Extensions that are Single Use tools should be added to this menu.

So while it might not be obvious at first, it's a good way to categorize custom commands into the categorizations that are already part of the Vegas interface.

~jr

Yes, it's logical and orderly, it's just not obvious.

I run across this a lot in my dealings with our main client and the giant support training website we maintain. I will arrange navigation in a way that seems logical and orderly and then later I'll watch people use the site and realize that none of them are looking at the site as a developer would. In the end I always want to bow to how people are using the pages rather than how I *want* them to use the pages. Often I'll create a few ways to get to the same content, just to make sure the different types of users are well served.

I think for Grazie, jrazz, and I, we're thinking we've got a tool set (Excaliber, Veggie Toolkit, Ultimate S) and we look for all the parts of that toolset in one place rather than looking for part of it here and part of it there.

Rob

There are/could be some advantages to having a built-in tool to organize these things.

1) You don't have to go out of Vegas and traverse your file system to do things
2) A good organizing tool would allow you to bring your templates, presets, scripts, etc in and out of Vegas. Say you have a bunch of stuff configured for a particular project but you don't want to wade through all those templates for other projects. a management tool would allow you to export all that stuff from Vegas and then remove it from your menus. Games often work this way, World of Warcraft allows you to add or remove all sorts of useful add-ons. (I kind of think that games are one of the few places where creative interface design is still happening).

My biggest fear, though, is that SCS would half-way implement the feature and then abandon it.

Rob Mack

Rob, after I added somewhere around my 200th application to my old XP computer I decided to arrange my applications into subgroups under the start/all applications. Thing is, for many of those applications after a few weeks the places I put them became non-obvious.

One of the things I REALLY like about Vista is the ability to open the Start Orb and start typing "Vegas" or "After Effects" and you immediately get a list of matching names (e.g., Vegas 8.0, Vegas 8.1, Vegas 9.0). I've often thought that Vegas needs something like that for the preferences dialog. Perhaps it would also be useful for the menus.

Jerry

That sounds good to me as one of several ways to work. Within a program it'd act kind of like a pseudo-command line with auto-completion. It allows you to keep your hands on the keyboard. The problem is that you need to know the name of the command ahead of time. Menus allow you to open the major category you remember and then find the command whose name you almost remember.

I think you could do the same thing in as many keystrokes: Alt+f, v gets you to the print preview dialog in Firefox, for example, but you have to know that "v" gets you to that command. Your idea would make it a little more visual.

The main thing, though, is to find an 80 year old and sit them down in front of the software, then watch what they do. You want the design to be easy for that person to figure out so you start putting the commands where they looked for them.

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I do the same organization thing to my Start menu in XP and try to keep it down to just 4 or 5 categories like Office, Art, Internet, and Utilities along with the basics that Windows started with. If you get too granular everything gets lost, and I don't thrive on too many options. Unfortunately, you have to keep redoing it.

Rob

Rob, I've found with Vista that even hints at the program name seem to work well. For example, when I want to go to the Power Management applet, I just type "pow" in the pseudo command line and get these choices:

APC Power Chute personal edition
Power DVD DX
Power Options

In Vegas maybe we could, for example, type Qu to bring up the Quantisize to Frames settings. Similarly, typing "au" would display this list from which to choose:

View
-Audio Envelopes
-Audio Bus Tracks
Tools
-Audio
Settings
-Audio

Jerry

EDIT: corrected indents.

For starters I'd be happy to just get Vegas to remember where the project files and the rendered output is supposed to go. All it does is remember the folder you last specified and assumes that'e where you'd like to do a Save As....and then the next render wants to output to your project folder.
Then there's how by default both Vegas and DVDA want to put temp files into My Documents....

I do like AE's Save and AutoIncrement. Simple, user friendly idea that would have been very easy to code.

Bob.

I've got to agree with this. tune and refine the basics that are already there. This really needs to be the overall drumbeat.

Rob

Bob, have you looked at my Auto Save custom command? It's free to use and is installed when you install Excalibur.

I'm betting, Edward, if Bob says that then he hasn't.

Edward's AutoSave has got my bottom out of the fire often!

Bob try it out . . . . you wanna increments? Yah got 'em.

Grazie

FCP supposedly boasts 3 ways of doing every task.
Maybe that has a little bit to do with it?

FCP supposedly boasts 3 ways of doing every task.

Doesn't Vegas have at least 6 ways?
:-)

Mike

Johnny Roy said:

"The View menu has all of the tabs that you can display in Vegas (e.g., Explorer, Mixer, Trimmer, Video Preview, etc.). These make up the various windows of Vegas. All of the scripts that are converted to command extensions which have user interfaces must use the View tab because that's how you invoke all dockable windows in Vegas and it's the only menu extension that allows a dockable window that is always open."

I didn't realize until very recently that these dockable windows can be stacked within Vegas. When stacked, they each have their own tab.

"I'm betting, Edward, if Bob says that then he hasn't"

True indeed and I'll certainly try it out.

Bob.