Extracting data from a project file (vf)

amethystina wrote on 1/10/2019, 5:16 AM

I am afraid I am still using Movie Studio (v15) to do things it was never designed for, so my question will seem very odd to many.

I am using a webcam to monitor a birds nest while it raises its young. I have processed 3 years of data but have another 3 years stil to process.

For each year there are approx 100 long videos (8 hours each). Each one has now been cut several hundred times (when the parent bird arrived with food and left). Each clip is being rendered to create a seperate file for eqach visit. There is no way of automating this.

However, I also need to record the start and end times of each clip (i.e where each cut is made). This must be stored in the vf project file - presumably as a relative reference to the start of the video. If I could extract this data it would save me many many hours of moving the cursor to each cut and typing the elapsed time into Excel.

I don't know if anyone has a utility to convert the contents of a vf file into a more usable format (csv, XML, etc), and if so, would they be prepared to let me use it for this purpose? (I would ignore any of the other formatting info, just the offset time of every cut - even the order does not matter).

Otherwise, any thoughts on how I might achieve the desired outcome with less manual effort?

Amethystina

Comments

Marco. wrote on 1/10/2019, 5:42 AM

I'm afraid the only recommendation I could give is to use Vegas Pro instead. I'm not aware of any way to do this in Movie Studio while in Vegas Pro there are tons of ways to automate different kind of tasks.

amethystina wrote on 1/12/2019, 7:09 AM

I'm afraid the only recommendation I could give is to use Vegas Pro instead. I'm not aware of any way to do this in Movie Studio while in Vegas Pro there are tons of ways to automate different kind of tasks.

Marco,

Thanx for the response, which was what I suspected but was hoping for something else. I cannot justify buying Vegas pro for a single function,

Amethystina

j-v wrote on 1/12/2019, 3:56 PM

I don't know if I understand your question as meant, but did you try rendering that total vf to the export format you want to use as an mp4 and then cut it in the pieces you want?
Cutting a mp4 with the free MP4 splitter/joiner does not rerender and goes very quick. You are able to give all the parts its own specifick name ander you can also later rename.
I use it always to split my GoPro sources in parts I want to use in a project.
Exactly the same type of file (MediaInfo equal to the original) is the result.

amethystina wrote on 1/14/2019, 8:54 AM

I don't know if I understand your question as meant, but did you try rendering that total vf to the export format you want to use as an mp4 and then cut it in the pieces you want?
Cutting a mp4 with the free MP4 splitter/joiner does not rerender and goes very quick. You are able to give all the parts its own specifick name ander you can also later rename.
I use it always to split my GoPro sources in parts I want to use in a project.
Exactly the same type of file (MediaInfo equal to the original) is the result.

J-V

I am trying to get a listing of all the splits I have made in a project (i.e. their times), so your suggestion, per se, would not help.

However, it did give me an interesting idea based on what you suggested. If I rendered the whole project into a format that included extensive metadata, then I might be able to extract the locations of the splits I want to make.

Unfortunately, this would require adding a marker to every split already created, as it appears that only markers (and not splits) can be written into the metadata - and this is another manual process, so it doesn't help me with the automation.

But it was just this type of suggestion that I was hoping for so I could apply a bit of lateral thinking to get a result. So I really appreciate your input, even though I wasn't able to make it work,

Amethystina

j-v wrote on 1/14/2019, 12:13 PM

If I rendered the whole project into a format that included extensive metadata, then I might be able to extract the locations of the splits I want to make.

Unfortunately, this would require adding a marker to every split already created, as it appears that only markers (and not splits) can be written into the metadata

Should be no problem for me.
With the MP4 splitter it is possible to split at a 1/100 of a second, so if you render the whole project and open both the rendered result in MP4 splitter and you open your project with your markers, you can do those splits by yourself.

But of course when you consider this as not to do for yourself: In the Vegas Pro version you are able to let it happening with a script, but don't ask me which one or if such script exists.

Marco. wrote on 1/14/2019, 12:35 PM

In Vegas Pro there is an internal option to export XML and various EDL types, both including the in/out data. Also there is the option to simply copy & paste the Edit Details in/out data. But none of these options are available in Movie Studio.

amethystina wrote on 1/17/2019, 6:42 AM

Should be no problem for me.
With the MP4 splitter it is possible to split at a 1/100 of a second, so if you render the whole project and open both the rendered result in MP4 splitter and you open your project with your markers, you can do those splits by yourself.

J-V

Thanx for this info - it would have solved my problem had I not already done the splitting of ALL the files in Movie Studio 🙁. If there is a next time, I will use it.

Amethystina

amethystina wrote on 1/17/2019, 6:55 AM

In Vegas Pro there is an internal option to export XML and various EDL types, both including the in/out data. Also there is the option to simply copy & paste the Edit Details in/out data. But none of these options are available in Movie Studio.

Marco,

This makes Vegas Pro sound more tempting, but as I only use 1% of the capacity of Movie Studio, it seems a lot of money. If it wasn't so easy to do the manual transcription I would seriously consider it.

Instead I usually do it while watching TV - it doesn't distract me, so although it will take longer to complete, it is not really time that is being wasted - well, not more than is wasted by watching TV itself ...

I feel a bit guilty here, J-V and Marco have both given answers that solve the problem as posed, but one was too late (because I didn't ask the question when I should have), and the other to expensive (for me). I suppose I was asking for too much, but the forum has proven its worth yet again,

Amethystina

cris wrote on 1/21/2019, 7:11 AM

First thing - I guess one's not supposed to reverse engineer proprietary file formats :) That said, it should be possible with a bit of try and error. But a way to go would be to ask Magix on this forum if they can pass along the specification - at least for a specific version of the format... it's usually not published info I guess, and some companies are very guarded about them (Microsoft used to be with Word format, for example), but some understand that open systems encourage user adoption, so you might get lucky.

amethystina wrote on 1/22/2019, 6:19 AM

But a way to go would be to ask Magix on this forum if they can pass along the specification - at least for a specific version of the format..

Cris

I had already contacted them directly and they gave me basically same response as Marco above, but with added suggestion I try to buy a discounted old version through Amazon or the like - the feature has presumably been in Vegas Pro for some time, so I don't need the latest version

I haven't had time to yet to ascertain the oldest version that has the this feature, but I might be able to get a very old version quite cheaply.

Quite honestly, this response surprised me because almost every other software vendor would try to persuade me to buy the full-priced version, so Magix has just gone up in my opinion as one of the (very) few honest software companies.

Amethystina

KenB wrote on 1/25/2019, 2:57 AM

I don't know if anyone has a utility to convert the contents of a vf file into a more usable format (csv, XML, etc), and if so, would they be prepared to let me use it for this purpose? (I would ignore any of the other formatting info, just the offset time of every cut - even the order does not matter).

I had a similar need with VMS 15 to extract a list of events on the timeline when I made a few slideshows. I wanted an easy way to check that each slide was of equal length after I had done quite a bit of editing and with 50+ slides in each clip it was tedious to Ctrl-Alt-RightArrow to the end of each event and check the timestamps. I also wanted an easy way to list the picture names in each slideshow to give to people who wanted it.

Being a Perl hacker from way back, I whipped up a script to print a list of events from the VMS project file. For each track it lists the track name and then the events in each track, showing the start time, length and event name. The output can be printed in CSV format or columns, and with times in fractional seconds or in standard hh:mm:ss:ff timestamps.

Here is a sample output in CSV format showing seconds:

Track,Start,Length,Name
Video,0.000,4.750,2014-07 IMG_0443
Video,3.750,4.750,2015-01 IMG_2056_2_2
Video,7.500,4.750,2015-01-02 DSC_1474
Video,11.250,4.750,2015-01-04 IMG_1883
Video,15.000,4.750,2015-01-05 IMG_1880
Video,18.750,4.750,2015-06 DSC_2754
Video,22.500,4.750,2015-07 DSC_4124
Video,26.250,4.750,2015-07 DSC_4465
Video,30.000,4.750,2015-07-18 IMG_5122
Video,33.750,4.750,2015-11 IMG_0839
Video,37.500,4.750,2015-12 IMG_1750
Video,41.250,4.750,2016-01 IMG_0845
Video,45.000,4.750,2016-05-30 IMG_9713
Video,48.750,4.750,2016-07-01 IMG_9995
Video,52.500,4.750,2016-08 IMG_1307
Video,56.250,4.750,2016-09 IMG_2204
Video,60.000,4.750,2017-05-31 IMG_4643
Video,63.750,4.750,2017-07-30 IMG_5034
Video,67.500,4.750,2017-11-24 IMG_6338
Video,71.250,4.750,2017-12 IMG_6660
Video,75.000,4.750,2017-12-25 IMG_6670
Music,0.000,79.750,Sirius2

And here is a sample output showing columns and timestamps:

Vegas Movie Studio version 15.0 project file (25.000 fps)

Text:

Picture-in-picture:

Video:
00:00:00:00  00:00:04:18  2014-07 IMG_0443
00:00:03:18  00:00:04:18  2015-01 IMG_2056_2_2
00:00:07:12  00:00:04:18  2015-01-02 DSC_1474
00:00:11:06  00:00:04:18  2015-01-04 IMG_1883
00:00:15:00  00:00:04:18  2015-01-05 IMG_1880
00:00:18:18  00:00:04:18  2015-06 DSC_2754
00:00:22:12  00:00:04:18  2015-07 DSC_4124
00:00:26:06  00:00:04:18  2015-07 DSC_4465
00:00:30:00  00:00:04:18  2015-07-18 IMG_5122
00:00:33:18  00:00:04:18  2015-11 IMG_0839
00:00:37:12  00:00:04:18  2015-12 IMG_1750
00:00:41:06  00:00:04:18  2016-01 IMG_0845
00:00:45:00  00:00:04:18  2016-05-30 IMG_9713
00:00:48:18  00:00:04:18  2016-07-01 IMG_9995
00:00:52:12  00:00:04:18  2016-08 IMG_1307
00:00:56:06  00:00:04:18  2016-09 IMG_2204
00:01:00:00  00:00:04:18  2017-05-31 IMG_4643
00:01:03:18  00:00:04:18  2017-07-30 IMG_5034
00:01:07:12  00:00:04:18  2017-11-24 IMG_6338
00:01:11:06  00:00:04:18  2017-12 IMG_6660
00:01:15:00  00:00:04:18  2017-12-25 IMG_6670

Audio:

Music:
00:00:00:00  00:01:19:18  Sirius2

You're welcome to it if you have Perl installed on your PC and are comfortable running the script from a command prompt.

Ken.

Musicvid wrote on 1/25/2019, 4:26 AM

I was a Perl monkey just for fun, I wrote the RSS feed subs for Coranto (NewsPro) and Calendarscript, and I was a natural with regular expressions to sanitize a variety of sources and charsets to pass feed validation.

Any Apache server should run your script, so maybe someone with a big heart and a bit of bandwidth will come along. Parsing project files sounds useful.

amethystina wrote on 1/25/2019, 8:01 AM

Any Apache server should run your script, so maybe someone with a big heart and a bit of bandwidth will come along. Parsing project files sounds useful.

Musicvid,

I wouldn't have thought that bandwidth would be a problem as one is only looking at the vf or veg files themselves - there is no need to transmit the video stream. But then as a small-scale user, my vf files are rarely over 300 KB - perhaps serious users generate much larger veg files.

(I have replied to KenB offline as I had some technical Perl stuff to discuss)

Amethystina

Musicvid wrote on 1/25/2019, 10:57 AM

It was just a figure of speech, amythistina, not a literal statement. Let it go.

CGI does not take up appreciable bandwidth, unless it's running a database.

Musicvid wrote on 1/25/2019, 11:22 AM

It's not necessary to install a Windows server on your system to run Perl.

WAMP works great on a thumb drive so you can carry it around.

Musicvid wrote on 1/25/2019, 11:28 AM

I haven't had time to yet to ascertain the oldest version that has the this feature, but I might be able to get a very old version quite cheaply.

All versions of Pro have the Edit Details window afaik. Just copy and paste like it was a spreadsheet.

amethystina wrote on 1/26/2019, 1:51 AM

All versions of Pro have the Edit Details window afaik. Just copy and paste like it was a spreadsheet.

Musicvid

Thanx for the info, but now I have the Perl script, I won't be needing Vegas Pro - but someone else may need that info, so it is good to have a solution on the forum.

As far as I am concerned, the forum has provided exactly what I was looking for, so my participation in this topic is over. Thanx to all who contributed - all contributions were interesting, and the topic remained alive long enough for KenB to find it and respond.

Amethystina