Help: copy and trim in Vegas5 does not work

logiquem wrote on 5/30/2004, 9:02 AM
Help Sony,

I have to backup a big project and the "copy and trim" option for "save as" do not work properly. I used this zillion times in V4 and never had a problem.

Now, all the source file is saved instead of the used portion ( regardless of head/tail setting ) . That is 4 Gig instead of 180 Mo! What's going on with this? Is it a bug with V5? Is it mentionned somewhere?

Comments

2G wrote on 5/30/2004, 4:38 PM
Funny you should ask.... I have been working with Sony support on this. Finally after a week or two, support came back with the response that it is working as designed. Interesting that it is so obviously "working as intended" that the support person spent a week 'debugging' it thinking it was wrong as well.

Bottom line is that I betcha you have a velocity envelope on a clip. Velocity envelopes make it difficult to determine how much of the clip is actually used without doing a render. Fine. I agree with that. But it isn't rocket science to figure out that a 3x velocity will play 3x the amount of a clip. But instead of doing what would appear intuitively obvious and pick the peak velocity node and just make the clip 2x or 3x what it was supposed to be. But, noooo... they think what is "working correctly" is that if you dare to put a velocity envelope on a 6 second clip out of a 1hr AVI file, that instead of creating a 6sec, 12sec, or 18sec clip, they simply copy a 13GB AVI file. Again, this is what you wanted, right??? According to them it is working as designed, even though it isn't documented anywhere.

I'm impressed. I wouldn't have been able to say that with a straight face if I worked for Sony.

In the meantime.... there is a semi-ugly workaround for this "feature". Remove the velocity envelope(s) and make the clips appropriately longer if the velocity is >1, save with trim. Then go back into the project and re-add the velocity envelopes. BTW, they were apparently smart enough to figure out how to do it if you speed up/slow down with ctrl-stretch on the clip. This only applies to velocity envelopes.

Sorry for the touch of sarcasm. I've been a programmer for almost 30 years. It chaps me when something is a little bit difficult, and instead of going ahead and doing the work, they imply that I'm too stupid to know I didn't want a 13GB file for that 6 second clip.

FIX IT, SONY!!!
johnmeyer wrote on 5/30/2004, 4:56 PM
If the bug is caused by the velocity envelope, another workaround (although it will lose the velocity envelope) would be to render to another track the section of the project containing the velocity envelope. Then, delete the section that has the velocity envelope and then move the newly rendered segment down to replace the segment you just deleted. Then, archive the project.

Now that I think about it, that is pretty ugly too. Perhaps it is easier, but then again, perhaps not.
logiquem wrote on 5/31/2004, 6:31 AM
Thanks for this accurate answer, this was precisely the problem indeed. Somewhat absurd indeed... Velocity variations does not come cheap in Vegas...

Thanks again.