How can we Preserve our Video Project Edits?

MadMaverick wrote on 10/14/2015, 10:28 PM
The rumors of Vegas Pro being discontinued have got me a bit worried and disgusted. I've been using Vegas since 2009. I started out with Vegas 8 and eventually upgraded to Vegas 9 and 10. I just recently ordered Sony Vegas Pro 13. I'm wondering if I made a mistake getting Vegas 13 due to all the complaints of bugs, and rumors that this will be the final Sony Vegas... it's got me wondering if I should even bother to continually use it.

My main concern (and topic of this thread) is in regards to the future preservation of our video projects. There's always been a much needed movement to preserve movies... but what about the edits? What if a filmmaker years down the road wanted to make a directors cut of one of his works? Would they have to get all the old raw footage and start from scratch? I've always wondered this about older movies shot on film.

Of course, for newer movies shot on digital I'd imagine you'd just go back to the video project. I've always liked having that option... but what will we do if (or "when" I should probably say) all versions of Vegas stop being sold, and when our operating systems stop supporting Vegas?

Preserving your footage is one thing, but what about the projects? I mean, you could move onto a different editor... but wouldn't you pretty much be starting from scratch? I'd hate to lose all the work that I did. As I'm sure you all know, edits can take A TON of time and be very very intricate. A lot of meticulous work can go into an edit.

If I was to just switch over to a different editor now, would it be possible to somehow transfer your work from one editor to an entirely different one?

Maybe at the end of the day though, it's just best for us to quit being like George Lucas. Perhaps once we reach a final cut of a movie we should just work toward backing up and preserving the final product above all else.

Comments

NickHope wrote on 10/14/2015, 10:52 PM
I expect that Vegas Pro 13 will run on whatever the "current" version of Windows is for a very long time into the future. Anyway Microsoft have said Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, and even if it isn't, I bet the next version has backwards compatibility. If not then just keep a box or partition that runs a compatible version of Windows.

Besides that, you have quite a bit of choice of formats you can export your project to. You're not going to transfer all the intricacies of a complicated Vegas Pro project using these, but you'll get the right media and cuts, and possibly more.

MadMaverick wrote on 10/15/2015, 3:39 AM
Wow, I can't believe I didn't know about being able to export your project to different programs like that. Is there a way to export to Adobe After Effects that way (or vice versa)? I don't see it listed, so more than likely not.
PeterDuke wrote on 10/15/2015, 4:08 AM
After Effects is not a Video Editor.
TheHappyFriar wrote on 10/15/2015, 5:39 AM
And what makes you think AE or Premiere will read old projects in the future?
JohnnyRoy wrote on 10/15/2015, 6:55 AM
I teach a Masters course on Transformation to Cloud Computing at NYU and the first class assignment was to get a 13 year old Java application running in a new virtual environment in preparation to migrate it to the cloud. Trust me, it wasn't as easy as installing the latest Java and J2EE on your shiny new 64-bit OS and running the program. Students had to find a 32-bit operating system and very old versions of Java 1.4.2 and J2EE 1.3.1 to get the application to work properly. You will have the same problem because that is the nature of software. Old software requires old operating environments.

If you have software that gets abandoned and your business depends on it. I recommend that you maintain computer or a Virtual Machine running an old operating system with the software on it. This is what many Final Cut Pro 7 editors do. They have an OS X 10.6.5 Snow Leopard boot drive (which is the last version of OS X to "officially" support FCP 7) and they use that when they have to edit FCP 7 projects. They also have a OS X 10.10 Yosemite drive to boot to and run Final Cut Pro X because FCP X has no support for loading older FCP 7 projects!

You might want to save your projects as XML files or AAF files which are more generic formats than the Vegas Pro project format. Then you might have a chance of opening them in the future with another NLE but it's very hit-n-miss. I find that maintaining the old environment is best.

So what did I do?

When I migrated from Windows XP to Windows Vista, I used VMware Workstation to take a snapshot of my Windows XP drive and create a Virtual Machine from it. I can now boot my old Windows XP desktop as a virtual machine at any time and use any of the tools installed on it whenever I need to.

In fact, I have since migrated to the Mac and by using VMware Fusion, I can boot my old Windows XP on my Mac as well. So by using virtualization technology, I have, in effect, preserved the past and I can work on Vegas Video 3 projects if I so choose.

You don't need to buy VMware, you can use the free VirtualBox. The point is that we now have technology to preserve entire old systems and use them again in the future when needed.

~jr
Chienworks wrote on 10/15/2015, 7:33 AM
Exactly. I see virtualization taking the world by storm in the next couple of years. I use VirtualBox to keep XP running on my latest hardware. It's so seamless that i can even drag and drop between windows running new 7 apps and old XP apps side by side simultaneously. Sometimes i even forget which windows are running which OS, but in the end what matters is that i'm still able to run old favorite software that newer OSses haven't supported for many years.

Amazon's cloud model includes many pre-rolled environments for all sorts of different needs. The user community also creates and submits their own. Some of them are built for cases where you need to recreate a system that you had running 15 years ago but current servers won't support. Merely grab the image you want and 'boot it up' in the cloud and it's ready to go. Previous $dayjob has a client application that had to be frozen with very specific old versions of Java and all the associated trimmings. Nothing current will run it, but using Amazon's cloud tech we can roll out clones of it in a matter of minutes for each new installation necessary. There are many companies offering such cloud & virtual capabilities now.

It's a real shame that Microsoft's own built in backwards compatibility system is barely operational. Part of me thinks that no one should be able to do this better than the creator of the OS, but then the cynical part of me thinks that it may be deliberate because they don't really want people using older software. The really cynical part of me wonders how much the big software houses lobby Microsoft to make sure their older versions won't run in order to encourage upgrades.
Former user wrote on 10/15/2015, 8:33 AM
One possibility is to export an EDL and print it out on paper. Of course, none of these methods are helpful if you do not keep your original footage.
john_dennis wrote on 10/15/2015, 5:53 PM
"[I]I see virtualization taking the world by storm in the next couple of years.[/I]"

No large company can afford the server sprawl that happened in the late '90s and early 2000s. They just wouldn't be able to pay the power bill. In the data center, virtualization is the norm. Believe it or not, it was the norm thirty years ago, before the W'intel client-server binge.

In my past work life I have prepared and tested Physical-to-Virtual (P2V) workstation images for old, proprietary hardware and software that wasn't broken but the hardware was old enough to be unserviceable and the client software and O/S had little or no support from the vendors. The fact that the systems weren't broken diluted the will of management to pay to replace them. That could have left me in a bind in a 24/7 critical facility. By keeping spare machines, luckily, I never deployed a virtual image, but I was ready if enough hardware had failed.

At home, I do that sort of thing only to entertain myself. The one exception is that I have a P2V image of my tax system which moves to different hardware every four years or so.

I could see how doing a P2V conversion of a good-running Vegas Pro 13 system and saving the image for the future might make sense for people who don't mind doing that sort of thing.

The free VMware Player software.

The converter software link is down this page.

I've heard good reports about Virtual Box, but I haven't gotten down that far on my list.
Chienworks wrote on 10/15/2015, 9:45 PM
Then of course there's the concern that the virtual images we save will remain intact and readable in the future. But, i guess if we're counting on our source files to last, we can hope the VIs will too.

I wonder if with SATA and it's compatible derivatives we've finally come up with the last storage drive interface we'll see. I still keep a few external IDE interfaces on hand for mounting older drives, but they may eventually die. I haven't seen an MFM/RLL interface in 20 years, and while i haven't seen such a drive in almost as long, it still makes me wonder if, even if the drives themselves last, will we have anything to plug them into when need them?
PeterDuke wrote on 10/15/2015, 10:47 PM
"even if the drives themselves last, will we have anything to plug them into when need them?"

USB drives are SATA drives with USB interface. All you need is this interface. Is USB likely to die too?
Chienworks wrote on 10/16/2015, 7:35 AM
Well, i'm not putting any long term bets on USB either, considering the proliferation of other connectors that have since come out. Try asking for an iPod or iPhone with a MicroUSB port, for example. And, even if USB survives, will you be able to purchase a SATA->USB connector 40 years from now when the one you have now has fried? Remember when firewire was all the rage and it was going to obsolete everything else, including USB and ethernet? Remember that that was only a few years ago?

Probably the answer is to copy all your cherished media to whatever new devices come out when they've established themselves, rather than waiting until you can no longer mount the old ones. I remember ages ago copying all 542 3.5" floppies lying around my office to a CD-ROM (yes, one single disc!) and making a couple copies of it. That CD saved us a few times when we needed to reinstall something and couldn't find a single functional floppy drive in the entire company. I suppose 3.5" drives are still for sale in a few places, but they're flaky and unreliable now, and most of the diskettes haven't fared well either. In a few more years we'll probably have to rummage through recycling heaps to find the drives.