Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/21/2005, 5:20 AM
I just threw this little experiment together:
http://www.vegasusers.com/tools/vegfontlist.cgi
Upload your .veg file and it lists the fonts of all text events.

CAUTION! This is completely an experiment. It works on the few Vegas 6.0c .veg files i threw at it. I won't guarantee it will function on your files. But, if it works, then great! You've got nthing to loose by trying it except a few moments wasted time.

And no, i don't know why it shows ever entry twice. If i did, it wouldn't. ;)

added ...
I can't seem to get it working for credit rolls just yet, so for now it only shows text events. Hope that's enough.
MarkWWW wrote on 10/21/2005, 11:07 AM
You should be able to find out which fonts are referenced by looking at the .veg file with a hex editor/viewer.

Along with a large amount of stuff that you won't be able to understand you should find some islands of plain text and some of these will contain the font references.

You're looking for something along the lines of:
"{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\fnil\fcharset0 Impact;}}" which is a reference to a font called "Impact".

As an alternative to a hex editor/viewer you might like to download a free applet called BinText from here: http://www.foundstone.com/resources/proddesc/bintext.htm
This is a nice little tool that displays any text strings it finds in a binary file - ideal for this sort of job.

Mark

Chienworks wrote on 10/21/2005, 12:49 PM
Mark, that's pretty much what my vegfontlist.cgi program does, but much prettier.
MarkWWW wrote on 10/22/2005, 4:18 AM
Hmm, I've just tried the link to your vegfontlist.cgi program but I just get a file download box asking if I want to save the file vegfontlist.cgi.

I don't think this can be correct - as far as I am aware .cgi files are scripts that run on the server rather than being downloaded to the client, but I don't know enough about it to know if the problem is at my end or yours.

Shame, since it sounds like a very useful facility. It could presumably be extended to identify various of the other more obvious things you see inside a .veg file. For example, it (or a related program) could identify the audio (or video) plugins used in the project to help with resolving the situation where a project will not load correctly because of a missing (probably third-party)plugin.

LATER

Aha! - I am still unable to get it to work with IE6 but I've just tried with Firefox and it seems to work just fine. IE6 seems fine for me everywhere else so I don't know what might be going on at my end to prevent it working, but since it works with Firefox it's not really a problem for me.

Many thanks for setting up this facility - I'm sure it will be very useful to anyone else in the sort of situation that essami is in.

The reason it lists every entry twice is that every entry actually occurs twice in the .veg file, though I can't imagine why that should be. As far as I can tell most of the other items in a .veg file are just listed once per ocurrence of their use, but the RTF entries always seem to occur at least twice or sometimes even three times.

Mark
Chienworks wrote on 10/22/2005, 4:50 AM
Argggg. Sorry about that. All fixed now. I had a typo and was sending the document type is "text\html" instead of "text/html", which apparently mozilla-based browsers parsed anyway. It should now work in IE/Opera/Mozaic type browsers.

I've also got it ignoring duplicate entries now.
MarkWWW wrote on 10/22/2005, 5:31 AM
Yup that's fixed it - now working from IE6 too. Many thanks.

On experimentation I find that it seems to work just fine for simple .vegs but I have found one .veg that it doesn't work perfectly on - it doesn't seem to parse all of the text quite correctly. It doens't really matter too much as it does identify the fonts used OK, but in case you're interested the .veg file in question is one called DigitalFilmSlate.veg which is an exercise in using generators to create an animated clapper board. It can be downloaded form the VASST site - search for "slate" and it is the top one on the list.

Mark
essami wrote on 10/22/2005, 3:00 PM
Many Thanks!!!

sami