Just guessing, but I don't think it's Vegas alone. Can you import 20,000 images into Photoshop in one fell swoop?

Just out of curosity, how long will the finished video be?

The video will run roughly a minute or so.

If you need to do any mass-conversion or resizing of them, I'd bet Irfanview can handle 20,000 and probably not take all that long doing it. Irfanview might be the biggest time-saver I have ever used.

I don't really need to convert anything. I just need to string the stills together to create a time-lapse video. But getting the 20,000 stills into Vegas is the obstacle at this point.

A minute? Hmmmm. One minute of 29.97fps is only 1798.2 frames. I can't see any reason to have more than one image per frame. 20,000 images at 29.97fps would last 11 minutes, 7.33 seconds.

That's what I came up with, Kelly.

Excellent point. I guess it WON'T be a minute long. :)

BTW, I solved my own problem. I had to check the "Open Still Image Sequence" box at the bottom of the import dialogue. But before I could do that, I had to write a batch file that would convert my files to sequential numbering; otherwise, Vegas wouldn't import them.

Asking any application in one gulp to import 20,000 images is SILLY. The limation is more due to how Windows works rather than Vegas directly. That said I have imported roughly a 1,000 at a time with no problem. If or not you can duplicate or better that depends on what version of Windows you're running how much RAM you have, the size of the files, etc..

In other words the simple solution, do it in steps. Vegas is more than capable working will LARGE projects, Right now I got a uncompressed AVI file that weights in a 87 GB, no problem. It did take awhile to build the audio peaks as you'd expect.

The difference is its ONE file, not 20,000. Expecting an application to draw that many thumbnails is likely what's causing the hang.

It may be silly, but it worked. Vegas rocks.

When you import as a sequence it treats it like a video file, so it doesn't draw a thumbnail for each frame. That is probably why it worked.

Dave T2

I think AVISynth can convert thousands of still into one AVI for you.
The Printworker does film transfers as thousands of stills and there is a program that will sticth them all into an AVI. Checkout the guys website to find out how it's done.

Slacy- just curious, (edit) what camera was used to capture the images and what was the time lapse interval?
JL

>It may be silly, but it worked. Vegas rocks.

Ok, I confess I'm pleasntly stunned. I've imported 1500 stills before and had to take some long coffee breaks (very slow computer). I was convinced that Vegas's implementation of "collections" was slow. Its a bit OT, but there are different program algorithms and data structures for handling collections; some are best for small collections, some are best for large collections, none are best for both. I was pretty sure that Vegas used small-collection approaches because I've seen exponential growth in effort required as the size of the collection increased. I was convinced that Vegas would take forever to import 20,000 stills.

Its nice to be wrong. You're right, Vegas rocks! Once again, its in the "little" things that the quality of the Vegas programmers comes through, time and again. Compare things that work in the small then get shaky when you really push it vs things that do well in the small then manage the large stuff as well. That takes great programmers, pure and simple, and no "suit" can substitute for a great programmer who cares about his/her craft.

Incidentally, how long did it take and on what CPU/RAM basis?

Vegas will handle 20,000 stills, no sweat! Just for giggles and groans, I just now imported 15 Digital Juice TGA libes at once. Each libe is approximately 1500 images. Some less, some more. Smallest is 930, largest is 2100. Frame rate on playback is 3 fps, but this is also on a laptop that is pretty slow at 1.4 gig, 512 meg ram.
LDisney did a project a while back that had somewhere in the neighborhood of 50k images, if I remember his post correctly. Final product was pretty creative and interesting.

I'm not sure. I know it was from a webcam, but that's all I know. I was brought in only to edit.

I agree, Rich. It feels like the millionth time I've discovered some beautiful feature in Vegas that does EXACTLY what I only hoped it could do. This goes beyond just great software development and into the realm of product management. As a former software engineer myself, I can tell you that software products are often at the mercy of the folks designing the feature sets. Clearly, the Vegas folks have a great feel for this tool. I'll bet most of them use this software in their free time.

The "Open Stills as Sequence" is a genius feature. I mean, come on, if you're opening 20,000 stills, you're probably doing time-lapse. So the Vegas team incorporated a feature that plays directly to the need for time-lapse support.

My hat's off to 'em.

As for how long it took, the import was nearly instantaneous. My box is a Dual Pentium 3.06 Mhz with 2 GB ram.

Open Stills as Sequence is a common need for stock media libraries that are delivered a Targa, for animations, uncompressed or low compression media, or high frame rate media. It is indeed a wonderful feature.

Ah, the "Open stills as sequence" approach. I bet they optimized that. My bad. I was actually thinking of something else: Selecting the files in the explorer then dragging them onto the timeline. Like to see you try *that* with 20,000 files :-)

Actually I was surprised how long Vegas went -without- this function. It's one of the first things I tried in Vegas 2 coming from Premiere. The numbered-still-import feature was introduced in Vegas 3. But you couldn't -export- still image sequences until version 4 and it is only through a batch script. So they were WAY behind Premiere, but eventually we 3d animators got what we needed! :)

There used to be a major RAM issue when using high resolution stills. That was back a couple versions... hopefully that's been fixed since then.

Slacy,

You said you had to write a batch file to rename your files to sequential numbering. How did you do that? I am trying to do the same thing with "Open Still Image Sequence". Did you write a script?

Thanks,

TomG

Tom,

Here's the script I used. If you're not renaming .jpg files, you'll need to edit the file type in two different places in the script.

----------

::rennumdo.bat
:: Rename the files in a directory having a given extension
:: to sequential-numbers
@echo off
set zsn=1
:: go to destination directory
pushd %1
for /f "delims=" %%i in ('dir /a:-d/b/o:d "*.jpg" ') do set zfo=%%i&set zfn=%%~ni&call :process
:: return to original directory
popd
for %%i in (zsn zfn zfo) do set %%i=
goto :eof

:: process the file
:process
ren "%zfo%" "%zsn%.jpg"
set /a zsn=1 + %zsn%
goto :eof
::rennumdo.bat ends

--------------

You could always do this in Vegas using QT....