Dave’s right you can’t do this in VF but you couldn’t do it with Studio either. It’s not a bad idea to start thinking of projects in smaller sections and working on them independently. I did a school play in VideoFactory and I made the introduction one project, which had a lot of titles and overlays, the acts and scenes another project (mostly straight cuts) and the finale with the credit rolls and flash back pictures a third. At the end I pulled all the AVI’s onto the timeline and rendered my final MPG file for DVD burning. I do a lot of my work this way now.

BTW, Welcome! You made a good choice by leaving Studio. I am amazed by how many people on that forum are convinced that all NLE’s are as buggy as Studio and that’s just the way it has to be. They keep hoping that the next patch will fix all their problems. I applied fourteen (14) patches to Studio 8 and it never worked correctly on my machine. (the same machine that Studio DC10+ and Studio 7 worked on). Then you pick up a Sonic Foundry product and its like a breath of fresh air.

I still use Studio 7 for Hollywood FX Pro and SmartSound. I just consider Studio 7 my special FX program and I export the selection I need a 3D transition as an AVI file. Cut it in Studio and add the transition, then drop it back on the timeline in VideoFactory and close the gap (because a 1 second transition takes 2 second of media, one on either side).

Glad to see you made the change. Now you can start being creative making movies with VideoFactory instead of being frustrated trying to get the software to work like Studio.

~jr

Yeah, I figured you could not do a project merge in VF. (Johnny, you could indeed copy from one project and paste into another in Studio 8, at least in theory. I did it a number of times, but always with a sense of adventure...you never really knew what the results would be. Blue screen GPF? Missing clips? Gaps in the audio? It was like being in The Deer Hunter.)

As a Studio refugee, I'm very familiar with the practice/art of rendering pieces to avi then reassembling in a larger project., rinse and repeat. With a real merge capability, however, you would not loose the editing elements in the piece when you move it to a new project. Oh well. I'm not complaining!!! Like you, I'll still use S8 for some things, DVD authoring for instance...although that hasn't worked well recently either.

DVDComplete from Dazzle actually works pretty well, btw, if you're interested.

> you could indeed copy from one project and paste into another in Studio 8

I didn't think the titles would paste. They were always red. Perhaps that was a bug but I couldn't do it in Studio DC10 either so I thought it just wasn't supposed to work. (but then again... it's hard to tell what's supposed to work in Studio 8) ;-)

> DVDComplete from Dazzle actually works pretty well, btw, if you're interested

Yea, I checked out the demo but I didn’t like the fact that you can’t change the templates and they wanted to "sell" you more. Other than that I thought it did a nice job. I eventually upgraded to Vegas+DVD.

~jr