Much needed feature for CD burning in Vegas

CDM wrote on 6/7/2002, 8:50 AM

We need to brainstorm on how to successfully add a feature that allows tracks to be moved around in Vegas. I know this is technically SF's job, but now that CD arch lives in Vegas it would help if we could give them some suggestions as to how to accomplish this. This is something that it REALLY lacks now. How would the programmers do this considering it's a multitrack environment? Split all events at track boundaries and move what's inside the boundaries to desired location? Yuck. It's a pretty complicated issue, when you think about it. There has to be some way to do this efficiently... Let's try to give them some ideas, folks!

Example -
I have 12 cd tracks. The Vegas project has 3 audio tracks. I want to move track 10 to where track 3 is and track 3 to where track 10 was... Right now you have to do it manually and it's clunky as hell. What if you have overlapping events that cross Track boundaries, etc...

Let's figure this out together!

Comments

Rednroll wrote on 6/7/2002, 11:20 AM

Well there is a way to do this. I'll try to explain with your example. You said you have a 12 song CD compiled over 3 audio tracks and you want to swap tracks 3 and 10. Let's say for your example, that track 3 is an event on audio track 2. First you need to enable "ripple edits". Now select your event that is CD track3 and do an "insert blank event" and copy this blank event to audio tracks 3 and 1. Now do a timeline selection with all 3 events selected (ie your original audio event and the 2 empty events. Do a "Cut". This will cause Track3 to be removed and all subsequent events to move up along the timeline. Now go to the end of your track 9 and do an insert paste. Track 3 is now where track 10 was. Now you have to repeat these steps for track 10.

Admittantly, this isn't the best way to accomplish this. The easiest way to do this would be to do a "select Loop" area (ie make your loop your Track id markers), and then do a cut, and with ripple edits enabled it should cut that area of the loop you had selected and move up everything behind it. Then you could do an insert paste where you need to place those events at you just cut. Thus you wouldn't have to do any "insert empty event", and you would have a multitrack ripple function. I found while doing this now without the empty events inserted, then the ripple edits would only function on those tracks with events on them located between the selectinon. Thus if no events on a track in that selection...then no ripple edit, and now your entire cd project that you edited is all messed up.

Now, that I wrote all that I found a simpler way to do it using the "Group" command. You need to Group all the events behind your CD track 3. Now just double click your event on CD track 3, so it makes a time selection of the track 3 area. Hold the ctrl key and additionally select the group you just created. Again make sure ripple edits is enabled. Now do a cut. It will cut out CD track3 area, yet move up everthing on the timeline evenly in the group you have selected. Do an insert paste, and now for moving track 10. Wash rinse repeat. No insert of blank events is necessary for this technique.

P.S. Sonic Foundry: I found a typo trying this out. In the keyboard short cut commands in the Help file, it says the "Select Loop region" is "Ctrl+Q"....No, that's the insert new audio track command.....so what's the 'Select loop region' keyboard short cut?

MacMoney wrote on 6/7/2002, 11:24 AM

See, Chrles We're there! U were reading my thoughts from Texas!

GW

CDM wrote on 6/7/2002, 11:46 AM

Brian -
Yes, those are serviceable methods. However, in CD Architect you used to be able to go to the PQ list and ctlr-drag a track # to any other position in the PQ list and it would move that track and associated audio to the new position and slide everything else down accordingly. It would be nice to be able to do this in Vegas too.

Also, what gets messy when doing any kind of cutting and pasting is if you are cutting and pasting with envelope points. As soon as you paste in a new location, the envelope points get all screwy. I wish there was a way for Vegas to automatically create boundary envelope points to all ripple edits so that insertion of envelope points doesn't cause a ramp up or down to the next point.

Rednroll wrote on 6/7/2002, 5:39 PM

You're right on that method Charles. I remember complaining about that feature during the beta testing to be able to print up a PQ code list and do PQ list edits, and I remember them saying it would not be released for 3.0, but hopefully would be released in an update. So I'm guessing they're still working on it and just isn't finished for this update?

I didnt' quite understand what you meant at first with the envelope problem, since it has lock envelopes to events option, but now I see how this can get a little screwy, looks like you have to put some points outside of the place you paste, to act as an anchor point, otherwise the volume envelope will do a ramp fade to the next closest volume point where you past at.Maybe using the event evelopes and having the ability to add "points" on that would solve this problem. Thats how CD architect pretty much did it anyways. Another solution would be to have the ability to put cuts in the volume envelope, that way it wouldn't have to be a continuous envelope.