organizing recorded video

tbobpage wrote on 9/11/2006, 11:34 AM
Hello all ---

I'm getting ready to dump years of home video (and other video) onto my PC to back up and convert (off older 8mm and digital8 tapes). I'm looking for a hassle-free way to organize them, however. I'm anticipating just dumping them in via Vegas's capture app and having each clip be a separate .avi. I have two questions (and I did a search for someone already asking this and didn't find anything so if I'm asking something old don't flame me, just provide the link and accept my apology)....

1. is there a program out there that will allow me to easily and quickly tag each clip with various terms so I can search them later (multiple tags) - preferably free... and also preferably not the vegas media manager so I can access the stuff wihtout opening vegas necessarily.

2. what format could I convert them to in order to allow me to edit them easily but not take up so much space as .avi (vegas gets grumpy with .mpg) -- like maybe mpg4? -- I would like the quality to still be there but also, realize that the digital8 camera isn't the best quality in the first place and mpeg2 looks pretty much just as good as the original for my purposes......

thanks for the help --

todd

Comments

douglas_clark wrote on 9/11/2006, 2:16 PM
Adobe Photoshop Elements (PSE) will tag video clips as well as photos. I have version 3, and have 20k family photos tagged. I'd use it for video clips, too, if there was a way to get the tags to and from Vegas Media Manager.

You just point PSE at a folder with video clips, and it imports them to the catalog and displays thumbnails, just like digital photos. You double-click the video thumbnail to play it, and then ESC to close the player. (a bit clunky compared to previewing in Media Manager, but it works). You can easily define whatever tags you want. You can define a "collection" in PSE to assemble a "slide show" for specific occasions. Just drag thumbnails onto the collection tag, and then arrange the collection in the order you want. I use this as my "story board" for composing slide shows (since that is lacking in Vegas). When done arranging my "collection" of pictures, I select all and drag the the lot over to Vegas and drop it on the timeline. (Then I run Ultimate S and zap...a pro slideshow).

I just tried it with some video clips. I imported 100 video clips to PSE, and then selected a group of 3 random clip thumbnails, and dragged it to my Vegas icon on the desktop. (Vegas wasn't open). Vegas opened with the three clips on the timeline...in the right order. Now, I'd say that has potential.

But why not do it in Media Manager?

I suppose you could also "tag" your files in Windows Media Player, or iTunes, or something similar, if you just want to be able to easily play the clips. But player "tags" won't be nearly as flexible as either Media Manager or PSE. And as far as I can tell, there isn't a standard way of putting metadata tags in avi files the way you can with MP3 files. (somebody please inform me if that's not right). Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) could be the future for tagging video, but it seems only to be implemented for photos up to now. Apple's iTunes defines the defacto tagging standard for MP4 files...to play on an iPod.

A couple utilities you might want to look if you ever need to rename your video files: 1) ReNamer (http://www.redbrick.dcu.ie/~den4b/projects.php) and 2) DVdate (http://paul.glagla.free.fr/dvdate_en.htm). Both can read (some) metadata from an avi header to use in renaming files.

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tbobpage wrote on 9/11/2006, 2:28 PM
Douglas --- thanks for the reply -- it was helpful. I have PSE but just the very first version so I'll have to look and see if it tags video. I've started messing with picasa's latest version for pics but I can't see that it works with video either.

Media manager may just be the way to go. I probably won't really access the content for editing outside of vegas anyhow.

Anyone know of a compressed video format that vegas is happy to work with? I could just keep them as avi's I guess since discs are getting so cheap, but I'm looking at close to a terabyte of data that way....... I've had some problems with mpeg2 data (freeze ups, jumpy renders, etc) -- but that may just be my problems and not vegas's as well....

todd

todd