other wish for 5.0: Nested grouping

dust wrote on 11/27/2003, 1:54 AM
Sorry for having so many wishes, but Christmas is approaching *g*

Anyway, due to the fact that video and audio events of one media file are not intrinsically linked to each other, but mutually independent (a concept that I personally favour as well), such events should nearly always be grouped together. Consequently, the GUI actually does so automatically. But it makes a lot of sense to group events for other purposes as well (like "freezing" certain event compositions for later moving around).

Unfortunately, if you group groups together, the interior group structure is lost and the group consists of the events the original groups consisted of, in a flat way. So, if you group together several clips you originally moved to the timeline (each consisting of one video and one audio event, actually seperate groups of "twin-events") , and later on "ungroup" this group again, you loose the original video-to-audio-event-binding, as you don't get back the original groups, but the separate events on the timeline.

The most consequent approach out of this problem would be to actually implement nested grouping (hierarchy instead of a flat structure). Of course this might be a complex extension (prevention of loops etc).

Another solution, less elegant but also useful, would be to memorize the original video-to-audio-event-linkage (the "twins") separatly, resulting in an additional internal data structure that is not directly accessible/modifiable by the user (unless maybe in scripts). Events only become "twins" if they are created together out of the same mediapool/explorer element (pointing to a file on disk), or if they are created by copying other twins. The user could use this twin-structures in several ways:
- projectwise grouping together of all twins of an event
- synchronize twins (movethem to same timecode and/or adjust lengths)
- re-create missing twins (=mediastreams of teh corresponding file), for example after removal of just the audio part
Of course using Takes somehow interferes with the concept. Either the linkage I mentioned should refer only to one take, and the active take of an event decides about the events binding, or - what I would do - stick the twin-property to the event itself. If you later on add several takes, the original linkage of the event remains unaffected, and it is the responsibility of the user not to mess with it.

Whatever mechanism is used, I would welcome it... and of course I'd also wish access to these structures (nested grouping, media file linkage) from within scripts.

Thanks, dust

Comments

PDB wrote on 11/27/2003, 2:28 AM
Dust,

I urge you to check out excalibur: it has (the most valuable feature IMO) among other functions, the ability to pick up original audio in sync with the event even if you have deleted it altogether. Having this feature makes life actually easier: I now only work with vid on the timeline and the rescue needed audio later...At 48$ odd it makes a nice xmas present :)

Now where is the link...(try this one: http://www.creativecow.net/index.php?forumid=24)

Cheers
Paul.
dust wrote on 11/27/2003, 4:31 AM
Thanks Paul,

I'm aware of this an dactually wrote a script doing precisely this myself (you can download it from http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/help/kb/kb_files.asp - search for author "klaymen", script then is "Reconstruct audio parts" - creates audio parts belonging to events and puts them on an additional track). Does about the same as in Excalibur, plus it's free :-) I couldn't live without it, still I think a better direct support from Vegas for the next release would be a good idea!
dust
rmack350 wrote on 11/27/2003, 6:48 PM
Dust,

You're absolutely right about grouping. Vegas' way of handling it is pretty primitive.

I used to use CorelDraw a lot (up to 7.0) and liked it's ability to group and combine. Not that this was unique to CorelDraw by any means.

What Vegas should do, IMHO, is have a "Group manager" tool to help manage the members of a group, have status bar messages to say that the selected item is a group (like "Group of two items"), and , of course, allow groups within groups.

And maybe, just maybe, a toggle in the group manager tool to lock and pre-render that group in the background. Same as nested timelines ought to do.

Rob Mack
Spot|DSE wrote on 11/27/2003, 7:30 PM
My input on this would be that a series of events linked to a group would have a horizontal stripe of some color along the bottom of the thumbnail, stretching across at least the bottom 1/8th of the thumbnails of every file in that group. It would appear like an overlay on the thumbnail in the workspace, but of course wouldn't show up in the preview window.
Subgroups would be nice, but it's difficult to have a single file be part of multiple groups. But multiple groups as a whole would be wonderful.
So, you'd have say....Red Group, Blue Group, Green Group, Purple Group, etc. this would be similar to Audio Busses that already exist, except that a bus is track dependent. Of course, there would be no envelope either.
But if I had up to 8 separated groups, i'd be really happy. 26 (number of letters in the alphabet) would be heaven.
Nat wrote on 11/27/2003, 10:22 PM
I think nested clips like in fcp and premiere would make things much easier...
rmack350 wrote on 11/27/2003, 11:57 PM
How about just putting the mark on all members. Say you select an event and then all the other items also in the group get a mark while a member event is selected. when the item is deselected the mark goes away (but you can still see a list of groups in the group manager view of Edit Details)

Personally, I don't see why there needs to be such a low limit to the number of groups. Just the number of visual cues. At a basic and most useful level, CorelDraw just had a text message in the status bar that told you the item was a member of a group. I believe there was also a group manager window which vegas (future rev) could also do.

As far as events being members of more than one group? Why not? Sure there could be practical reasons in some situations. But for a media file (A+V) dropped on the timeline I see no reason that those two streams couldn't be grouped and then for that group of two to be members of a larger group. That's groups within groups. And then if you ungroup the larger group then the subgroups stay intact.

The thing about subgrouping is that it's hierarchical:

Items "1" and "2" can be members of
set "a", which, along with set "b", is a member of
set "A", which, along with set "B", is a member of
set "I", etc...

But, yes, you're right;

Item "1" cannot be a member of
Sets "a" and "b"

To me that just makes sense-and it's not "nested" grouping.

...back to the color marks. You could assign colors in the group manager but always have a color reserved for everything linked to the current event. It sounds similar to number keys matching the first ten marks on the timeline.

Rob Mack
rmack350 wrote on 11/28/2003, 12:07 AM
Nat,

I just want to point out that nested clips and nested groups aren't really the same thing. That's why I'd rather call the grouping something else like hierarchical grouping or subgrouping or something. If the feature were actually implemented it ought to just be called "grouping" because the feature is so "duh" basic that it doesn't deserve a special name.

The main point of subgroups is that you can put them into a group and then if you destroy that grouping the items will still be in their subgroups. Where this is most needed is in the way Vegas handles audio and video streams from the same media file. Vegas treats them as a group but if you add them to another group then the relation of those two streams becomes the same as between any element in the group. If you destroy the grouping then the AV streams come ungrouped. That's just not right.

By nested clips I think you're talking about something more like nested timelines. Something that you can drag onto your project or open from the project. It's not a great leap from subclips to nested timelines-but they arent the same.

Rob
Nat wrote on 11/28/2003, 10:53 AM
I agree, what I mostly mean if that if nested timelines were implemented, I wouldn't rely on grouping that much.
I also agree that nested timelines must be hard to implement, but since Vegas has strong compositing features it would help in many ways. The ability to drag an event in the mediapool would be great also.
rmack350 wrote on 11/28/2003, 10:18 PM
I think people could find a use for both. Nested timelines might imply things like:

--selecting a range in your project and exporting it as a timeline
--including that timeline (or any other) as an event in the existing timeline
--having timelines appear as items in the media pool (which also implies having ranges from a clip appear as a media pool item)

While all this sounds great I think there are probably some reasonable limitations to it that some may find dissappointing. For instance, what if you try to nest a 320x200x1.0par x 12 fps timeline into a DV project? Does playback start to suck? Other software can do nested timelines precisely because they make it hard to mix and match media types. Nesting in vegas may not provide a very nice experience.

Rob Mack