Hi,
I've not long been using Movie Studio 13 but after putting together my first twenty or so projects I found I wanted an overview showing me, for example, which projects were using a particular clip or piece of music. I googled for all I was worth but found nothing even close so like all good coders I wrote my own.
What I have at the moment is an application that will recursively scan one or more directories for Vegas Movie Studio project files (*.vf) and build a list of media used in them. It will also scan one or more directories for media files and build a list of files found.
By comparing the list of found media against the list of used media it can, for example, display
* a list of unused media
* projects with media that are missing
* media that is used by multiple projects
* etc, etc.
At the moment it generates a very simple HTML report but I plan on improving that as even with just 20 projects the report is very long.
What I'd like to know is if anyone else would be interested in this software? The application will be free and I'll open source it once I'm fairly happy with the shape of the code. If people are genuinely interested in using something like this I'll put in the effort to tidy up the code and add a user friendly front end.
If you would like to test out what I have you are more than welcome but you'll need to understand this: the project is currently packaged as a runnable jar file (Java 8 JVM needed) and takes a small number of command line parameters which you'll probably want to supply using a batch file.
Before anyone asks... At the moment this application can't read Vegas Pro (*.pro) files. I don't have any Vegas Pro files to test against so I've excluded them from the project scan. My guess is that Vegas Movie Studio and Vegas Pro probably use a broadly similar file format internally and so the application could probably be extended to read Pro files.
Before anyone asks 2... The project (*.vf) file format is binary and undocumented which means I'm seriously limited to what I can read from it. The basic chunk structure is easy enough to figure out but the majority of the data held in a chunk is unintelligible to me. I'm able to determine what media a project is using because it's contained in a fairly simple chunk but even that chunk has parts I don't (yet) understand. I've been able to extract some other meta-data and I could report on generated media (e.g. titles) but nothing very useful. It's highly unlikely I'll ever fully understand the contents of the file.
I've not long been using Movie Studio 13 but after putting together my first twenty or so projects I found I wanted an overview showing me, for example, which projects were using a particular clip or piece of music. I googled for all I was worth but found nothing even close so like all good coders I wrote my own.
What I have at the moment is an application that will recursively scan one or more directories for Vegas Movie Studio project files (*.vf) and build a list of media used in them. It will also scan one or more directories for media files and build a list of files found.
By comparing the list of found media against the list of used media it can, for example, display
* a list of unused media
* projects with media that are missing
* media that is used by multiple projects
* etc, etc.
At the moment it generates a very simple HTML report but I plan on improving that as even with just 20 projects the report is very long.
What I'd like to know is if anyone else would be interested in this software? The application will be free and I'll open source it once I'm fairly happy with the shape of the code. If people are genuinely interested in using something like this I'll put in the effort to tidy up the code and add a user friendly front end.
If you would like to test out what I have you are more than welcome but you'll need to understand this: the project is currently packaged as a runnable jar file (Java 8 JVM needed) and takes a small number of command line parameters which you'll probably want to supply using a batch file.
Before anyone asks... At the moment this application can't read Vegas Pro (*.pro) files. I don't have any Vegas Pro files to test against so I've excluded them from the project scan. My guess is that Vegas Movie Studio and Vegas Pro probably use a broadly similar file format internally and so the application could probably be extended to read Pro files.
Before anyone asks 2... The project (*.vf) file format is binary and undocumented which means I'm seriously limited to what I can read from it. The basic chunk structure is easy enough to figure out but the majority of the data held in a chunk is unintelligible to me. I'm able to determine what media a project is using because it's contained in a fairly simple chunk but even that chunk has parts I don't (yet) understand. I've been able to extract some other meta-data and I could report on generated media (e.g. titles) but nothing very useful. It's highly unlikely I'll ever fully understand the contents of the file.