Project backup strategies and saving loop region

Evelyn wrote on 3/9/2002, 8:30 PM

Hello Vegas Evangelists,
I am fairly new to Vegas and have not yet installed the update 3.0a as I am
in the middle of several projects, each over an hour long. I am having great success
with Vegas 3 and and win2k and my 3 chip Sony camera and Canopus (which I hope will still work
after the update...)
I am wondering how people are dealing with backups of capture files and projects when one works
on several two hour long projects at a time and there may be a fairly long delay between each project edit version. (time for clients to review, etc.)

What I did on the first few projects was to print the current edit back to NTSC DV back to tape, clean off drives and then recapture the video for next edit
from the edited tape (which might be weeks later). This has worked pretty well so far and resolution looks very good, but I just
realized that I have been using the DV templet with the rendering set to "good" when
"best" is also available.

I did a test file and it turns out? that the "best" setting
actually produces a smaller file, in one case 7,388,214KB for "good" and 7,383,385KB for best? this is just opposite of what I would expect..

I am wondering what this means in terms of compression and if I am losing much resolution using the "good" setting and recapturing again from the edited footage

(then I start another project and need the diskspace -- I have 120 GIG (2 x 60 RAID) and 60 gig on my system drive and yes, I should probably have another drive just for backup, but....$$$)

I suppose I can save the project and trim it to keep the footage on the drives but sometimes I need to get the project off the computer entirely to make room.

Anyone else doing this and not backing up to another disk but to tape like this?
Most of my footage so far is not much movement, mostly seminar and technical presentations and edits are mostly short dissolves or straight cuts so that might have something to do with the compression sizes?

Also I am wondering why the loop region setting (the long grey bar on top of timeline) is not saved in the file on 3.0 but goes back to 0 and is that fixed on the update?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts on this.
Evelyn

Comments

Control_Z wrote on 3/10/2002, 10:16 AM

Dunno about the loop question.

You're doing what you must and I wouldn't worry about it unless you find yourself writing/recapturing more than a few times. Depending on your deck and tape quality you'll see no loss until after pass 5 or so and then it'll as likely fail completely.

If you do a lot of this type of stuff you should invest in removable drives. External firewire is nice (~$80 USD); cheaper is eide trays (~$10).

wvg wrote on 3/10/2002, 10:20 PM

I'm a world class nitpicker. Right now I'm been working on the same major project for a few weeks, now on version 76. That's no typo. No space problems. Remember Vegas Video is none destructive... just don't lose the SOURCE files or the lastest project file. The project files for all those versions comprise only a small amount of space on one of my hard drives. If worse comes to worse, for example version aa-12 gets corrupt, I can always fall back to version aa-11, not a major lost of my efforts. You do NOT and probably should not be making interim renders. No point really. Oh by the way I've got about a dozen other projects all in various stages of completion. So just don't lose any source file or make any change to it outside of Vegas Video.

Evelyn wrote on 3/11/2002, 11:22 AM

Thanks Control_Z and wvg for your comments.
I considered mobile racks for the RAID drives but they are not recommended
by the manufacturer unless they are a certain kind, and had some bad experiences
(knocking capacitors off the motherboard)
with mobile racks before. Firewire, well that is an idea but will it conflict with
my Canopus firewire...I have all IDEs filled (booting to different drives through bios) plus the RAID drives for storage.
Well, point well taken wvg that maybe I should just try to store the captured files
and projects and not take original capture off machine as rendered until project is completed.

I have since found another anomaly which might resolve itself with the update.
If I set the render DV NTSC to "best" (uncompressed) and save it, I cannot go back to "good" setting, it doesn't take even if I select it in a new project and save it.
The best setting takes longer to render too so I would like to go back. I guess I will get new templets when I upgrade to 3.0a. (hesitating to rely on the old projects opening perfectly in 3.0a - have been software developer myself and know that things don't always stay the same when old projects are loaded into upgrades...)

Also the loop region setting seems to get saved in project when there are no markers along the timeline, in one case it was correct, in another project it was haphazard, so one must always reset the loop region for rendering. This seems to be a bug, probably should report it to tech support unless they are reading this forum.

Thanks again,
Evelyn