Re-linking projects dead-end?

Douglass-Ray wrote on 10/25/2024, 12:02 PM

To date, I have made nearly 70 trips to 40 countries to shoot videos for my website.  I use several 64GB HDSC cards per trip.  The model of Panasonic cameras I’ve used for years – and which is the only camera that’s suitable for the mobility+quality that I require – start renumbering the clips with every new card.   (Other cameras that I’ve tried number continuously instead – but they otherwise don’t work for me.)

And that spells disaster when I need to reestablish lost links between a past (or current) Vegas project and the its media source.  If the VEG project calls for the “00706” clip, it will automatically find 50+ clips with that number.   I have about 150,000 clips on several large drives, from which Vegas typically would search for about 400 clips to link a single documentary.  

If I could direct Vegas to a dedicated project folder to reestablish the links, that would be easy.  But Vegas requires that I point it to a drive.  My solution has been to create multiple partitions on multiple GPT drives, and load all the media associated with a particular project onto a dedicated project partition. 

Now I’ve reached the 26 maximum drive letters -- only my most important completed projects reside in the partitions.  The next step would be to link the new partition to a directory on my system, rather than to letter.  But it looks like Vegas won’t search in a directory, and only in a lettered drive.

Am I right?  And IS there any way to direct the Vegas’ search for the media to a folder rather than a drive? – if so, my searching has never found it.

Thanks for any ideas.

 

Vegas 19, updated 7-5-24; Build 651

Windows 10 Pro

CPU:  Intel i7-7700K CPU @ 4.20 GHz

RAM:  32 GB

Motherboard:   MAXIMUS IX HERO;  BaseBoard Version: Rev 1.xx

Graphics Card: - Radeon RX580 8 GB 2048 SP

Sound:  VA2246 Series-0 (NVIDIA)

Comments

Douglass-Ray wrote on 10/25/2024, 12:06 PM

No, HDSC is not new card designation -- I meant SDHC.

3POINT wrote on 10/25/2024, 1:31 PM

To date, I have made nearly 70 trips to 40 countries to shoot videos for my website.  I use several 64GB HDSC cards per trip.  The model of Panasonic cameras I’ve used for years – and which is the only camera that’s suitable for the mobility+quality that I require – start renumbering the clips with every new card.   (Other cameras that I’ve tried number continuously instead – but they otherwise don’t work for me.)

And that spells disaster when I need to reestablish lost links between a past (or current) Vegas project and the its media source.  If the VEG project calls for the “00706” clip, it will automatically find 50+ clips with that number.   I have about 150,000 clips...

I always rename my recordings to date(recorded)-number with a tooĺ that reads the record date, before using them in Vegasprojects, so I always have unique clips.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 10/25/2024, 2:13 PM

Among the cameras I use for multicam, my only possible clip-numbering conflict is with some aging jvc ptz cameras whose functionality is somewhat unique. I generally avoid the jvc conflict by creating a unique subfolder for each camera that's in each multicam project's folder. That avoids conflicts within a project. But there is an issue if I want to create a Vegas media-swap folder which requires all of a project's media to be in a single sub-folder... in that case I found that I need to append an extra digit to clip-names from one of the jvc cameras if I used 2 of them in the same shoot. There are a number of group renaming utilities out there but the one I use is the PowerRename utility found in Microsoft PowerToys.

Douglass-Ray wrote on 10/25/2024, 6:17 PM

(Not sure this got posted – Just in case, I’ve revised it and I'm posting it here)

Thank you for your quick responses. The batch name-change idea is good, but for the 25,000 clips in my published projects, it would require replacing all of these by hand in the projects' VEGs with the newly-named clips. And, for reasons too complicated to explain here, name changing won't fix my problem on projects moving forward.

The fact that Windows and Vegas don’t behave in the peculiar way I’d like them to brought me to the obvious work-around:

I can take all the media associated with a project (e.g., 500 clips, 10GB), and put it in a dedicated folder on a drive NOT permanently connected to the computer.  If I always leave one drive letter on the PC available, and leave a 10+ GB partition empty, when I need to reconnect links, I can dump the project media there and re-link them to the project.  Then I can accomplish what I need – make corrections to the VEG (for republishing);  revise/expand/reduce the project;  choose clips for use in another project, etc.  After rendering to an MP4, I can return the media to the external drive, and disconnect.

Thanks for all your efforts to help me solve this – I should have thought of the obvious first.