Script Access to groups, once more - please!

dust wrote on 4/23/2004, 8:50 AM
I know I ask for this for the 3rd or 4th time since the past days, but I didn^t get any reply on this...

Do we now have access to grouping from scripts??

If not - will we ever have this possibility??

I don't even have a statement from Sony why the wish for access to grouping, which is over an year old and not only wished by myself, keeps on being ignored. This begins to become frustrating (begins? After over an year? Hell, ain't I patient... :-)

Don't get me wrong, I think V5 has some great features, I love the layout savings and the track nestings, but please PLEASE don't neglect scripting - this is THE point where Vegas REALLY differs from other NLEs. And honestly - is adding access to grouping that complicated? Grouping isn't even a hierarchical thing, groups are just flat, so this could being implemented as a single integer (group index) that can be read and set in an event. This just can't be so difficult! I start to get the impression it is a marketing policy NOT to allow people having too much flexibility in scripts - this just doesn't seem to make sense to me. Are you trying to prevent people to add features that you'd like to implement yourself in future versions?

Comments

SonyPJM wrote on 4/23/2004, 10:13 AM
There is still no grouping support in the scripting API. It is still
on my list of things to do. I understand it is at or near the top of
several script developers' wish list. I am not trying to sabotage
you. Grouping can be (and has been) more difficult than it may seem.
sturm wrote on 4/23/2004, 10:19 AM
dust, how about the solution in proxyEvents and sortEvents. (wasn't it you who wrote them under the name klaymen?).
It was only a bit too complicated for me to understand, but seemed to work fine.
dust wrote on 4/23/2004, 12:51 PM
Yes, that was me (klaymen), and it basically worked by sending keystrokes like "G" etc back to Vegas and re-initiate the script. The problem was that it did not work reliably; Vegas sometimes ignored some of the keystrokes the script tried to send back to it, probably these stored keystrokes drop out of the queue under certain conditions. It just wasn't stable enough for everyday usage.

The best approach I found so far was a pure heuristical approach - just to find audio events that refer to the same mediafile as a given video event (or vice versa). Basically works for my needs, but of course not for people that take video and audio out of different files. The only real solution would be direct access to grouping. At least a reading access would be of great help, in case writing access should be the problem. Or an event method returning true or false with a second event as argument ("true" meaning they belong to the same group).

@SonyPJM:
Sorry if I sounded upset (which I was - at least a bit :-), but now that I know there is some technical problem that will eventually find a solution, that's at least good to know. Thanks for the info!

@SonyPJM:
Please also have a look at my other thread, concerning naming media in mediabins. I noted they can now be renamed (they couldn't in V4), and I also noticed this can be (ab)used to change the order in which media files appear in a bin. Some people ask for storyboards, and such a feature could do the job. Thanks.