Sorry... No Vegas Tools anytime soon

jrsunshine wrote on 2/5/2004, 7:38 PM

I am a little angry and bummed out but....

My apologies to the Vegas Video faithful. I hoped the Sony experts would show some support by answering my questions about the COM interface in Vegas. The forums do fall under the area of support... don't they? Anyway, I am guessing the message I am supposed to get is to just forget it.

So, because I am unable to get anyone from Sony to answer my postings about the COM interface...

I "will not" be building the following utilities:

1. Media Manager -
A robust project oriented media manager which can interact with Vegas.

2. Storyboard builder -
A fully interactive storyboard tool which can interact with Vegas timeline.

3. A visual script builder -
Makes it easy for the non-programmers to build scripts.

4. The ultimate batch render tool -
Uses a visual interface to build batch processes. Including the ability to do pre and post processing.

5. The Vegas Film Lab -
The ultimate film-look processing utility. Uses mini versions of the storyboard tool and the batch render tool to make for a great film-look processor. Also, provides a "looks" library.

So again, my apologies to you all for announcing earlier that I wanted to develop some nifty tools for Vegas. I will be unable to do so unless I get a response from the Sony guys.

Regards,
Roy

Comments

johnmeyer wrote on 2/5/2004, 7:50 PM

Doesn't bode well for the future of this product line. The difference between the "big boys" and the "also rans" in any software category is largely measured in third party tool support. Look at the plugins for Photoshop, Premiere, Word, Excel, etc. compared to the Sony products. The really sad part is that it doesn't take much time or money. All that is needed is a published API, and then one person part time -- eventually full-time -- to answer developer's questions.

roger_74 wrote on 2/6/2004, 2:05 AM

Sony generally does answer questions in the scripting forum, unless they're in crunch mode on some new software...

Even if you did use the COM interface you still wouldn't be able to change FX settings and so on, so I don't see how it would help you in the long run.

I don't think Vegas has a suitable architecture right now to support some of the features you planned (having the Vegas interface active while your program is doing it's thing).

jrsunshine wrote on 2/6/2004, 5:49 AM

Thanks for the response guys.

BTW:
I have been able to create compiled .NET WIndowsForm apps that can run along side Vegas still allowing you to interact with Vegas. My current road block is simply getting regas to render. The same setting for "type" on the render function in the Script Host does not work for the Render function in the COM library.

The most fruystrating thing is the hard line against developers using the COM Interop library. The COM interop library seems to be very stable and is mostly clear in its implementation. I am sure if they would just document it we could use it without much trouble.

Does anyone else have any example attempts at using the COM interop library? The script library is a nice tool for automating Vegas, but for me it just does not fill my needs.

I guess there are other ways to skin this one which I may explore, but again they are not what I would call clean solutions. I would just rather the SOny folks provide some assistance on using the COM INterop library or..... give us a managed code library to interact with Vegas (other than the scripting library which I have already stated does not meet my needs).

Thanks,
Roy

doctorfish wrote on 2/6/2004, 4:18 PM

Have you tried actually contacting Sony directly through email or even calling them. They do often respond in the forums but the forums are not their official means of customer support and often many seemingly important things go unanswered here. Try contacting them directly and see what happens.

I've begun to dabble some in scripting but it's slow going for me and I would be quite interested in your list of applications if you do get them developed.

Dave

SonyPJM wrote on 4/12/2004, 9:26 AM

When Vegas 5 comes out, you will probably find that code you've
written to use the COM interface directly will be broken (in ways
beyond the simple namespace change that scripts will require).