What Vegas gives us is just fine.
My problem is I can end up doing several projects for the one client using common media and common intermediate files.
If you simply used the Vegas method you'd end up with multiple copies of the same media. You could merge them into one folder and then let Vegas find them again I suppose.
I don't really have a magic solution to the problem, what I'm using seems to work OK for me but if anyone's got any better ideas, I'm all ears. Perhaps I should document what I'm doing as I go, maybe a flowchart except it'd end up looking like a maze that down the track I'd never follow.
Other issue is stock footage, logos, stock music etc. I try to keep all that in one place and just reference it as needed. That works upto a point, until I decide to re-organise or move that stock footage around and then 6 months later I open an old project and where the heck is that piece of media gone.

Bob.

but if anyone's got any better ideas, I'm all ears.

Bob, not a better idea - just a dream...

A basic concept of software engineering is the Mediator pattern. The Mediator promotes loose coupling by keeping objects from referring to each other explicitly, and it lets you vary their interaction independently.

In Vegas, Media Manager is a potential mediator that with futher development would solve your problem in a very elegant manner.

If Media Manager were a mediator, Vegas would obtain all media from MM. MM, in return, would maintain references to the actual media and its current location. This means that media could be moved without impact on the veg. It also means that many vegs could use a single instance of a clip, without concern for whether it gets relocated.

This would require that if you moved media, you would move it using MM. The benefit would be that Vegas would always look to MM for the media, and MM would resolve the location.

MM should also be able to manage the archival of media. If Vegas requests media that is offline, MM should inform the user through a message to Vegas that they need to insert archive disk 018, for example.

Well, it is a nice dream. I submitted my dream to SCS a while back. For now, I think your current appoach is a reasonable work around.

Jerry

I see your point - have the same situation here - exactly.

Thanks for sharing I'll try it out next time.

/Ulf

Jerry,

You've just described how an Avid works, from Media Composer on up.

PITA for those who are not used to it, totally beloved by those who are (because it saves many mistakes).

"In Vegas, Media Manager is a potential mediator that with futher development would solve your problem in a very elegant manner."

We share the same dream.

Bob.

One axiom I keep coming back to is "all systems fall apart".

I think that the best way to organize is probably to just use a good folder structure and maybe a short document explaining how things are expected to be organized (also allowing for people to do their messy things within the sandbox of those folders)

Setting that aside and looking at a monolithic media management system, what would be on the list of requirements? Would it have some sort of versioning features like Subversion or CVS? Should it be designed to look like Windows Explorer (very familiar). Should it track bins and make them available to all your projects? Shouldit be a standalone tool?

I think you could come up with a lot of requirements and features. For Vegas, I think it'd need to stay pretty modest but with a potential to be built out. You'd probably want to fold all the functions of the Media Manager, Vegas Explorer, and Project Media windows into just one tool. The biggest potential I see is to create a tool to manage a project with many veg files in it.

I don't see this explicitly dealing with Bob's initial concern (lots of miscellaneous renders for a project).

Rob

Basically the same idea as a trash can, but maybe not as tempting to empty every few minutes.

Rob

The difficulty with any system is that the user must be systematic. My dream is like the old days where an editing trainee/intern/assistant had to keep track of film clips. Film forces one to have a written and labelled system, but with digital it is so easy to copy clips, retain exploratory edits, render test compilations, assemble nested vegs, that I finish a project with a lot of duplicated material. This wouldn't matter if I kept good written records, but I assume I'll remember what I've done and the cryptic file names will be sufficient prompt if I forget. Not so! Am I getting old? So I finish with a lot of material that I'm not sure is safe to delete, so I tend to leave it on the disk because I don't want to spend the time sorting it out. Is this where this thread started? Although I see that farss is more organised than I.