Vegas Pro Extension Design

Gary James wrote on 10/2/2011, 2:56 PM

After writing a few Vegas scripts, I decided to try my hand at creating a Vegas Pro Extension. Extensions are like scripts except they stay resident and reside in a window that you can dock or float freely. Excalibur and Ultimate S are Vegas extensions.

Needles to say, public information on designing Vegas Extensions was almost impossible to find. After much searching, and asking dozens of questions I finally gathered enough information together to create my own extension. I've created a Vegas Utility program that I call "Timeline Tools", and have made it available for free for anyone to use. The utility makes working with Events, Envelopes, Points and Markers a snap.

I've also placed a .zip file on the following web site that contains a Microsoft Visual Studio 10 project for creating a Sony Vegas Extension. This should make it much easier for you programmers out there to write your own Vegas extensions. The project is written in C# for the v2.0 dotnet framework.

Visual Studio 2010 "Extension Project" example for Sony Vegas Pro

Gary James

Comments

amendegw wrote on 10/3/2011, 4:01 AM

Gary,

I downloaded and installed "Timeline Tools" and I'm impressed!! Looking forward to exploring its intricacies.

And thanks for the VS2010 template project. I'm just getting my feet wet in writing .net stuff for Vegas, so stuff like this really helps.

...Jerry

amendegw wrote on 10/3/2011, 6:40 AM

Gary (or anyone else who has the knowledge and ambition),

There's a real opportunity identified over in the Vegas Pro Forum: Media Manager Substitute

Sounds to me like something that would fit nicely as a "Vegas Pro Extension"

...Jerry

Gary James wrote on 10/3/2011, 10:53 AM

Guys, I tried to check my web site this morning and it appears to be down. This does not look good. I tried to call the support number for my web host, and got a recording that the number has been disconnected.

If I don't hear back from them by tomorrow, I'm going to look for a new web hosting service and move my web site over.

I have placed a new version of the program up at a temporary location:

https://skydrive.live.com/?cid=31E8FBE8628B7659&id=31E8FBE8628B7659%21338&sc=documents#

This is version v1.0.14. Sorry for the problems this may have caused.

Gary James

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Web site Update:

My web site is back up and running. My web host had a server failure and it took several hours to get everything restored an running again. .

JohnnyB wrote on 10/27/2011, 6:35 AM

Gary, thanks very much for this, and I'll have a gander at your utility.

Like you, I found the public samples and docs rather feeble, nothing at all to do with generating a "professional" application - unnecessarily so. Talk about reinventing wheels.

I've been plotting publishing a sensible generic Vegas handler which includes loading a UserControl (whatever the developer wants in there), plus all the necessary event handlers for resizing, opening, closing etc. I've had to do this for the extension we're developing.

For those who need data persistence in their extension, there's also a gotcha in using this kind of plugin/extension dll method when using object serialisation (which we'd planned to have as a quick-and-dirty DAL). Basically, although the dll has the object definitions in it, the deserialization doesn't know about that, and you need to then register the dll in the GAC if deserialization is to work. We've now chosen a database persistence instead.

I've found the constraint on .net2 annoying at times, I don't know whether/if we'll ever get up from that.