Veggie Toolkit potential improvements

CClub wrote on 2/27/2008, 2:08 PM
I just spoke with Randall Campbell, developer of Veggie Toolkit (www.peachrock.com). He's in the process of developing an upgrade. I asked him if -- after rendering batch conversions within the Capture Cutter tool -- Toolkit could give me the option of replacing the media referenced on the timeline with the new media. He really liked the idea. He's going to try to add a checkbox in the Capture Cutter window that would do this.

If you have large amounts of footage on your timeline, cut the footage down to smaller clips, and want to save only those portions when you're completed with the video project, this may help you as much as it will help me. I often have about 20 hours of original footage, I end up with an 8 minute video for a customer, and don't want to keep all that original footage on my hard drive. If you think this would help you also, shoot Randall an email at peachrock.com. He also said that if any Vegas users can come up with new ideas for tools that would integrate into Veggie Toolkit, send him an email on that also and it may be able to be added to the current upgrade he's working on.

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/27/2008, 7:47 PM
> If you have large amounts of footage on your timeline, cut the footage down to smaller clips, and want to save only those portions when you're completed with the video project, this may help you as much as it will help me.

How is this different from what Vegas already does when you choose Save As... and check Copy media with project and then use the Create trimmed copies of source media?

Not sure if you knew that Vegas does this already.

What we did with Ultimate S4 is add an Archive Nested Projects function which works exactly the same as “Save As/Trim Media in a normal Vegas project,” except that it looks at ALL veg files in a master/nested veg project, and trims media from all nested projects. This saves a tremendous amount of time, and assures consistency in saving files, and will assist in cleaning up disk space.

You just point the file to a directory where you’ve got enough room to save the entire project/trimmed media, and the files will be archived there. Veg files from nested projects may also be saved to a subfolder, so that each veg in the nested project has its own folder location, thereby making it easier to locate media from a specific nested veg file.

~jr
Laurence wrote on 2/27/2008, 8:03 PM
"Create trimmed copies of source media" is a wonderful function, but it only works with DV and Cineform codec files. Unfortunately, on a lot of projects, it really doesn't do much good.
biggles wrote on 2/28/2008, 3:12 AM
"...What we did with Ultimate S4..."

I can only see S3 on the VASST website - is a version 4 still under development?

Wayne

CClub wrote on 2/28/2008, 4:13 AM
As Lawrence stated, "Create Trimmed Copies of Source Media" isn't reliable.

I see "Archive Nested Projects" in Ultimate S3... does it trim the original copies and replace them on the Vegas timeline with the new clips? Thus I can delete the huge original files if I choose? Does this work with all formats of video files (specifically HDV and Cineform HDV avi files in my case)? If so, that'd be awesome to be able to downsize my source media when I'm done with a project.
Laurence wrote on 2/28/2008, 7:25 AM
It isn't that that "create trimmed copies of source media" isn't reliable, it's that it only works with some file formats.
rmack350 wrote on 2/28/2008, 11:13 AM
The Trim and save feature in Vegas is something I never used because it used to save all the audio as separate Wave64 files. I see that now it doesn't do that, and that all the Dv clips I saved are recapturable. So now it's a useful feature.

When did this change?

Rob Mack
JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/28/2008, 1:32 PM
> I can only see S3 on the VASST website - is a version 4 still under development?

That was definitely a finger check on my part. I meant to say Ultimate S3 (oops). ;-)

~jr
Jim H wrote on 2/28/2008, 7:47 PM
"What we did with Ultimate S4 is add an Archive Nested Projects function which works exactly the same as “Save As/Trim Media in a normal Vegas project,” except that it looks at ALL veg files in a master/nested veg project, and trims media from all nested projects. "

That's handy...I can remember when nested veg first showed up and I archived a project with nested vegs only to find later that I lost a tremendous amount of material.

Even though Vegas's trim function has never worked for me, I still use it to gather all the bits in one place... makes back up easier for me.

So does US3's trim feature work for all files even M2T?
CClub wrote on 2/29/2008, 4:07 AM
That's the $64K question. If Vegas' trim function doesn't work for HDV, does that mean that the US3 script based on this function also doesn't work with HDV. In addition, can you choose which format to back up those files? If I wanted to trim my original files which are in the Cineform avi format, which format would it trim them into?
JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/29/2008, 1:08 PM
> If Vegas' trim function doesn't work for HDV, does that mean that the US3 script based on this function also doesn't work with HDV.

That's correct. US3 uses the built-in Vegas function to archive the nested projects so it only supports the same functionality that Vegas supports.This means it does not trim HDV files.

The reason for creating the US3 function is this: If you archive a project in Vegas that has nested projects and you tell Vegas to copy the media, it does not copy the media from the nested project. It just copies the VEG file because to Vegas, the VEG file is the media that is in the current project.

This is not very useful if you are archiving to an external hard drive because having the VEG file without it's source media does you no good. The purpose of the US3 function is to allow you to copy ALL of the media from the nested projects to the same location. It then modifies the master archived project to point to the new copied VEG files with their copied media so that you can restore the whole project from your archive intact.

> In addition, can you choose which format to back up those files?

No, it uses the format of the original files.

> f I wanted to trim my original files which are in the Cineform avi format, which format would it trim them into?

It would trim them in Cineform format just like the original files (only trimmed).

~jr
CClub wrote on 2/29/2008, 8:49 PM
John,
Thanks for the reply and the email. I wish -- for this feature -- I was using DV, because this tool in US3 sounds very useful. What would be the best way to try to "encourage" Sony to get the trimming capability to work with HDV files?

Using HDV files, when I tried to Save As with the Copy Media with Project checked, it gives me two options: 1) Copy Source Media, or 2) Create trimmed copies of source media. With HDV for Option 2, all it does is copy the source media without trimming them (file copies are the EXACT size as originals). When I use the US3 Archive Nested Projects tool, it does the same thing.

When I do the same steps using DV footage using just the Save As with Copy Media with Project checked, and Create Trimmed Copies of Source Material, and then using the US3 tool, both seem to work.