Workflow help - PA or Ultimate S

john_r wrote on 5/5/2009, 10:48 AM
We currently use Vegas 8 and Ultimate S 3. One of the more tedious projects we do is dance competitions and dance recitals. Currently we manually edit these. The recitals are cut by dance number and a logo and title are added to each. For the competitions, we do even less, just cut by dance number and line up the judges commentaries. When dealing with hundreds of numbers in competitions, this can get very tedious and time consuming. We've just started to look at creating our own scripts or using stuff already out there. It sounds like Production Assistant may help. Anyone doing work like this that can offer help or suggestions?

John R

Comments

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/5/2009, 2:13 PM
I can tell you what we demoed at NAB:

We showed a workflow for skydiving videos. These are "same-day" events where someone is doing their first jump, it gets videoed before and on the way down, and when they land they go home with a DVD of the experience.

The workflow is (1) Take memory card out of the camera, (2) Insert it into the PC. That's it! We have a macro that is waiting for the card to be inserted, then it copies the videos from the card onto the hard drive, invokes Production Assistant and selects a template and adds the files to the queue and presses OK. Production Assistant then fires up Vegas Pro, loads the template, replaces the media slugs in the template with the real video and when it's done, you have a complete project with intro, music, etc. all ready to go. All we do is change the name on the title to the name of the client and then render.

It sounds like your dance work is not too far off from that workflow and could benefit from Production Assistant. I would download the 30-day trial on Monday May 11th and check it out.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of the authors of Production Assistant. Feel free to wait until others have seen it to give their reviews. ;-)

In the mean time you can read Jan Ozer's review from NAB: Something new under the sun - Vegas Pro Production Assistant.

~jr
john_r wrote on 5/5/2009, 2:31 PM
Thanks jr.

It seems that the main difference in the skydiving videos and ours, is that ours is one long video stream (for competitions we firewire directly to the computer), and yours is one or more videos that get plugged into a SDE type of project.

Based on your expertise on PA, could you provide a workflow idea, as to how we would automate our process using PA? Currently, we input, thru firewire, one long segment onto the timeline. Once on the timeline, we cut and apply start and end fades. Could we use timeline markers as triggers to PA to automate the process of cut and fade and send to render?

John R
JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/6/2009, 1:27 PM
> Currently, we input, thru firewire, one long segment onto the timeline. Once on the timeline, we cut and apply start and end fades. Could we use timeline markers as triggers to PA to automate the process of cut and fade and send to render?

Actually what you are describing fits the Ultimate S Pro workflow better because you can create named regions around the sections you want, then Ultimate S Pro can cut the regions, apply the fade in and out, and render the regions using the region name as the filename.

You might want to download the trial of both PA and US Pro and see which workflow works best for you.

~jr
dand9959 wrote on 5/7/2009, 9:01 AM
JR, I have a question about PA that might be obvious...

Does PA automatically adjust for video clips of differing lengths inserted into the same slug slots? If so, is the "auto ripple mode" active over all tracks, or affected tracks only? Regions? Markers? etc?

JohnnyRoy wrote on 5/7/2009, 2:47 PM
PA currently assumes that you have a weekly or daily format that doesn't change and therefore assumes that the slugs represent the program length that is needed. If you feed it a file that is longer than the slug it will not extend the slug. If you feed it a file that is shorter than the slug it will shorten the slug leaving a gap to indicate that something is wrong and you need longer media. It does not automatically ripple but it does have a 'Close Gap' tool that will ripple and works at the track level.

So you could make the slugs longer than you need and then after the media slugs have been replaced, you can highlight the tracks with gaps and press the Close Gap tool and have everything ripple closed with one click. This is part of the skydiving workflow that we showed at NAB.

~jr