Working in Batches

Princeospace wrote on 10/29/2004, 10:28 AM
I'm new to Vegas and have not been able to find any information about this in the manual, so I thought I'd try here.

I'm currently working on a long project, editing about 5 hours of material into a 1-hour form. I don't want this to be a series of titles on the finished DVD -- in otherword to play through smoothly from start to finish without jumping back to the main menu. But I'd like to be able to edit in sections, working scene by scene rather than having to manipulate and fine-tune an hour-long timeline with multiple tracks. In addition, there are about 350 individual raw clips, which makes working with the Media Bin really difficult.

Surely there must be some way of organizing the raw footage into subfolders, assembling individual scenes, and them assembling them into a final master timeline? Thanks in advance.

Comments

ChristerTX wrote on 10/29/2004, 10:44 AM
I use Ulead DVD authoring software and you can tell the program to exclude a menu and the clips I add to the disc will then play sequentially from one to the other.
I'm sure that DVD architect can do the same but I have not tried it.
Even if you want a menue to start from, you should be able to tell the program to play the files in sequence without jumping to the menu.

That way you can ccreate several MPEG files that will play in secuence. No need to create one giant file as far as I understand.

Steve Grisetti wrote on 10/29/2004, 11:30 AM
Actually, I'd recommend working on a scene at a time and then using Make Movie to produce DV-AVIs -- which you can eventually assemble into your master edit.

It will use more hard disk space, of course, but, man, if you're dealing with 5 hours of raw video, hard drive space must not be an issue!
Princeospace wrote on 10/29/2004, 1:42 PM
I realize that the raw footage starts out as AVIs, but will saving the various editted sequences as AVIs add a layer of digital compression when the whole shebang is rendered to MPEG? (Thus far I have been saving my editted projects as MPEGS.) Thanks in advance.
IanG wrote on 10/30/2004, 2:43 AM
Unless you're using a very poor lossy codec you're not likely to see any problems. Bottom line with all these quality related questions is you should try it for yourself and see if you can tell the difference - your equipment and / or eyesight might be better than mine!

Ian G.
gogiants wrote on 10/31/2004, 1:36 PM
For what it's worth, if you're editing captured .avi files, then rendering your edits to .avi files, there will be no "extra" compression. In fact, you'll notice that in unedited parts of your .avi, it is just a frame by frame copy to the target file. You will want to make sure to create .avi's before rendering to MPEG-2 for your DVD. Editing the MPEG-2 files won't work very well, and will result in some loss of quality.

As for your original question, for large projects I pretty much ignore the media pool and just use the explorer view in Movie Studio. (It's the far right tab in the same section of the window as the Media Pool; you might need to scroll right to see it.)

I like doing things this way because you can preview the clips, rename them, and create subfolders to keep things organized. Much easier to manage lots of clips this way rather than in the media pool.