What is the best way to merge many projects finally to one?

[dr.onestone]

Starting situation: Many MPEG video sequences, which have to be edited to a single DVD video.

1.) I want to prepare a workflow as follows: About 5 students are independantly editing on separate PCs one piece of the entire video. At the end all of these different projects have to be merged to a total project. Can anybody give me a hint, how this workflow can be best performed? Of course, Project Properties and Preferences must be set unique at all PCs.

2.) A similar question occurs for a single user processing a large video. To speed up the processing time during the edit step it seems to be favorable to cut down the entire video into small pieces (projects). But how can I merge all these projects?

Of course you can create and save each of these different projects and feed them again in a final project to the timeline. But I think with this procedure I generate an needless MPEG generation, which I want to avoid. Who knows how to perform this task?

[Ken Berry]

Hi again, Dr Einstein. You say, at the end of your question, "Of course you can create and save each of these different projects and feed them again in a final project to the timeline." I am assuming that you mean that with each student's project, you would go to Share > Create Video File, and then transfer each of the new DVD-compatible mpeg-2 files to one computer, start a new project including them all, and go to Share > Create Disc > DVD.

That is in fact the only way I can think you could achieve your target and it would, as you suggest, inevitably involve a second recode and potential loss of quality. However, you could guard against too much quality loss by keeping the quality (i.e. bitrate) of the original projects as high as possible.

Or of course you could have the original projects done in DV/AVI and not mpeg-2... That way, each student would produce a final DV file which could easily be transferred to a single computer and only go through one recoding to DVD-compatible mpeg-2.

Video Studio in theory can, in the authoring stage, use separate VSP files instead of actual video files. However, this appears to cause more problems than it is worth, even if the various projects and all the relevant video files, are on one single computer. But in the situation you describe, it would literally be a nightmare to transfer not only the VSP files from 5 separate computers to a sixth computer, but all the attendant video files relevant to those projects. And you would then have to re-link each project file to all of those individual files...

[dr.onestone]

Hi Ken,
both answers of yours:

a.) That is in fact the only way I can think you could achieve your target ....
b.) Or of course you could have the original projects done in DV/AVI and not mpeg-2 ....

are more or less the same, if my source material comes from a MPEG DVD camcorder. I would generate in each case an additional recode and thus a potential loss of quality.
Is it really the case, that Ulead VideoStudio is not possible to merge various projects?
As I see no technical reason for not-providing this feature into VideoStudio I would recommend Ulead to put this with high priority to the user's wischlist. For me this might be a knock-out-point for selecting UVS for education purposes in a school class.

[jchunter]

Dr.onestone,
There is a simpler method to merge these 5 projects - just have each student separately create (smart render) a DVD-compliant (mpeg2) video file from his project. It would be best if they used the same video properties. Then do Share/Create Disk/Add Video File to collect them together to burn on a single DVD. The DVD menu will permit the playback of any indidual file or the whole thing, in sequence.

Since the original video files are Mpeg2, this whole process will be quite speedy and will have excellent quality. No re-encoding or re-compression will be necessary.

[dr.onestone]

Hello jchunter,

thanks for your hint. I know that I can fiddle around this major deficiency of Ulead VideoStudio. Ken has described a similar trick with his advice: "Video Studio in theory can, in the authoring stage, use separate VSP files instead of actual video files. ...."

But if you work together in a group you might want to alter something within your movie after you have seen it in total. Thus, I think, merging some projects should be an essential feature in an video editing tool.

I don't know the design of the software of Ulead VideoStudio. But I think it should not be a big task for the software developers to implement the feature "Merge Projects" as each project is exactly described in the project file *.VSP!

Does anyone know whether a member of Ulead reads this forum?
Does anyone know whether some suggestions of this forum can feed a To-Do-List of Ulead?
Does anyone know whether a public readable To-Do-List of Ulead VideoStudio exists for future versions?

[jchunter]

Dr.onestone,

Merging projects by combining video files in the Burn module is sound procedure - I do it all the time.

The advantage for your class is that if there is a bug in one of the projects, only that one project requires the creation of a new (short) video file. You can accomplish a re-burn of all the project video files very quickly as long as all the projects are DVD-compliant.

BTW, Video Studio already can merge projects (using Share/Create Disk/Add Project) but is unable to avoid a total, lengthy re-rendering of all the projects, DVD-compliant or not. If you want to try to get Ulead to fix something, I suggest focusing on this one issue. Good Luck

[Ken Berry]

Just to add a footnote to my earlier post: I was writing on the assumption that at the stage of bringing all the separate mpeg-2 files together on one computer, you would NOT be using smart render in that final single project because of the problems it has caused in previous versions of VS. I never use it these days, so tend to forget its existence. But the jury still seems to be out on whether smart render has been corrected in VS10. If you use it, of course, you will not suffer any (even slight) deterioration in quality for those parts of the videos not affected by edits... And, as John has suggested, you would still produce a high quality DVD this way.

Indeed, even NOT using smart render, if the original five separate DVD-compatible mpeg-2s have used high quality settings (i.e. high bitrate), then any deterioration through a second rendering would be minimal (and arguably not noticeable to the naked eye).

[daniel]

But the jury still seems to be out on whether smart render has been corrected in VS10.

No! Or not completely to say the least.
And still buggy as hell with modified pan/zooms.
Keep on ignoring it...