Breaking up a Project

[patflan]

I am currently working on a medium length? (40 mins?) project with captured minidv on VideoStudio 11 plus.
I initially did a basic edit from start to finish cutting out uninteresting parts and now I have jumped on to a part half way through which needs more detailed editing.It is a scene of a street parade and so I have moved scenes around showing peoples reaction and then I had to shift around sound tracks to make it all seem natural.
I have ripple editing enabled for all tracks but then when I went back to the earlier section to edit it causes shifts in the later part where I did all the work.
I wish to avoid having to depend too much on ripple editing as it seems to not work in all cases where there are several tracks to be kept locked together.( message -"ripple editing will not be applied here)"
So my basic question is what method is the norm for dealing with a long project or indeed any project without loosing quality when the final output is a DV file -not a DVD.(I like to first produce a DV file to save back to tape as a backup before making a DVD)

1 Do you break it up into different vsp projects and then insert these into the final project.?( But I think I read somewhere that these nested vsp projects can result in rendering problems?)

2 Do you save (render?) each section as an DV file and then bring them all together in a new project.

Method 2 is the way I would prefer to use but I am worried about any loss of quality when inserting a saved DV clip back into a project and then having it re rendered again.
So the point of my question;-is it true that putting a saved dv clip back into a project and saving the final project again as a dv file that there is absolutely no loss of quality apart from at the joins?
To rephrase the question - is this the normal way everybody deals with their projects?
Or if anyway does not use this method then why not ? - what are the disadvantages.

Thanks in advance and thanks to all the contributors here as I have gained a lot of knowledge just from reading the replies to posts.
(Thanks to Steve for that sample video on Pan and scan for images -it helped bring my project to life where I had a mix of video with photographs -very useful when I had run out of tape in the final part of a holiday and was then able to use the photographs to look almost like a continuation of the video to fill in the gaps)

[Ron P.]

Did you split the audio from your video clip(s) before cutting? If so all you need to do, with the clip highlighted, go to the Edit tab and unmute it by clicking on the speaker icon. In VS you don't really separate the audio, it mutes the audio, in the video track, and places a copy in one of the audio tracks..

Since you're using DV, you can safely do #2. DV is for the most part considered a loss-less format. It would take numerous recodes to notice any loss in quality. I tend to use this workflow more often than not. It helps simplify, and keep things a bit more organized.

I also will not split my audio until I'm fairly certain I have my video clips arranged how I want them. I think it would be even more helpful if Corel would do away with it's ludicrous naming convention.

[Black Lab]

From what you are telling us I don't understand your need to break up your project, either in separate VSPs or separate video files.

With that being said, I have had the need to use a previously edited and rendered clip in another project. So, to answer your question, I agree with Ron that since you are working with dv-avi you should not suffer any noticeable quality loss.

FWIW I have, in the past, suffered very noticeable quality loss when inserting a VSP into another project.

[patflan]

Black Lab,Videoman,
Thanks for the replies -I was hoping that I could safely use method 2 without quality loss.
My video editing experience is still new and I am still trying to learn the best approach but I have two reasons to want to break up a project.

One is that I find it hard just to edit from start to finish in a linear fashion especially as my videos usually are not one set occasion but likely videos of our family holiday where we went to different locations and it lends itself to be broken up into different mini projects.It makes it seem a bit more manageable this way.

The other reason is that I find myself only having the time to do the editing in a stop start way -often with big gaps in time -days,weeks between getting back to it.
I don't like to take a chance with some big project just sitting on my computer for this length of time unfinished - after all the project file is just a list of instructions pointing to all the different media files -if any file is accidentally deleted or any other failure then all the work is lost.
By saving individual dv files as I go along at least then that part of the project is completed and saved.

You both are telling me however that there is some very slight loss on re rendering.Can you tell me why is this so as I do not fully understand what VideoStudio is doing when it is rendering to DV a file it sees that is already DV standard which was originally encoded by Videostudio itself.What does it do to it ? -Why does it re-encode it again ? I am just wondering why there should be any loss of quality at all ? Also I am wondering even if I cannot notice any loss on a standard TV (after converting to mpeg dvd) would maybe a loss be noticable if the same video is shown on a HI-DEF big screen tv.-Just wondering ?

[tommytucker]

sometimes it is nice to just work on a segment of a larger project so that one can extract some stills, work with pan and zoom, transitions, music on a portion of a larger project. I believe in MediaStudio you can do this on the many different timelines. But in VS10+, it can get a bit confusing to work on a section of a large project. I have particularly found it useful to only work on a small section, especially if I am extracting a number of stills from some video and working with those images. So if I was to just work on a portion of a project and desire to reinsert that finished rendered output into a larger later complete project, the best output format for that small project video file would be?

[Black Lab]

DV-AVI, because it is basically a lossless format.

[patflan]

Further to tommytuckers workflow.

I too, need to be able to work like this where I need to do a lot of complicated work on small parts of a project and I had assumed that this would be the workflow of most users -that is, render these small parts first in DV mode and then insert these completed parts into the main project as there is no quality loss.

However searching through the threads it is not clear if this is a standard practise.

I have found that some people are just aiming to produce a DVD and so will render these small sections first to mpeg and then bring them all together at the authoring stage.

This does not apply to me where I want to initially make a dv copy of the complete edited project to put back onto tape or harddrive as a backup before making a DVD.

So I would like to hear from other people that use this method as their normal day to day way of doing their projects -that is, rendering sections of a project to dv and re-inserting to a final dv project.Then I can go ahead with with more confidence that there are no downsides to doing it this way.(quality loss).

I know that, as has been said before, that workflow methods vary a lot among users but it would be nice to know that I am using a method that has worked with a lot of other people.

[Black Lab]

If you are working with DV-AVI then you should not worry about quality loss. Use whatever workflow works best for you.

When I said I rendered my projects to an MPEG-2 file then inserted them in the burn phase was because I wanted them as separate titles on my DVD. If you simply want to break a large project into more manageable parts that's ok.

Here's an example of what I did once - I think it's similar to what you are doing. I did a highlight video for a basketball team. I broke the highlights down for each player. So I did a little highlight reel of each player, rendered each one to it's own DV-AVI file, then brought them altogether into the main project.

[patflan]

Thanks Black Lab for that reassurance.
Now that I am getting a bit more adventurous with my editing using vs11 (before this I had vs7) it is good to know that I can safely break into down into smaller workable blocks.

[tommytucker]

so if you reinserted a rendered MPEG-2 video file..that would be lossy? As opposed to AVI?

[Black Lab]

If it's going to be rendered again, yes. Will the loss of quality be noticeable...?

[tommytucker]

but you can check that box in VS10+ to avoid MPEG-2 rerender?

[sjj1805]

Providing you stick to DV (avi) then you can safely render portions of your video as standalone video files and later insert them into your master project. The problems associated with rendering a second or subsequent time relate to lossy formats such as MPEG2, MPEG4 and other such formats.

[tommytucker]

can you expand the timeline to take up more of the display so that you can see several overlay tracks, audio and the main video track? Seems like you scroll and the multiple tracks roll up under the main track, you can't see all of the tracks. I think in VS11 you can expand the timelines.

[sjj1805]

VS10+ introduced multiple overlay tracks but you had to scroll them.
VS11+ allowed you to expand these new overlay tacks so you could see them all at once.