Creating a list of images used in Video Studio 8

Bytheseaside · Post by **Bytheseaside** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 8:37 am

Having selected 500 or 600 images & movie clips from the thousands I took on holiday, & assembled them into a Video Studio project, I would now like to have a list of those .JPG & .AVI files I have used. Apart from going through the whole project writing each one down, or putting the .VSP file into a text editing program & extracting all the file names one by one, I can't see how to do it.
Does anyone know a method - perhaps a small computer routine - that will extract the file names in the order I used them as a text file? In an ideal world it might also extract clip durations & transition info as well.
My wife has asked me to bung the best of the rejected images straight onto a DVD. Trouble is it's a long job working out which images I rejected!

Trevor Andrew · Post by **Trevor Andrew** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 9:55 am

oh dear
I do not think there is any easy way to do that.

Your best option would have been to copy the images you were going to use to another folder, may be a sub-folder within the working folder. Then import to VS. That way you would know exactly which you have used.
(That¡¦s assuming you have created a working folder dedicated to this project.)

But to find out these details from the project is not easy.

Are you intending to bung the remainder onto DVD as a DVD or as a data backup.?
If its data then you have 4.3 Gb to go at.
If as a DVD slide show, then a 6 sec¡¦ image would be 600 per hour.
A two hour video would have 1200 images.

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 3:37 pm

I don't know if this will work because I haven't and don't have the time at the moment to try. VideoStudioX2 has an option to Smart Package a project and copies everything used - photos, music, videos, the VSP file - all into one place on your computer.

Try downloading the 30 day free trial and see if it will open your existing VideoStudio 8 project. If so you could then smart package it!

Bytheseaside · Post by **Bytheseaside** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 4:15 pm

I've just tried opening my VSP file using Open Office with Text CSV as the filter. The result is a rather messy, but usable list of all the images, movies & transitions with some rubbish in between.
Perhaps this is the best I can do without hours of work.

I did copy all the images I intended to use into one folder, but I ended up not using some & changing the order of others, so that's of limited use.

I don't really want to venture into VSX2 territory, so I guess I'll have to stick with my Open Office solution.

Thank you.

jbarchuk · Post by **jbarchuk** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 4:42 pm

Bytheseaside wrote:I've just tried opening my VSP file using Open Office with Text CSV as the filter. The result is a rather messy, but usable list of all the images, movies & transitions with some rubbish in between.

The rubbish is that VSP is a binary file, meaning not commonly viewed or edited with a text editor. However I also glanced at them as you did and see that the images are embedded in there as plain text. (Actually I use a plain text editor that's not uncomfortable with viewing plain text within binary files but you get the gist.)

If you're at all comfortable with programming there's probably a fairly simple sed or awk solution. I also *think* that these filenames are prefixed with the text 'OC:', at least the few I have in mine seem to be. Whether OC: is used to prefix other VS data is another story that I didn't go further into.

Have a

day!

Jim
jb@jbarchuk.com

jbarchuk · Post by **jbarchuk** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 7:08 pm

jbarchuk wrote:The rubbish is that VSP is a binary file, meaning not commonly viewed or edited with a text editor.

After a little more research... For anyone who has Linux (oraccess to it) the strings command is exactly designed to extract all ASCII strings from binary files. This worked in half a heartbeat simply pointing strings towards a VSP file:

$ strings *.VSP |egrep "png|jpg|gif"
bC:\a\ppl\frances\img\frances-pilates-02-090130\frances-pilates 04-090130-traile
r-uvs090219-032.png
bC:\a\ppl\frances\img\frances-pilates-02-090130\frances-pilates-04-090130-traile
r-uvs090219-032.png
bC:\a\ppl\frances\img\frances-pilates-02-090130\frances-pilates-04-090130-traile
r-uvs090219-032.png
bC:\a\ppl\frances\img\frances-pilates-02-090130\frances-pilates-04-090130-traile
r-uvs090219-032.png

Need the egrep too because -just- the strings command returns about 12k lines worth of 'stuff' every ASCII character in the file.

The -might- be Win/Mac equivalents of strings but for me far more annoying to 'install a new program' that just use what's here.

I'm not actually using Linux on this PC but Cygwin. If you've ever had an -interest- in trying some Linux commands then Cygwin is very very very easy to install and operate. Don't know if it does graphics but it's a very full featured text mode OS that runs right -within- Win. http://www.cygwin.com

The path/path/name wrapping is caused by the limited width of the Cygwin screen but in normal practice would redirect '>' output to a text file.

The 'b' at the beginning of each line *might* be a signal within VSP that means 'hello I am a filename' or some other delimitation but that's easily stripped out with a 30-second text edit.

OP or anyone else wants a string extraction just email me your VSP.

I have half a mind to put up an online utility to do this but no time to do it at the moment.

Have a

day!

Jim
jb@jbarchuk.com

sjj1805 · Post by **sjj1805** » Sun Oct 11, 2009 12:26 am

Just created a VideoStudio 8 VSP and opened it with Microsoft Wordpad (Built into windows)