How to 'Section' Projects

[RickMen]

As I'm in the editing process I would find it useful for large projects to create discrete sections where I have completed the edit and don't want any actions I may do further along the timeline to adversely affect the prior section. It appears that VS does not have this feature? A work-around technique that was mentioned in another topic (can't found it now) mentions using a method where you breakdown the overall project into sub projects/VSP, render each sub project and then add all the rendered clips into a final project/VSP to combine them. Is this a good approach? Will there be degradation in video quality due to the multiple renders?

[Ken Berry]

I suppose it depends on how long your project is. Most of my projects are no more than 20 minutes, and I rarely have to chop them up. However, I have done so with a number of projects and find it works quite well in practice.

It also depends to an extent on the project properties or rather the properties you want the final rendered project to have. These days, though, most people are using some form of high definition video, and thus giving good to outstanding quality. If you are only talking about editing Section A then rendering to the final format; then doing the same with Section B, and so on, I don't think you will have any quality problems with just one further render at the end of A + B + C with the same properties.

There may be some minimal loss of quality, but frankly I doubt that it will be visible to the naked eye if you are only talking about these two renders. And the higher the bitrate of the final format, the less likelihood of your being able to spot any quality loss. It is really only after several renders -- and I am talking of more than two -- that quality loss might become more noticeable.

But you might want to create a short project broken down into several shorter sections, and try it for yourself to see if the end result is still good.

[RickMen]

Thanks Ken. That's what I was hoping. I'm going to try it out.

I try to keep my projects within the 5-30min mark (almost always either 4K or FHD, but sometimes I mix in old historical AVI clips) but I find with the 30min+ projects it can start to get a bit daunting on the timeline and I wish I could lock down the parts that are complete.

[zaphodikus]

I'm lately also making videos in separate sections/projects, I don't know why I never did this before, it's so helpful, not noticed any degradation. And I don't have to fiddle and render out the smaller projects. Just dragging projects into my timeline on a new project. its a slight pest to edit a section, because if you decide to edit any of the sub-projects in the big timeline project, you have to go "new project" first else it says the file is already open.

[RickMen]

I'm not familiar with other Video Editors' features but it would be a 'nice to have' feature in VS.

[canuck]

For larger projects (>30 miutes), I always break up the project into several segments, with each segment as a separate VSP project. You can break the project into segments based on per day, per theme, etc.
Each segment can be rendered to a video which can then be imported into the timeline to create your final product. You can also add the separate projects VSPs to the timeline instead of first rendering.