Edit List in VS9

[profk99]

Is there any way to generate/export/import an Edit List using VS9 (or Media Studio)?

By that I mean a text list of the .VSP events: Time, event, object, etc.

e.g. 01:12:22 Insert Image C:\Video\Intro5\Stills\Newprod3.jpg\

That would be immediately useful for things like selecting chapter points in building menus using the somewhat primitive VS9 DVD menu system, in troubleshooting, and in finding and adjusting audio rubberbanding key frames. Also to identify files that need to be moved whenever the project is transferred ot archived.

And, dream on, to possibly help move projects from system to system.
One example: I recently bought Media Studio Pro, and would love to migrate my current VS9 project to it as a learning tool. I might want to do the same whenever an old project needed to be updated. And I would really be grateful if I could migrate my Pinnacle projects as well. Pipe dreams?

Bob K.

[sjj1805]

I recently bought Media Studio Pro, and would love to migrate my current VS9 project to it as a learning tool.

No need.... Media Studio Pro will import an existing Video Studio Project.

[TubaDad]

I would still like to know how to get an edit list out of the project too. I need it for archiving reasons though. I would like to be able to keep all of the clips to a project together. Especially whan I need to recreate the project. I ran into this when I upgraded form 8 to 9. Yes 9 could read the VSP file, but I needed to make sure I had the right clips available in the proper directories.

The only way I have been able to do this so far is open the VSP file in a test editor and search on the common directory name and delete all the junk between the file names and save it as a text file. It worked for this one project, but it was very painful.

Any kind of readable export would be useful.

[PeterMilliken]

G'Day Bruce,

I am not sure what you are after here. If I understand your objective correctly (that of archiving a complete project so that you can later restore it and re-edit or whatever) then the mechanism I use is to place my VS Working Folder in its own disk partition - this is where I capture too. So all the files (project file(s), video clips, still images extracted etc etc) that consistute my project are in the one disk partition. I then use a disk image program such as Norton Ghost or Image for Windows to archive the entire partition to DVDs. This way, if I need to restore a previous project I just restore the image to my "Work" partition and start editing the project. Obviously I don't have to back up any of the VS supplied files that I may or may not use as their location doesn't change between projects. So they will all still be in a place where the project file can find them when it is restored.

Does this help?
Peter

[TubaDad]

Thanks for the reply Peter. What I would like to do is pull the file list out of the VSP file. I do archive my clips along with a master of the DVD, but at the end of the year I create a "Best of" DVD. Since I had out of sync problems with VS8 I needed to remaster my DVDs with VS9. All of the weekly projects were easy, but the "Best of" DVD was a huge pain in the rear. Since there was not enough room on the drive to contain all of last years clips, I just brought them back in one DVD at a time and deleted them as I went along to the next remastered DVD. Then the last one has 70 clips from various weeks, and there was no way for me to know which clips to put on my hard drive to make the project complete, I hate that relink message. What I ended up doing was to pull the VSP file into notepad and delete out all of the "stuff" between the filenames. Then I had a list of the clips, along with the directories they were contained in for remastering the last disk. It was a pain, but well worth it in the end.

What I would like is a utility that could read the VPS file and export the file names for the clips, including their directories. Heck it would be nice to have some things like the transitions and overlay track info too. What I created looked like this:

Title
D:\Ulead Video\king 040826 c halftime fight song 1st tuba dance.mpg
D:\Ulead Video\king 040826 fight song and tuba dance.mpg
D:\Ulead Video\king 040903 fight song and tuba dance2.mpg
D:\Ulead Video\king 040910 c halftime fight song.mpg
D:\Ulead Video\king 040910 tubas dancing 1.mpg
D:\Ulead Video\king 040910 tubas dancing 2-3.mpg

I would love to have something like the clip and duration, but as long as the clips are there I can work with it.

Just anything to be able to pull something readable, and useful, out of the VSP file.

Hope that made more sense.

[PeterMilliken]

OK, that explains a lot

There is a program that will help you do this - unfortunately it is not "user friendly" at all! It is a utility program that normally runs under the Unix operating system. There are ports of it that will run under Windows OS's i.e. XP and Win2000. To get you up and running with it could be quite difficult as it is generally used by programmers who have a Unix background.

Let me think about it over the weekend (Friday afternoon here) and I'll see if I can come up with an easier solution. I might be able to write something for you to use.

Have a good weekend,
Peter

[TubaDad]

Peter, I am willing to try something difficult too. But I do not have a UNIX/LINUX box running usually, just Windows XP, so I would need the Windows port. I thought about trying to script something using GREP, but that was not going to give me what I needed since the clip names varied in size of their names. Just could not get something consistant to work with. It would be nice to know the character used to mark a file name. I haven't figured that one out yet. Plus, with as rarely as I use it right now, it is more a labor of "I know I can do this" rather than "I need to have this". Give me what you have and I'll try most anything right now.

And more importantly, have a great weekend.

[PeterMilliken]

Well, grep is what I was going to suggest

If you are prepared to try it we can attempt it all off-line (to save the list from being bored with any further posts). If you have grep already, then the following will work (despite the long file/path in your .vsp file - regular expressions are wonderfully power but somewhat difficult at times ):

grep -oa --extended-regexp '[A-Z]:\\[0-z .\\\]+' xxx.VSP

where xxx.vsp was the project file I tried it on. Of course, not all grep's are created equal, and so we might have to get you to install that Unix port I mentioned - it's called cygwin and you can have a look at it at http://www.cygwin.com/. Just the base install will have everything you need (including grep) - we might have to "fiddle" a bit with the bash shell though before you can get it going properly - but I am sure a couple of emails will fix that up quickly.

So email me directly if the above doesn't work and we'll try and get you working with Cygwin, bash (unix shell) and grep.

Peter

[profk99]

Hi!

Thanks for the replies to my post. Apparently it really is impractical to do what I want in VS9. Fortunately, when I was so p*****d off at Pinnacle and bought VS9 @$49, I also bought Media Studio Pro 7 @$99 (Obviously a clearance deal just before MSP8 release). I finished my project with VS9, and was stuck with over 100 unneeded clips (mostly my narration .WAVs; I am a lousy narrator and flub lines ALL the time!) Hence my post.

Well, I need to update the project, and decided to try MSP7. Look what I found in the Help file:

Create EDL File
Creates an Edit Decision List (EDL) file of your project. A typical EDL created by Video Editor is a text-based file with an EDL extension listing all clips, effects, and transitions with their Mark In and Mark Out times.

Package
Copies or moves all files in the current project to a specified folder. A dialog box allows you to assign the folder in which to move or copy the files used in the project. By packaging your files, you can better manage all related files by keeping them together.

The answer to my request and more! But a LITTLE drawback: I can't get MSP7 to actually READ the VS9 project file, even though the Open menu has a specific choice of .VSP as input. I get a message box that says "Unable to open the file. [20213:2:2]".

I have a tech support request filed, but would love to get an answer here.

Bob K

Bruce (TubaDad): I'd guess you'd find MSP @$99 an attractive alternative to hacking with grep (if MSP actually CAN read VS files), but the price is now $299. But you might try the trial version of MSP8 to do your "Best of" video. I tried MSP7 a couple of years ago and found it pretty easy to learn; I wasn't ready to pay that much at the time, so I stayed with Pinnacle Studio. I sure wish I hadn't done that. I bought it for $99, but spent more than the $200 difference on Pinnacle and VS9 during that time.