SelectionToMultitakeClips is for everyday use.
Here’s the file-info:
WHAT THE SCRIPT DOES
The script creates new audio and video-clips for the timeline-selection, and adds to them all the material within the selection as takes.
BASIC USE OF THE SCRIPT
when using FX on a clip and render it to a new track (Ctrl-M) you can end up with several alternative versions of the clip, lying in render-tracks above each-other. Eventually the timeline gets cluttered with tracks.
Make a timeline-selection around the clip and run SelectionToMultitakeClips. You now have all the alternatives available in one clip and the render-tracks can be deleted.
The script gives these takes names using the orignal takenames (to view these names, “Menu/Options/Preferences/show active takenames in events” should be selected).
MulticamWithTakes is a lot more complicated and meant for projects that have a lot of material shot with multiple camera’s,
WHAT THE SCRIPT DOES
The script creates new audio and video-clips for every region in the timeline, and adds to them all the material within those regions as takes.
Optionally it can also group the new clips, and ripple-delete all material outside the regions.
USING THE SCRIPT FOR MULTICAM EDITING
The script is mainly meant for editing material that has been shot with multiple cameras. For instance drama-scenes where seperate camera’s have been used for close-ups, wide shots, totals, or topshots. There will often also be a seperate audio-recording on DAT or minidisk, apart from the camera-audio.
The best known multicam-script available for Vegas, Excalibur, works well to enable camera-changes in one scene (like a music-clip), but it has shortcomings when it comes to editing material that needs not just camera-changes, but also all the manipulations (shuffling, rippling, etc.) that you’d do in any normal editing-proces.
PREPARATION
recording:
The normal procedure when recording a scene (if you don’t have Timecode-synced equipment) is to write the slate (which identifies the scene that is being shot) and take numbers on a clapperboard, check if all equipment is recording, say the numbers out loud (e.g. slate 24, take 2) and then give a loud clap with the board.
When the scene is finished, the director usually calls “cut!” or something like that.
putting in sync:
To achieve sync in the editing, the captured video/audio is opened in the Trimmer and regions are assigned to every slate/take. The regions start at the clap, and end when the director called “cut”. For reference you can give the regions the same names as the original slate-calls in the audio, e.g. “slate 24, take2” (note the difference of the word “take” during recording and the “takes” in Vegas).
The corresponding events can now be dragged to underlying tracks on the timeline, that you give names like cam1, cam2, cam3, cam4, DAT (you may also choose to sort them according to the sort of shot, e.g. closeup, wide, medium, total). The tracks that you’re likely to use most should be the most upper tracks (if you are mostly going to use the DAT-sound, make it the top-audiotrack).
With help of the eventmarkers you can now put the corresponding events exactly in sync on the timeline. If you do this carefully in this stage, you won’t have to worry about sync anymore during the rest of the project after running the script.
This script requires that you also make Timeline-Regions to identify the scenes, but this time give them describing names, e.g: “John enters”, “dinnerdialogue”, “flashback Mabel”, etc.
previewing the material:
You can use trackmotion to show the different cams in one previewscreen (Picture-In-Picure, PIP), mostly a preview in 4 quarters will be sufficient (make pan/crop-presets for them). If the framerate of the preview becomes to low, you set the the previewquality to Draft-Auto or Preview-Auto.
RUNNNING THE SCRIPT
You now have a nice overview of all the material, sorted by scene and put in sync, but it will be hard to keep the sync-information when you start editing. That’s where Vegas’ “Takes” come in very handy. The script creates a Master-videotrack and a Master-audiotrack, and puts on them one clip for every scene, that contains ALL the information on the underlying tracks, in sync, in different takes. It also gives these takes understandable names using the tracknames and regionlabels, for instance: “cam1-dinnerdialogue” or “closeup-John Enters”. (to view these names, “Menu/Options/Preferences/show active takenames in events” should be selected).
Note that this is a script that needs to perform only once during a project. If you have done the preparation carefully, you will benefit from it afterwards for weeks of editing.
For safety, the script can save your project before executing, and create a new projectfile with the same name to which is added: MULTITAKE
To activate this option, change the statement below to “var SaveToNewProject=true”
SCRIPTBUTTON NR. 10 FOR GROUPING AND TRIMMING
Additionally this script can also group the new video-events to audio-events on the Mastertracks, and trim the project, deleting the material between scenes from the Timeline.
Unfortunately Vegas Scripting isn’t really suitable for this, so a trick has been used where the script can ask to run itself again, using codes for keystrokes. It’s not really fast, but then again it needs to be done only once.
By default, this option is turned off in the script, because things can go wrong here.
If you want to activate the grouping and trimming, there are a few things to take care of, or the script will fail:
– you HAVE TO BE SURE TO ASSIGN THE SCRIPT TO SCRIPTBUTTON NR. 10. This is important. If you activate the grouping/trimming option but have some other script assigned to scriptbutton 10, then that other script will be called for, with unpredictable results.
– The keystroke-script is not intelligent and just looks for the next timeline-marker, therefore the timeline-regions MAY NOT BE OVERLAPPED (a new region can not start within another region), and there must be only the scene-regions, NO OTHER TIMELINE-MARKERS OF ANY SORT.
You can best check these conditions in the Edit-Details Window.
– To activate the group/trim-option: change the following statements to
var group=true
and/or
var trim=true
EDITING FURTHER
In the project you now made, you can already make a quick on-the-fly edit: select only the (AV)clips in the Mastertracks, but mute the Mastertracks so you can see the PIP preview. When you want to make a camera-change, press S, and the Multitake-clips will be cut. Now solo the Mastertracks and, using the T-button, assign the new-made portions of the clips to right takes. This is similar to the workflow with Excalibur.
For extensive editing however, you are only going to use parts from scenes, hustle and shuffle them around, ripple them etc. I would advise not to do that in the project you just made, because then you would loose your overview of sync material, including the sync PIP preview. Instead, use this project only as the source for the editing, and perform the editing in a second project (that you run in a second instance of Vegas). For instance, call the multitake-project LIBRARY.VEG, and use it as a source for a second project (called e.g. EDIT_01.VEG). If you want to use (part of) a scene, just select the multitake-clips on the Mastertracks in LIBRARY.VEG and copy them to EDIT.VEG. There you can do whatever you want with it, without ever loosing access to the other sync clips. For instance, to cut in the middle of a scene from a wide-shot to a closeup, just select the MULTITAKE-Videoclip in the EDIT-project, cut it (S-button), select the second part and choose another take (T-button).
Download Link
Iron Fox Studio 