Nested Veg Question
 

Up until today I did not know about nested veg files (you live and learn!)

How it came about was, I gave an external drive to a friend to have a play around with some HD footage on his new PC and try his own take on an old wedding edit.

Now....he then called to say thet instead of opening up as individual clips, the project was rendering the file into one long clip on open. I couldnt think what he had done.

Asked him to show me what he was doing, and it trurns out he was dragging the veg file onto the timeline as he was used to doing in Sony Acid instead of doing File/Open.

So...in dragging it across he opened it as a veg file....then (here is where i suspect it went wrong) he saved it as the SAME file name. Result...wrecked veg file/project!

Now....I typically break my edits into chunks-Intro, Ceremony, Photos, Dancing and then make a new project and copy and paste each section into a master Fully Assembled file.

If i understand nested files as i now think I do, in future, all I need to do it drag these individual veg files down onto the timeline and then IMPORTANTLY, save them as a new MASTER veg file.

From then on, any changes I make to the indivdual ssections, will be refelected in the MASTER veg file.

Have i grasped this correctly?

What benefits are there in doing this?

Is ther any way back from my friends mistake (not a huge deal as it was old footage-but nice to know)

Cheers in advance.

Exactly right...

Yes you have

If you need to make a change in the edit, titles, or ANYTHING in any section, the master file is updated automatically. On long projects with numerous changes this can be a life saver. I spoke to this on a 6-month long corporate project I had been working on with 25 scenes. The proof was delivered and agreed upon, but when I delivered the first DVD, the client wanted "just a couple of changes". That necessitated editing the individual scenes, rendering each of them, copying those newly rendered scenes into the master, then re-rendering the master.

On delivering the second DVD we found 3 typos in the titling. So, I had to do this process all over again. With nested .veg files, it would have been as fast as making some edits, and then re-rendering the master.

It's a MUCH smarter way to work on larger projects. And I'll do all my large projects this way from now on.

Thanks Perone for the fast answer.

OK, next question.

If....I then drag one of the nested veg files onto the timeline it shows as rendering.

What exactly is it rendering?

Once finished, if i then render that single file, and I rendering at full HD or, am I rendering a lower quality proxy?

I'll have to wait for someone else to respond here. I haven't played with this enough to give an intelligent answer.

As I recall, it's generating a file that contains all the information necessary to display it on the Vegas timeline.
Once you're finished with the project, you'll want to delete this newly generated file as it can be quite large in size.
Be advised that, no matter how many tracks the source veg has, a nested veg comes in as a single video track and a stereo audio track.

Nested vegs come in at project property value so, if it's an HD project, that's what you get.

I personally hate the things. I'd rather just start another instance of Vegas and copy and paste the project into the new master timeline.

Dennis, some things (Track Motion keyframes?) will not survive a copy/paste so that's why nested vegs are a nice option.

IT is rendering thumbnails and the waveform and probably some other bits and pieces.

One thing to be aware of, is that I have noticed errors in nested veggies with reversed media. When you right click on a clip and choose reverse, that property sometimes doesnt' get transferred to nested or network rendered uses.

My two cents, I'm with Dennis, I don't care for using them. Mike pointed out that some things won't move with a copy and paste, which I didn't know. In my case however I don't use anything that won't move with a copy and paste, so I'm fine without the nested veg files. I suppose it is a great feature to have, I just don't use it.

I guess I'm with Jeff somewhat on this one. I don't exactly hate them, but I'm nervous about them.

I have used nested vegs before and for the most part things worked OKish. In one particularly complex project, though, when I was suffering a number of crashes because of a dodgy jpg (which I had never encountered before) I got in a bit of a mess with the restored files. In the end I had a hard time working out which were the correct files and which were old copies. It was made worse with the fact that I had several layers of nested vegs - trying to find the dodgy media that was causing the crashes was fun!

Performance seemed to take a bit of a hit as well - the nested vegs were (for me) extremely complex animations and it took an age to re-render the preview whenever I made any changes.

Nothing showstoppingly difficult about nesting, to my mind, and I'm sure that if I had planned my use of nested vegs more carefully I could have avoided or minimised these issues. I certainly do accept the fact that it can save multiple rendering stages (which are a real pain when it comes to having to make changes to an earlier embedded render).