Region names - warning if batch rendering
 

Just a heads up that may be perfectly common sense to everyone but caused me a little grief!

I am editing some very long, very dull presentations (7 hours in total) and I have used regions to identify different sections.

However, when I came to batch render them using Edward Troxel's fantastic Excalibur I ran into an issue (not with Excalibur, but with naming regions).

I set the batch render going, and carried on working on other things for the rest of the day. I just went to look at how things were progressing and I was please to see it had all finished. Went to look at the resulting files - nada. All that was there was a single zero byte file bearing the first part of the region name.

My mistake? I had used the following naming convention for regions:-

KEYNOTE:Segment1, KEYNOTE:Segment2 etc.

I think the : acted as some kind of pipe when it came to Vegas creating the files and forced the contents into a null file called KEYNOTE. I'm sure someone else will have a more technically grounded explanation.

Anyway, the moral of the story - don't use punctuation in region naming if intending to do a batch render.

Hope this helps someone, somewhere.

/ ? < > \ : * | ” and any character you can type with the Ctrl key are invalid as file or folder names on Windows. So is placing a space or period at the end of a name (tho I think these two are just ignored rather than causing a batch-render to glitch out).

: is an illegal character on Mac OS. And you can't begin a name with a period.

Ah, now that much I knew! Unfortunately my brain decided to put a blanket over that knowledge right at the time I needed it ;-)

It is interesting, though, that a file was created in this case, albeit zero byte.

In a future release of Excalibur, perhaps Edward could consider adding a check for illegal characters in the batch render function?

And I say it again, it wasn't Excalibur's fault, it was all mine!

Really? And I thought Mac OS was essentially FreeBSD recompiled. In other words Unix, where such file names are quite common (mostly used for configuration files).

"I thought Mac OS was essentially... Unix" - Adam

(don't remember source site sorry)

MACINTOSH OS X CONVENTIONS

Since Mac OS X is build on top of UNIX there are a few inherent conventions that OS 9 users may not expect. Because of this, migrating certain files and folders from OS 9 to OS X may cause unexpected behavior.

The only illegal character for file and folder names in Mac OS X is the colon “:”
File and folder names are not permitted to begin with a dot “.”
File and folder names may be up to 255 characters in length.

Oh, I'm not arguing (I have never owned a Mac, so I do not know much about it). I'm just surprised.

Re: Region names - warning if batch rendering
 

That's not strictly true. It may not allow "users" to create files beginning with a (.) but that's because these are (usually hidden) system files and they don't want "users" messing up the system. However, "root" can create/edit system files, just as in every other unix/linux based system.

QUOTE:
"In Mac OS X, files with names that start with a dot (.) are hidden. You may have noticed some of these before, for example when copying files from your Mac to a PC where they aren’t hidden. The most common one you might bump into is the .DS_Store file that Mac OS X puts in every folder (to save various view settings), but there are all sorts of other hidden files used by all sorts of applications.

These files are hidden by default for good reason — the average user almost never needs to change them, so keeping them visible would just cause useless clutter. But every now and again you may find that you need to view the hidden files, for example to browse the UNIX filesystem, to work with .htaccess files or to find a file that you accidentally (or purposefully) hid by naming it with a dot."