Subject:SF7 - a second look

Posted by: DaSoundGuy

Date:11/3/2003 3:36:29 PM

I posted a while ago about my reservations with respect to the worth of the SF7 upgrade. While I still think the product was premature, and more a feature extender than most upgrades, there is at least one thing that I now find invaluable: the ability to go back on your edits after saves.

I didn't realize what this meant, until I started sending different edits over from Vegas AND KEPT THE FILES OPEN in Forge. If I don't like the result in Vegas, I go back to Forge and undo, resave, and I'm back to the previous file in Vegas. I haven't compared thefile sizes of copies vs the additional info added to a file to allow undo-after-save, but I do find this method a lot cleaner than generating a lot of copies.

It's too bad you can't keep files open in Forge and get the current status of the file to playback in Vegas. That would allow re-do as well. And its too bad you can't just take a file open in Forge and drag-and-drop it into Vegas.

Thanks to the Sony ex-SF team for doing what they can.

DSG

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: Geoff_Wood

Date:11/4/2003 2:39:13 AM

The SoFoSo team ?!!!

geoff

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: DaSoundGuy

Date:11/4/2003 11:51:09 AM

Or the "SoSo Fo" team ?

I still have a hard time saying So...So...Son....

Maybe I'll get a Clie now cause Forge supports it!

;)

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: wigworld

Date:11/4/2003 2:57:42 PM

The So Fo Mo Fo So team?

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: sk

Date:11/4/2003 9:39:56 PM

DSG - are you talking about the full "project save", or just the undo after save feature? The "project save" creates pretty large files, and I'm not totally clear yet how much more it offers than the standard "undo after save" feature. But while it certainly is convenient, the project save does create GB+ file sizes, vs MB size files for plain old "save/undo".

sk

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: Sonic

Date:11/5/2003 10:11:27 AM

Undo-past-save only keeps the undo history (and associated temporary files) around for the life of the window. Once you close it, it's gone.

Project-save, on the other hand, persists indefinitely. You can close out the app and resume your work at a later time. A project save involves not only the edit information (the .frg file), it also sequesters all necessary media files in an identically named directory. Sometimes this is a copy, sometimes just a move (depending on the file). So as long as you have the .frg and the directory, you can move the project around and work on it on another machine, for instance. It is similar to the "Save media with project" option in ACID or Vegas.

The file copying is not terribly smart, so if your project includes small pieces of very large files, the entire file is still copied into the project folder. This will improve in future versions. After the initial save, however, the project will just use the new file, rather than re-copy every time you save.

Clear?
J.

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: DaSoundGuy

Date:11/5/2003 11:20:47 AM

sk,

You're right: I was confusing the issue by talking about save sizes. I'm not saving projects, and I'm keeping the file windows open in Forge to be able to undo after save. I was mistakenly thinking that the saved files contained the undo history.

Thanks to Sonic for the clear explanation.

Sonic, can undo-after-save survive a crash, the way in-process crash survival worked before?

DSG

Subject:RE: SF7 - a second look

Reply by: Sonic

Date:11/5/2003 11:41:08 AM

Crash recovery attempts to restore the edit history (at the time of the crash) regardless of whether undo-past-save is enabled, though, in most cases, you will lose the most recent edit.

If you want to see it in action, open a file and make some edits, then kill the process or End Task with the Windows Task Manager and re-start Forge.

Granted, a lot of bad things can happen over the course of a crash, so I won't claim it's going to work 100% of the time (To be completely honest, it was a lot easier when Sound Forge was a destructive editor with a big monolithic temp file laying around).

But it's usually pretty slick, and certainly better than nothing.

J.