Johan Althoff, former Lead Sound Designer at Starbreeze Studios, has released a suite of scripts for Sony Vegas, specifically tailored for use in music production and sound design. TeeVegas includes a flexible batch renderer, utilities for creating and arranging regions and markers, as well as helpers for speeding up the workflow of sound designers.
From Johan Althoff:
TeeVegas is not just a handy toolset for sound design, but it is intended to turn Vegas into an asset manager. While many of the scripts are specifically made to speed up constructing and layering sounds in Vegas, the power lies in the region batch renderer. You’re free to create your material in a DAW of your choice, and use Vegas to slice-and-dice it into individual assets, adding finishing touches as you go.
A bit more from Johan about some of the specific features of the script:
The main piece is a little cutie called RegionRender. It’s (obviously) a batch renderer, but made for a multi-user environment — any person who runs RegionRender will spit out the same files, in the right place, in the right format, without having to know anything about target files or directories. There are some companion functions to quickly “wrap” events on the timeline in regions, give them the correct name, and so on.
RegionRender can also work in stem mode, grouping renders either on track name or bus name, so that you can quickly render songA-drums, songA-bass, songB-drums and so on. Stem mode is also a local setting, meaning you can switch it on and off for different parts of the same project.
Setting a project up for use with RegionRender is as simple as going to the Scripts menu and running a script called “Set up project for RegionRender.” Please be aware that your settings markers will appear where you’ve placed the playback cursor.
Another set of tools deals with markers in files. If, like me, you have long wave files with several takes in one, you probably do what I do, which is to add markers saying “big,” “smooth,” “crackly” and so on at each take. In TeeVegas lingo, this is called MetaMarkers, and we can use this in a variety of ways: We can split events based upon metamarkers, “jump” between them (moving the offset), or randomize between them to quickly create variations. Additionally, if you have multiple recordings of the same event, TeeVegas can copy markes between media files. Risky, but useful.
Finally, a minor but helpful gem is a tool called Clone and replace media. In multi-user environments, you’re likely to encounter stock samples, stored on a central network drive, that you want to tweak destructively, but you don’t want to break any other projects that might be using the same file. Running “Clone and replace media” will create a new copy of the source media, and then re-direct all references in your local project to that media file. This creates a unique copy that only your particular project knows about, and you’re free to edit it in any way you want. As a bonus, your tweaked file will appear right next to the original, so that other users who browse the directory can get some extra inspiration.
TeeVegas can be found at http://www.teevegas.com, and contacted at http://www.facebook.com/teevegas.