Extendscript: remove all blank spaces in a sequence

[Nick5EBA]

Is there a way to bulk remove all gaps between clips in a sequence? I'm currently removing them with the inRipple parameter set, i.e., removing them individually between clip removals. My assumption is gap removal increases triangularly (i.e., (n^2 - n) / 2), and so it becomes very slow on 1000+ clips. Is there a way to bulk remove gaps, to solve that problem so I only ripple remove once?

[Ann Bens]

This method is without a script.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I89jYuZYvP8

[Nick5EBA]

Hey Ann,

Unfortunately this is for a plugin so I need to automate it!

[gerikp]

Does going to the Sequence menu and pull down to "Close Gap" not do it for you?

[Nick5EBA]

Thanks gerikp, I don't think I was clear in asking my question - I need to remove all of it programmatically as part of a script 🙂

[Ann Bens]

@bbb_999 - Adobe Employee

[Nick5EBA]

Tried a few things, but really it looks like the issue is in the implementation of Track.remove(). Seems that it is superlinear wrt the number of tracks. For 2n tracks, Track.remove seems to take ~4t time. So I'm guessing the function is O(n^2), which kinda sucks when I know how fast bulk track removal is. Would there be a way to request a bulk track removal feature?

[Nick5EBA]

Just to clarify the end of that comment, I mean bulk removal in the UI being very fast, and to request a bulk track removal function in the API for ExtendScript. My current solution is to recreate the sequence, which is itself not a great solution (loses the current time indicator, zooms the track out to default, etc)

[Bruce Bullis · Accepted solution]

Sorry,, there's no "remove all gaps at once" functionality available. 

[Nick5EBA]

Understood. Could I request a bulk clip remove function? Ie specify an array of either  project item node ids or the clip node ids, and remove them all at once? Inidividually removing many clips is very slow!

[Bruce Bullis]

You could request such a feature, but I think it'd be better for us to fix the root cause of the API slowness (which you're not the first to report, under PPro's New World scripting).