Panel/Script idea #1: Mixdown video track

[Trevor_Asq]

Not sure if this is appropriate, although if it isn’t then it’ll wither & die through lack of replies...

Lacking time & patience & skills to develop them, I have ideas for panels/scripts that might be useful & thought there might be budding devs looking for projects of interest. So it might be useful for PP editors to post ideas in SDK forum  & see if they gain traction.

First up is a background mixdown & overlay idea I’ve had kicking around for a while. (I work a lot in very tight turnaround- often we pretty much play to air from the timeline, so it can’t stutter).

In Avid you can mixdown video & stick it on a ‘mixdown’ track - like a render but easy to see where you are rendered & easy to lift out a section to make changes without losing renders.

In FCP7 I used to  do a similar thing by rendering then dragging the  renders back in onto the mixdown track.

Haven’t managed to do similar in PP other than exporting with ‘import into project’ checked & overwriting that onto a mixdown track. AME helps as it does let export happen in background.

What script would do, ideally:

a. Require a sequence track be uniquely named eg ‘Mixdown’

b. using sequence preview setting & using sequence preview renders and using Media Encoder to make it a background task, export between mark in & out, all video tracks underneath ‘mixdown‘ track (eg there may be caption track above) and overwrite that export onto mixdown track.

[Bruce Bullis · Accepted solution]

I think the API has everything a panel would need to implement this behavior, today.

• Check for magically-named mix-down track
• Enable/disable ('mute') tracks, based on whatever logic it likes
• Export sequence between in and out
• Import resultant media
• insert media onto magically-named track