Okay, I've just tried using bins myself only a couple weeks ago, and I probably didn't read the manual or online help, but "bins" are basically just organizers for your clips and media.

Click the "Bins" folder, and you can create little groups (bins) of whatever you want. (Maybe you right-click and add bin? I don't recall and I'm not at a computer with VMS installed).

Anyway, I'm working on making a DVD project of the house and neighborhood where I grew up (many, many years ago...). So I created bins (look like folders) for "House", "School", "Church", "Neighborhood", etc.

Then, I opened the "All Media" (or whatever its called) folder, and browsed through all the clips and photos I had (well over a hundred). I would then drag clips, or usually multiple clips, into the appropriate bin. "Here's a video of the house. Here's a photo of the church.", etc. This does not create copies of the media, its just some kind of organizational structure that references the original media file. Also, any clip can go into multiple bins as well. ("This picture shows the church and the school, and goes into both bins".)

After that, when I was editing video, I could open up just a particular bin ("House", for example), and now my file selection window only included clips and photos that I associated with the house.

I can see on big projects where this kind of organizing could be very helpful. You might segregate things by media (still photos bin, video bin, sound effects bin, etc.), although I guess the normal file window does that pretty well by sorting based on file type.

If you were editing a movie, you might organize the clips by scene number, etc.

The only risk I see with using bins is that if you have a clip that you haven't dragged into any bin, and you edit using just the organized bins, you may end up totally ignoring a good clip -- forgetting it even exists.

Well, that's my meager insight on bins. I hope I got this right. If not, somebody else please step in...

Tim L