Thank you for your prompt reply, but I'm not sure that I understand. If I start a new project ( which as yet has no media imported) and click on the import media button I have the same access to my hard drive that I get with Explorer.

What does one feature do for me that cannot be replicated by the other?

Thanks again.

I don't think generated media shows in explorer
which includes text etc. or subclips.

And regions that were maked out in the trimmer will show in the Vegas explorer, but not in the project media window.

Regions can be a very effective way of sorting out media when you have very long clips, especially in interviews that just rambled on forever.

Rob Mack

Can you explain the regions in explorer ? I must try this.

Yes, after my work commute. If your impatient, it's in the manual.

Rob Mack

One big and very useful difference is that Project Media allows you to place the SAME media in more than one bin. Bear in mind these are just pointers to the media, not the media itself and so there's no duplication going on - unlike if you were to try the same thing in explorer.
So, in a current project of mine, where I've catalogued the clips but not yet decided which I'm going to use, I have a clip of a Vietnamese person serving food from a boat and it resides in 3 separate bins - Individuals, Boats and Food.

Actually it's not a clip - it's a sub-clip - something that you can only define in Project Media and a very useful way of reducing long sequences into shorter, more manageable clips.

Regions and SubClips are pretty similar but the differences are subtle.
Regions:
Visible in Vegas Explorer but not in Project Media
Can be saved with the media and hence visible in other projects
If you insert a region as a clip and then lengthen it, the clip will lengthen (so long as the original media extends beyond the end of the region)
The region name appears on the timeline.

SubClips
Visible in Project Media but not in Vegas Explorer
Not saved with Media
If you lengthen a clip on the timeline it will loop - the clip's length is fixed.(Workaround - select sub clip on timeline, select open parent media in trimmer)
The clip name will appear on the timeline if you have selected View Take Info.

Personally I'd like something that has some behaviours of both:
Visible in Project Manager AND Vegas Explorer
Saved with Media
Not fixed length (ie ability to edit length is dependent upon original media)
Don't care how the name appears on the timeline, so long as it does.

THF said f you have a really good folder setup going on then [Project Media] are redundant
Not necessarily so. Quite apart from the fact that using bins allows you to cross reference your media - (like using tags in Media Manager), it means you don't have to make copies of your stock footage, music, foley, sound effects etc into your project folder.
Seems to me that the Project Media tab is really a poor man's Media Manager. Much simpler, stays with the project and pretty darn useful. With sub-clips it's even more useful than MM.

Yeah, I know what you mean. It just doesn't make sense to me that you can't browse regions in the project media window as well as the explorer window. Why can't it work in both?

There are reasons why subclips have fixed borders but I've never really been able to remember what those reasons were. I think it has to do with certain effects that really need to know what the bounds of the clip are.

The first NLE I had contact with was Media100. In that, subclips didn't have fixed heads and tails so they behaved more like Regions in Vegas, except that you could put them into bins. Conversely, speed effects and freeze frames made rendered clips that acted more like Vegas' subclips. Of course, almost everything needed rendering, but that meant that you could take a section of a clip in the trimmer, apply mediaFX to it, and then have that as a rendered object in the bins. I kind of wish the Vegas trimmer would handle cutting, writing, and applying FX to clips.

So...the joy of Regions. When you apply a region to a clip in the trimmer, that region can be saved. It actually creates a file object on your computer. Once you've done this you can configure the Vegas explorer to show regions. It'll do so hierarchically, showing you all the regions in the selected clip. It's a very fast way to organize a very long clip and I found it very useful when searching through a long interview for a little gem.

Regions can be dragged from the Vegas Explorer to the timeline, and then they can be shortened or lengthened as needed (which you can't do with subclips). Also, if you keep your master clips long you can run a mediafx on the whole thing and then just grab regions and put them on the timeline.

This isn't always the way to work, but I found it was the only way to deal with long rambling interviews without losing my mind.

Rob Mack