Saving Edited Clips

Monte_88 wrote on 12/30/2014, 3:18 PM

Fairly inexperienced Sony Vegas user looking for some help. I did most of my initial video editing using older technology VideoCube software. In that application, you could save "Clipsheets" where raw footage files could be trimmed and saved, and then later you could call up the clipsheet and copy these clips in their trimmed form to place on the timeline. I am unable to figure out a way to duplicate this rather simple process in Vegas 12.0, without creating sub clips for every potential file I might use in a project. Perhaps that is the only answer but I am hoping for some other options.

I have tried the markers and regions, but either I am doing something wrong or don't understand their functionality because whenever I reopen the clip it fails to retain the specific portion I designated. Ideally I would like to edit clips in a location separate from the timeline, then when I get to a certain point I would like to access the trimmed clip (without having to re-trim it) and place it on the timeline in a specific location.

Assuming I explained this clearly enough, does anyone know of a solution? I realize this may be a rather silly question, but I cannot figure it out. Thanks in advance.

Comments

xberk wrote on 12/30/2014, 4:53 PM

Eventually you may grow out of a need for this style of editing, but Vegas can do it.

Simply open Vegas and trim all your "events" on the same timeline. You can add markers to each trimmed event to describe the event if you like. Save this collection of trimmed events as a veg file.

Open a second instance of Vegas at the same time. Now you can copy and past the trimmed events between instances of Vegas and thereby reorder the trimmed events. Nothing is lost. Your collection of trimmed events will stay intact for later use. Nothing is permanently changed so you can further trim or expand the events. One of the key features of Vegas is being able to open multiple instances of Vegas at the same time and copy and paste between them.

PeterDuke wrote on 12/30/2014, 4:54 PM

Perhaps you need to re-think your editing processes. Do you really need to trim your clips before you edit?

If you really need to reuse trimmed clips many times, then you should load each clip into Vegas one at a time, trim and render out to a new file. MPEG2 can usually be smart rendered, so that you would not lose quality and the render will be quick.

MPEG4 AVC cannot be smart rendered in later versions of Vegas, so you might consider using a program that does to trim such clips, such as VideoReDo.

Chienworks wrote on 12/30/2014, 4:55 PM

Subclips is Vegas' way of offering this feature. Markers and regions exist in the project itself, not in the media files.

Perhaps you should use the trimmer window instead of editing on the timeline. This doesn't give you a "queue" of edits to use later though, and is intended to be used one clip at a time, which then gets placed in your project before going on to the next. Or maybe you're after more of a storyboarding function where you could use the trimmer to trim, place the clips on the timeline in the order you edit them which may not necessarily be the order in which you want them to appear. At least they'd be on the timeline then and you could drag them around to rearrange them without losing the trimming you've already done.

Note that saving trimmed clips will often involve re-compressing them which adds more quality loss, so this should be avoided.

set wrote on 12/30/2014, 5:07 PM

+1 xberk

I will think the similar way to do this.
Also in Save-as command, you have the option to save the media in the same folder where you save the VEG Project.
Never tried the trimming, but I always save all original media, unmodified.

Set

Monte_88 wrote on 12/31/2014, 8:20 AM

Thanks xberk...this sounds like a workable solution. I was unaware that I could have another project opened and toggle between them. Instead I was thinking that I would have to load trimmed clips onto another video track on the destination project and mute it or move them around while working. In your scenario I could actually save a couple different projects, based on the type of footage, with trimmed clips and then access whichever project contains the clips I need at that particular time.

Gary James wrote on 12/31/2014, 10:28 AM

"Subclips is Vegas' way of offering this feature. Markers and regions exist in the project itself, not in the media files."

This isn't entirely true. Some video formats like .WMV support media markers. I use them frequently when working with .WMV files.

Chienworks wrote on 12/31/2014, 11:20 AM

Well, true enough. But, just placing markers in Vegas doesn't put them in the media file directly. For those few formats that do support them you have to manually tell Vegas to put them in. Also it only works from the trimmer, not the timeline.