why not import the whole thing, open it in trimmer, play or scroll through it and press the m button to mark what you want, snap to your markers and import to timeline. If space is an issue render the timeline and discard the original.

ps you can name the lables any way you want.

"generate multiple video files from your source files (no recoding). So then you have one file for each shot you want to keep, which worked for me. Any way to do this with Sony's stuff?"

Assuming you have a MiniDV camera... in VideoCapture, Options > Preferences > Capture, place a check mark beside "Enable DV scene detection". This will do exactly what you want, create individual files of your video.

Preview each file in VMS, and drag the "keepers" to the timeline and trim/edit as necessary.

Thanks, but my clips might not match the "scenes" on the camera. For example, if the wife spent 20 minutes filming a kid swimming but only 1 min is good to use...

"why not import the whole thing"...

Good idea, but I like having bunches of little files. (For one thing Windows Photo Gallery and screensaver can find them).

Well, if it were me, i'd manually capture the parts i want to use. If you often have cases of a 20 minute clip with only one minute usable, scanning through the tape and finding those bits first before capturing is a viable method. You're going to have to scan through all the video at some point anyway in order to find the good bits, so why not do it while getting ready to capture?

Whenever anyone sends me a tape of their own to work with i require them to give me a cut list with the tape, or i return it to them without doing anything at all.

If I understand what you're looking for, I strongly recommend
designating (and saving) REGIONS within your clips
in the trimmer.

I recently discovered the value of this. The names of
the saved regions show up in the VMS Explorer window
(if "Region View" is checkmarked). So, as I play a clip from
the trimmer (often speeded up), I'll just tap the "i" and the "o"
keys on my keyboard to mark in and out points, then I click
"r" for region and give that clip segment a name.

HTH

Marking the clips is certainly helpful.

Finding good parts while importing is harder than doing it in the NLE.

It *looks* like this is what the "Copy and Trim with Project" is "supposed" to do (based on what its doing to my audio files), but it isn't doing it to the video. My GUESS is that trimming wasn't trivial with MPG files (my source is HD), so copying the whole thing is a workaround.