stupid newbie questions

gmes29 wrote on 8/22/2006, 4:04 PM
just to let everyone know.. although i'm new to Vegas, i'm not new to the whole movie/DVD creation process. i'm pretty adept at Pinnacle Studio which is a nice program as far as it's features and ease of use goes but it was just too damn buggy. figured it was time to try something else so here i am..
one thing confuses me right off the bat. what is the trimmer best used for?? i do a lot of editing out of commercials in my videos and i know how to use the Split option from within the timeline to break up my entire video into separate 'events' or clips (very similar to how Premier Elements does it) and extract the commercials so what exactly does trim mean in regards to using the trimmer?? my brief experience with the trial edition told me that you pretty much have to jump through hoops just to get anything from the trimmer into the timeline. doesn't seem to be as easy as simply setting a bunch of in and out points.
now going back to the Split option, how come i couldn't get the ripple delete to work after extracting 2 commercial segments?? i extracted both commercial segments first then tried the ripple delete. this worked for the 2nd cut but not the first - the menu options were for some reason suddenly disabled when i attempted to close the 2 gap. and how does rd know what gaps you are interested in??

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 8/22/2006, 4:39 PM
You don't ever have to use the trimmer for anything. My personal suspicion is that it's in Vegas because other NLEs have it, and there are probably a lot of advanced users who would never consider switching to Vegas if it didn't have a trimmer. There are also people who are used to using it in other software and wouldn't want to try editing without it in Vegas. As you've discovered, splitting and editing on the timeline works and it's easy, so stick with that. I haven't used the trimmer since the first day i tried using the Vegas 2 demo.

The trimmer does have some nifty advanced functions such as creating subclips. If you work on large feature-length videos then these advanced functions might be handy. For what you're doing they're probably overkill.

There are two main types of ripple: auto and post-edit. With auto ripple the events to the right on the timeline slide right along with your edits as you do them. This is a great way to work if you only have a single audio/video track. It can get a bit confusing if you have multiple tracks. Make sure you have the mode set appropriately, which in your case is probably "All tracks, markers, and regions". Even with this setting, it will only affect selected tracks if you have any selected. If you had two video tracks, selected 1, then made an edit, track 2 wouldn't ripple along with track one. So, make sure you don't have individual tracks selected while editing if you want all tracks to ripple.

Post-edit ripple allows you to edit without instantly rippling. This sounds like the mode you may be using. You probably have auto ripple turned off. You may want to consider turning it on. But, if you leave it off, doing a post-edit ripple manually merely remembers the very last edit you did and performs a ripple on that.

Probably the best way for you to work is to leave auto ripple on, set to all tracks markers & regions. Place two splits where you want them. Double click on the video or audio inbetween those splits to select that section. Press delete. The section between the splits is removed and everything to the right gets shoved over to butt up against what's on the left. This should work every time, all the time, if you do it right.

I do this slightly simpler than that even. I find the start of the break and split. Then i move the cursor to the end of the break, but don't split. I leave the cursor there, then drag the left edge of the part after the split over to the cursor. This removes it from the timeline and what's left jumps over to the left to fill in the space.
Tim L wrote on 8/22/2006, 4:54 PM
I've started using the trimmer a bit. Not frequently, but at least occasionally.

If I have a 30 second film clip, and I want to pull 5 seconds or so out of the middle, I drag it to the trimmer, set the in and out points, and then drag it to the timeline.

This isn't really that much of a help if you are adding the clip to the end of a video -- where it is easy enough to drag the whole clip onto the timeline, and adjust it as desired before butting it up against the end of the video. But when working at inserting something into the middle of the timeline, it seems easier to scope it out in the trimmer, find just what I want there, and then drag the "pre-trimmed" event to the timeline.

If the trimmer wasn't there at all, I guess most people wouldn't even notice, but I am starting to find it convenient on occasion.

TIm L
rustier wrote on 8/22/2006, 5:56 PM
I had to chime in and tell you that I had several long old videos/tapes/family movies that I had to stitch together and clip out the junk and I found the trimmer feature to be very helpful. I could just preview the thing and press the m (marker key) and I could even label the markers for those times I wanted to rearrange the order of things from the original stuff. It saved me a huge amount of time scrubbing (going back and forth on the timeline) and made assembly very nice.

It was especially helpful to me when I was using mpeg footage where I was looking at video "blocks" rather than the nice frames of DV-AVI. Zooming in to blocks was awkward and sometimes difficult to me but snapping to a marker was a cinch.

there's my two cents for what its worth.

gmes29 wrote on 8/23/2006, 1:50 AM
thanx all..
just one more question.. i found the Auto-ripple option and set it.. but since it fills the gaps automatically, where do i set the All Tracks, Markers, Regions option ahead of time so the auto-ripple knows what to?? is this in Preferences or someplace??
Tim L wrote on 8/23/2006, 4:12 AM
The Auto-Ripple button has a drop-down arrow just to the right of it. Click that arrow to get a list of options. (If I recall correctly, that is -- I'm not at a computer with VMS installed right now...)

I agree with Chienworks that the "all tracks, markers, and regions" setting is the one to stick with probably 99% of the time. This assures that audio, music, titles, etc., on other tracks all move together in synchronization.

Tim L