Tips on grabbing short clips from long scenes?

gogiants wrote on 7/1/2002, 1:14 PM
I tried various searches without luck, so I hope I didn't miss any past postings...

After capture using scene detection I will have a clip that is several minutes long. No surprise, but I often want to take about 10-15 seconds out of that longish scene. Having viewed the full scene, I have a rough idea of where that 10-15 seconds lies within that scene.

Now the "problem": In order to get at that 10 seconds, what I've been doing is the following: go way right on the timeline, insert the long clip in some empty space, split out the 10 seconds I want, go back left in the timeline, drop the "good" 10 seconds to the desired spot, then go back way right to delete out the stuff I don't want. This typically leaves me with lots of junk clips to the right of where I'm doing the "real" editing. This is time consuming and prone to error.

Anyone have any slicker/quicker/better ways of doing this? Also:

1) Is there any way to jump to a certain spot within an event? For instance, jump to 2:30;00 WITHIN an event? This would save me from doing the math relative to the overall project timeline, which is "skewed" because I've dropped the entire clip to the right of my "real" working area.
2) Is there any way to find or jump to a given timecode, either within one file or across a series of files? I have continuous timecode on the original tape, but scene detection splits it into multiple files. Do the captured files have any "knowledge" of the timecode from the actual tape?
3) Books I've seen (e.g. Rubin's "Little Digital Video Book") do a good job of talking about logging tapes, but don't explain mapping this to portions within the captured files. Anyone have tips/techniques to do this effectively?

If the answer is "upgrade to Vegas" then I'd be curious to hear specifically how Vegas helps. Simple pointers to manuals or posts on the Vegas forum are welcome!

Thanks...

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 7/1/2002, 3:15 PM
Vegas isn't going to help you any in this situation as it's editing features in this respect are identical to VideoFactory.

If you've activated the trimmer in VideoFactory, you may find this helpful. It lets you slice out sections of a clip before inserting them into the timeline. Personally i find it an extra step and doing what you've described is easier. But that's me. Others may prefer the trimmer.

Are you using the overlay track in your project? If not, you could drop the clip into the overlay track and do your selection and trimming there, then drag it down to the main track.