the good news is there are a variety of ways to trim and edit. If you have already dropped the clip onto the timeline - one easy way is to simply left click above or below the video you want to trim and drag (hold the left click) till you make a "region" you want out. Then right click on the video to bring up the pop up window and left click cut - or just press control x on your keyboard. boom its gone. if your auto ripple is on, the clip will automatically shift to close the gap.

if you want to scroll quickly or "scrub" a video, look for a region that says rate - on my display it is below the tracks on the left. You will see some arrows 2 left and 2 right bunched together. Left click on that and drag it back and forth to quickly scrub through your area of interest

if you want to open a clip in the trimmer - one easy way to get the part of the clip you want is to simply select the region (left click and drag - or snap to markers) then left click and drag that section up to the timeline. once you do it you will say to yourself oh that was easy.

as I said there are more ways to edit. as far as using the trimmer - my personal preference is to use it for long clips where I may want several sections and maybe I want to change the order around - otherwise I just use the timeline. If your clips are a bunch of short ones it might be just as easy for you to do your editing on the timeline - you might want to keep the auto ripple off till you are ready to put it all together.

if you trim in the timeline - there is nothing to replace. if you want to use the trimmer, right click the media you want to add and left click on 'open in trimmer'. The clip will not go to the timeline until you select something and drag it up or use the pop up dialogue.

I would suggest you get a short test clip and just start clicking away at it like a mad man, trying anything you can find. You will soon discover how intuitive and user friendly VMS is. If you mess something up just click the go back button (little blue arrow going left) or just close the project without saving it and reopen it.

Also if you use the search function of this forum you will discover a gold mine of information on any topic you can think of - rest assured the chances are good whatever question you have has been discussed at least once.

don't be concerned about the questions you ask here- there are people on all levels of experience and understanding that come here. the majority are very nice and happy to help anyone

have fun with it

One way to have a good view on your source is to use the Windows Thumbnail functionality - at least on my system they show all the source, that I use: Stills, AVI clips, DV clips and other sources. (Remember, that you can make the thumbnails bigger or smaller using i.e. MS Powertoys TweakUI). A quick doubleclick starts the clips in Mediaplayer and there you can also jump forward and backward in the shown clip.

And the stills/clips I want to use I just drag and drop to the timeline for later shortening/colourprocessing/pan-crop etc.

This is the way I work.

My 1920x1200 24 inch LCD is just acceptable for this - but making me plan for an 30 inch with some 2500x1600 resoloution. On such a screen I could much better have 1 or 2 open folders with thumbnails to the left and the VMSP to the right with the mediaplayer below perfectly enabling this workflow.

Thank you so much for your help folks. I've played with the trimmer using the tips you've supplied and have now worked out a flow that should work fine for me.

I've got to tell you that I'm really happy with the stability of VMS vs Pinnacle so far. It seems so so much smoother and more responsive than Pinnacle and it hasn't crashed yet!!!!


Cheers and thanks again,
Gary

Thanks Gary for asking this question. I've been wondering about some of these same ideas.

I'm trying to put together a project for my son's 7th B-Day party showing some "highlights" of what he's been doing over the past year. I have several mini-DV tapes that I need to selectively extract clips from and have been doing some playing to find the best workflow. Some of these suggestions should really help.

I second your comments about VMS compared with Pinnacle. Pinnacle was nothing but one big headache. System lock-ups, software crashes, turning the camera off during capture, . . etc. VMS is a welcome change. Have not had the first system / software / camera related problem !

Hi

I'm new to Vegas MS and despite a bit of searching, can't find the answer to something basic that you have touched upon in this particular thread i.e.

"press S to split, and delete the unwanted material."

It is great that VMS is a non-destructive editing package but how do you permanently delete unwanted parts of a clip? I know how to trim but any clip you split (having deleted the 'unwanted' part/s) remains the same length when you check the properties.

I want to delete rubbish shots to free up more drive space.

Cheers

I would say you can do a selective render of your clip - so just envelope what you want and save it under a different name - or heck for that matter save it as the original name and overwrite it or save it to an archive file or drive.

Thankyou for the reply - great help.

Another question though please - are you aware of any loss of quality to the clip by doing this?

Paul

If it's a DV clip and you haven't done any alterations such as color correction, compositing, effects, titles, etc. then Vegas does a bit-for-bit copy when rendering to a new DV file. There is absolutely no loss of quality at all.

If you have made alterations then SONY's DV codec is amazingly good and survives dozens of generations without noticeable loss.

That is very good news.

I'd rendered a few DV clips (well, 'AVI' clips - same thing presumably?) in VMS and couldn't see any difference on my 19" LCD. Hadn't output anything so far to examine it on a larger TV screen though.

So, thankyou for the information.

I am warming to this Sony system (had tried a few others in the past).