I use it because it keeps my timline a little cleaner ( got tired of having something way off somewhere that I didn't realize was there till I was watching the rendered video and it was 18 minutes long for a short 5 min promo vid).

Dave

I felt the same way, until I started using the trimmer more. Since then I find myself using it all the time for making cuts--it's just a handy place to put a piece of media and scan around though it to find material for a cut. Then I can keep the timeline area relatively free of clutter, and it seems to help me keep track of what I am trying to accomplish.

The other thing is that, when trying to find some media for a cut from another video track in the timeline, I end up having to scroll the "donor" media all over the place to find my cut. So then I usually have to slip-edit that donor media and make it small enough to get it relatively close to the spot on the "recipient" track where I want it to go. It can be confusing, lol. I will say that the trimmer can be a pain when you have more than one piece of media that you are trying to take footage from, to add to your main footage. In that case, it's more handy to just add each piece to a separate track and align them all (roughly) where you want them to go.

It's hard to explain I guess, but once you start using the trimmer I think you'll find it more useful than you first thought. I certainly did...

TB

Lets say that you are doing a multicamera shoot of a corporate presentation or award banquet. If one of your cameras is assigned to shoot audience reaction shots along with CUs of the speaker, you put that long clip in the trimmer and make subclips out of the reaction shots before you sync up for multicam editing, then you can pull them from the media pool as appropriate and needed.

Ralph

The trimmer does have the distinct advantage of being able to recall the bits and pieces of a clip that has been trimmed.

If you manually place a clip on the time line, trim it, and then discard the trimmings.... then change your mind at a later time and want to re-adjust your trim points.... Oh well... too late, the pieces have already been discarded.

The trimmer on the other hand doesn't actually discard the trimmings... it just hides them so to speak. You can return to a clip at anytime and re-adjust your trim points because the WHOLE clip, including the trimmed pieces will continue to show in the trimmer.

There have been a few threads on the trimmer. SCS has made a white paper available on what they envision the workflow to be with the trimmer.

There's also the Discovering the Sony Vegas Pro Trimmer window Sony newsletter article.

Mike

>"Is there some advatage to using the trimmer that I am missing?"

If you shoot mainly "in sequence" events, such as talks, concerts, church services etc, then basically everything is already in the right order, and working from the timeline can often be the best way.

Most of my projects are based around a script, with voice over plus interviews, and the order of shooting has little or nothing to do with the place where any given footage will end up.

Putting projects like this together without the trimmer would be unthinkable. To make things easier, I often create regions in the Trimmer, naming them according to their place in the script. So one region may be called "A03 Child unpacks lunch" and another "D06 Visual acuity test". This means the Regions view in Vegas Explorer will contain all the pieces I expect to use, in the order they are needed.
That's why I use the Trimmer.

Trimmer and regions can be a very easy way to work, especially when you capture long clips and need short bits.

For example we have been doing a series of interviews where the subject just talks for a few hours. Organizationally, it'd work well to capture entire tapes and then mark out regions as Peter described. You can view a list of a tape's regions in the Vegas explorer, and regions are more flexible than subclips. (Subclips have some technical advantages if I remember correctly, because they have fixed heads and tails. Maybe it's easier to use a keyframe-able mediaFX?)

A nice thing about regions is that they don't have fixed ends like a subclip, so it's easy to drop one on the timeline and then extend out the head or tail.

The down side of regions is that you can't browse them in the project media window. You have to use Vegas' explorer. That's dumb. I'd be happier if you could see them in both places.

Rob Mack

I come from a Avid Liquid background and had to use the Source window (trimmer) but when i went to vegas i never used the trimmer much, I do use it when i am editing my mud bog videos because I have to make cuts every 30 seconds or less for each truck run so the trimmer makes it easy for that. I love the new trimmer in 8c it is a llot more like my old liquid and having seperate viewers is great. The trimmer has its place and i am glad it is better.

Paul B

blink:
"If you manually place a clip on the time line, trim it, and then discard the trimmings.... then change your mind at a later time and want to re-adjust your trim points.... Oh well... too late, the pieces have already been discarded"

Maybe I'm misunderstanding your statement, but the trimmed portions are still there on the timeline. Just grab the end of the trimmed piece and extend it to the new trim point.

Peter, this is new to me and looks useful. Is there a way to display regions from across several clips at the same time?

Jerry

>Putting projects like this together without the trimmer would be unthinkable. To make things easier, I often create regions in the Trimmer, naming them according to their place in the script. So one region may be called "A03 Child unpacks lunch" and another "D06 Visual acuity test". This means the Regions view in Vegas Explorer will contain all the pieces I expect to use, in the order they are needed.

There's also the Discovering the Sony Vegas Pro Trimmer window Sony newsletter article.

This is a very nice article... I just spent a couple hours going through it and playing around with various aspects of the trimmer. This article was written by one of the co-authors of the book Digital Video and Audio Production, which is an awesome learning guide. Mr. Rebholz and Mr. Bryant seem to have a knack for giving deceptively simple-looking exercises that really illustrate the basic features of Vegas. The book is extremely thorough, and if a person faithfully works through the examples, you can really strengthen your knowledge of Vegas. It's a great book...

Thanks for posting the reference Mike!

TB

Unfortunately not Jerry, but if you've got your clips organised, clicking on any one immediately shows the regions you've created, so it's pretty instant to click back and forth.

You can also create subclips in the Trimmer, and these can be sorted into folders in Project Media, and then there's also Media Manager .... but I've got into the habit of working from Explorer, and don't use PM or MM at all. One of these days I'll learn MM so I can organise my Acid loops with tags, but it'll take many hours/days so it's hard to fit in.

I can also confirm I find the new trimmer functionality very useful indeed - even though I'm not coming from another NLE with the player and recorder monitors.

Especially when I need to cut-into my (already quite crowded) timeline, using just a short fragment (several seconds) of a very long, one-take clip (like those over 1-hour long we're routinely taking when shooting live music performances).

I've not used MM at all but I can see a problem with it if it relies on tags. Tags are dumb, even M$ has fallen into that trap.
The problem with tags is they don't let you build a hierarchy. The old school system of bins does except although Vegas has bins you can't send a 'clip' from the trimmer to a bin. Perhaps someone can come up with a COM addin to save the day. Ths shouldn't be rocket science, a 'clip' at it it's simplest only needs tape name, in point and outpoint to define. Oh well, OK Vegas doesn't do any of that timecode stuff so it'd have to be File Name, Time In, Time Out. Still simple enough. Bells ans whistles such as a thumbnail and a few bits of metadata would round it out.

Bob.

( got tired of having something way off somewhere that I didn't realize was there till I was watching the rendered video and it was 18 minutes long for a short 5 min promo vid).

I have also fallen foul of that too, so now, before I render anything, I click the button that takes you to the end of all the media on the timline. If you've left any stray media on the timeline that method shows it immediately.

Bob, I do use MM and really like tags. To me they work like the bins. I can put a clip in mutiple tags (bins) and I can nest tags under tags (i.e., create a hierachy of tags). For example I might have a hiearchy that has "people" and "interview" at the highest level. Under People, I might have "Billy", "Bob" and "Sue". Now, I can find all clips that have people in them, all clips that are interviews with Sue, or all interview clips. So I get the benefit of a hierachy, and the many-to-many functionality tags support. In a similar fashion, I use del.icio.us to tag everything I find on the web that I want to return to in the future. I am a big tagging advocate.

What I think needs a little more work is the integration between the different ways of categorizing in Vegas. For example, why can't I right click an item in MM and add it to the trimmer? It would be nice if MM could also support the types of things you can only define within a project: e.g., subclips and regions. These would become visible in MM for each project as it is opened. I also wish MM supported the Veg as a media type. I like to create standard Veg's that get reused across multiple projects (e.g., FBI warning, My company name/logo clip, etc.). It would be nice to quickly retrieve those via a MM tag. For now, I use the Vegas Explorer Favorites folder (which I only recently discoverd) to navigate to those.

Sorry, I'm going OT here with my rants. This thread has been very enlightening for me regarding Trimmer functionality. And in an earlier thread I learned that I can right-click and drag a selection from the trimmer to the timeline as a new take. This has definitely streamlined my workflow for certain types of work.

Jerry

>I've not used MM at all but I can see a problem with it if it relies on tags. Tags are dumb, even M$ has fallen into that trap.

After reading this thread yesterday, I pulled out Gary Kleiner's DVD on the window docking area (#4 in the series, for anyone that's interested) and watched it. In the part about the trimmer, I was reminded about another good reason to use the trimmer...markers and regions that stick in the media.

When you edit video on the timeline and place a marker or region, those don't stay fixed in the project. Sure you can make the selection in the Ripple Edit to have them move with your edits. But when you place the markers/regions in the trimmer and click the Save icon, they are stuck to the media and you can then save them as a subclip and there they'll stay with the media. So if you need to use that subclip in another project, you've now got those markers/regions to help you; but if you simply want to place that media on the timeline, they're there as well. And if you have them on the timeline and don't want to see the names cluttering your timeline...just hit Ctrl + Shift + K and you can toggle the names off. Finally, you can then promote them to the top level of the timeline (ie; make them project-level, not just event-level) simply by running the Promote Media Markers script.

So I really like the trimmer a lot--it's a great tool, and I probably should use it more. And thanks to this thread, I have been motivated to go learn to do just that!

TB

Jerry? Thread IS about trimmer BUT what you ask has Trimmer at its centre - so no worries from me mate!

For example, why can't I right click an item in MM and add it to the trimmer? - Yes, got my vote.

However . . . .

I also wish MM supported the Veg as a media type. I like to create standard Veg's that get reused across multiple projects (e.g., FBI warning, My company name/logo clip, etc.). It would be nice to quickly retrieve those via a MM tag.

What do you mean as a Media type? 'cos within MM it is already there.

I've just done a MM search for *.VEG. I got 441 coming back at me. Clicked on one, it rendered the proxy file, which I could audition and even DRAG to Trimmer.

Try it out with a VEG search? Now once you have collected your veggies you can sort and make TAGS for them.

Grazie

"I like to create standard Veg's that get reused across multiple projects (e.g., FBI warning, My company name/logo clip, etc.)."

Why not render them as clips and add the clips into your database. If you use these regularly having them already rendered saves rendering each time you use them.

Bob.

I never use the trimmer.

> "I never use the trimmer."

Fine, but it's not frivolous or uncool to decide which part of a clip one needs before adding it to the timeline.