Why use the Trimmer

[Stephen Mann]

I’ve been using Vegas since Version 3, and I’ve never used nor needed the trimmer. I learned to edit on the timeline and using the trimmer would certainly slow me down. I think it’s there for people familiar with the old editing paradigm of Premiere and FCP.

Steve Mann
MannMade Digital Video
http://www.mmdv.com

[Danny Hays]

I totally agree. The only reason I can think to use the trimmer is to preiew a clip, Pro 9 and later, before putting it on the timeline.

[Mark Prebonich]

When I preview clips, they just come up on the preview window anyways. I agree, using the timeline has seemed easier for me as well. I like having the additional real estate available by not having the trimmer window there.

-Mark

[John Rofrano]

Whether you find the trimmer useful or not probably depends on the type of shooting that you do. If you are shooting “events” where the footage is in a linear progression, the trimmer holds little value. Just drop your video onto the timeline, cut out the bad parts and you’re done. That’s how I work most of the time.

What the trimmer is useful for is extracting just the scenes you need from a much larger clip. A clip that may contain multiple takes of the same scenes for a movie you are shooting. In this workflow you would go through and mark all of your in and out points for the scenes you want to use and save them as subclips with useful names. This makes editing a lot easier when you start to assemble the movie especially since movies are rarely shot in a linear sequence.

The trimmer also allows you to easily fit a clip into an empty space on the timeline because you can trim it first (s the name implies). I will use this if I want to use just a measure or two of a song and I don’t have any place on the timeline to drop the entire song and trim it and move it into place. The trimmer does all this for you in one motion.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Jerry Norman]

I recently created a clip in Proshow Producer of four photo effects I wanted to use in a Vegas slideshow. I separated each of the four with a few black frames. When I brought the clip into Vegas I loaded it into the trimmer, trimmed the first photo effect and added it to the timeline. I repeated this for the remaining three photo effects. The trimmer works well for this, where you are trying to fit into a predefined slot in the timeline. I would especially prefer to use the trimmer if I had many more than four photo effect segments to trim and insert.

Jerry

[Lee Brennan]

Hi,
Les Stroud did a tutorial called “Using Trimmer As Source” that made me rethink using the trimmer. I had so many clips on the timeline (that I was splitting here and there) it was a bit confusing-so I tried using the trimmer as source and it helped. I believe the tutorial is on the SCS site.

[Bill Mash]

I played around with the trimmer more on my last project when I had lengthy clips that were well suited for subclips. It also use it quite a bit to select either Audio/Video followed by insert from cursor to timeline. Like many in this thread I saw no need, yet the more I use it the more valuable it becomes.

The biggest wall to using the trimmer more is the inability to set the quality of the display so I can play my AVCHD files without stuttering.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.