Graphics

Are you able to trim videos in the Video shader?  If not, where can you trim/edit video length before using it as a material?

Hey,

Trimming and sub clipping is a feature of XPression Clip Store. If you don't have this you'll need to trim your clips before entering them into XPression. 

Clip Store is completely separate from Xpression Designer/Studio?

Can clips be edited in the Codec program before converting to AVIs or does that just import as is?

It's part of the software but a separate license. If you have it you will find it under the Display menu when in Sequence mode. 

If you do not have it then you will find that the XPression codec is available on any machine with XPression installed. That means if you put Premier on that machine XPression encoded clips will run inside the software and further to this you will be able to export by selecting AVI > XPression codec. 

That separate license - that's runs the Clip Browser, which Clip Store would fall under, correct?

So outside of having that license to run clips on servers, the only way to trim clips coming into the machine as materials would be to edit them inside their native software and then export to an AVI in the Xpression Codec?  Just making sure I understand that we are limited in editing AVIs in Deisgner/Studio without that Clip Browser/Clip Store license.  

Correct Clip Store is part of another license, usually partnered with another software called INcoder. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BA72S5MieY

While I recommend trimming your clips before importing you do have one more option inside the software. If you pull the material from the material manager thumbnail onto a scene director track you'll see it will create a green track. This is a reference to the frames of the video and you can simply grab the end of it like you would a layer in Ae and effectively hide the frames you don't want at the beginning or end of the clip. This needs to be done per clip. 

You can also do some creative things with visual logic and scripting if you need it to be more dynamic than that.