I'm hoping I am understanding what you did. If I'm right you had a 1.5 hour clip and you wanted various pieces of this clip. You would add the clip to the timeline, trim front and back to the first piece and then add it back and trim front and back to get the second piece and so on.

The Multi-Trim feature probably would have saved you a bit of time. You can add the video to the timeline hit multi trim and then watch the video until you want a piece. Hit the split button, which splits the video, delete the first part. Watch until the end of the clip you want, hit split again. Continue until you hit the next piece you want, hit split and delete the part in the middle. It might have saved you a minute or two doing it this way. Hope this helps.

The best approach is the one that works easiest for you and gets you to the final outcome. Working with smaller clips is often times easier to work with. Are you capturing from tape? If so you need to capture in real time. Lets say you are 45 minutes into your capture and you antivirus software kicks in and starts an antivirus scan on your hard disk drive. This will result in dropped frames of the hard disk can not keep up with the real time video capture. The point is dropped frames will occur if anything interrupts the video capture and this can be minimized if you capture smaller clips at a time. If you are capturing from a hard disk camera or SD card then these types of concerns are less of any issue, but smaller clips do allow for better organization.

That's my two cents worth. Good Luck. Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT

McLean,

I think you have the idea of what I was doing. One of the reasons I did it the way I did was that the clips would not stay in the order they were on the original clip. So I was not sure if I used Multi-Trim if I could then rearrange the clips to the order I wanted.

Does anyone know if my rendering time was lengthened by doing what I did? Would I have save time during rendering if I would have used many smaller clips?

Thanks for the responses.

I'm not sure what you mean by the clips not staying in order. If you were trimming them and added the full video at the end of the trimmed clip, they should have, so I'm not clear on that concern. Ideally if you put the video in the timeline and trim it OR multi trim it the clips should stay in the right order. (you just have to make sure you delete the parts you don't want and not one of the pieces you do).
BUT having said that yes the clips are moveable no problem. I do a lot of my editing in the story board, because I can see all the clips (the front pic of them) rather than having to run down a full length of video. They if you want to move a clip, you just drag and drop it from one square to another.

As far as the processing time. It would stand to reason that there might be an additional time (I'm not sure) BUT I would think that capturing smaller clips JUST to make it easier to edit (when those clips might be useless for any other purpose, might take more time) I guess it depends upon the use of the original video.

You may want to experiment with rendering time, but I doubt it would make much difference.

This post is not exactly what you are doing, but you may find it helpful.

http://forum.cyberlink.com/forum/posts/list/7133.page Q9300 2.5 GHz
4 GB Ram
Nvidia 9800 GT