I can see this being useful - grouping the elements of a character’s gun comes to mind...but is renaming of any sort something many of you do?

its not so much to group for the mix stage (as a big blob defining a characters gun (or whatever) isnt that helpful unless the order is all consistent with the members of the group-

I was thinking moreso of individual clips....

say you have a car chase- hero car is labelled as such for all its elements-

bad car the same- I prefer actually having these sorts of things in separate predub grps so you can use vca's to control the balances easier, but some like to have engines in one predub, bys, sweeteners, skids, etc in different predubs. its really about trying to make it easy to rebalance the groups of elements in the most straightforward manner I think.

so, lets say you have the hero car engine being a clip named something like "fast ass hot rod car, V8 engine, driver is insane" which might be entertaining to the FX mixer, but something like "Bobs car engine with revs" might allow him to know what the sound is a part of quicker....

So rather than rename the clip, you region group it alone and rename the region?

The problem I see with region(clip)-groups is that "ungrouping" loses clip gain information of the group (unless I am missing prefs for this, or a way to "coalesce" clip-group info into the clip).
Especially if the group is spread over a few tracks, or several clips spaced out on a track, I might want to go in and check an edit, or a fade, or so...
Upon ungrouping, I lose all the volume info of the group, no?

Unless it has has changed relatively recently then yes.
I found out the hard way when I received a music score edit where there were layers of clip groups...

Ayayay what a mess to sort out. Clip levels and both fades and crossfades then disappeared when I unlocked the clip group.


Perhaps it has improved since then?

Six years later, its interesting how threads can live on over time.

yes you would lose that info, though that is largely not an issue when handing the work off- as your mixer might choose to create his/her own region groups. the point is communicating the information to them so they can do their work.

that is the way I treat them.

As a re-recording mixer who has also experienced pains with clip-grouped FX sessions, I'd advise against them, for the reasons stated above (if you put clip gain or fades on the clip group and then un-clip group you lose all that)

However, I love clip groups on otherwise blank regions for leaving notes or descriptions within the session. I'd advocate doing that instead (I also prefer it more than dropping markers). Grab a blank spot above the tracks that all live together, make a clip group, color it a color that stands out, and put a note or description in the name, THAT is really useful. Or do a thin vertical clip group before a bunch of tracks, or whatever.

Those kinds of guides or notes or pointers left in the session I really appreciate when I'm mixing, but actual useable FX clip grouped together not so much, as I'm going to have to put the energy into un-clip grouping all of them and then I lose the names or whatever info was put into that clip group in the first place.

My 2 cents on the matter, at any rate!

Oh yes! Both of this, also if you colour these they stand out visually straight away too.