The Library is much more than a passive storehouse of material for your Pinnacle Studio productions.

The Library Browser has several features for decluttering your view by hiding assets that aren’t relevant to your purpose. No matter how numerous your media files, the combined power of these techniques can greatly speed your browsing.

Most importantly, each location tab corresponds to a different selection on the Navigator. Like web browser tabs, location tabs are readily defined (click the ‘+’ icon at the right end of the tab list), and come in handy for keeping track of multiple things simultaneously.

Clicking within the Navigator sets the location for the current tab; conversely, clicking another tab transfers you to its saved location on the tree. Only the assets within the chosen location are displayed in the Browser. If the location has subfolders, however, their contents will be included. To keep things simple, choose a location as near the bottom of the folder hierarchy as possible.

Other controls let you restrict the display further by filtering out some of the assets in the chosen location. Each location tab maintains its own set of filters, so any change of filtering settings affects the current tab only.

When you have Project Bins selected in the Navigator, you can filter by media type.

By clicking the icons for Video, Audio, Photo, and Project, you hide or show the corresponding media type. When the icons are orange, they are active, and the corresponding media type is displayed. When the icons are white, the corresponding media type is hidden.

When you have Project Bins selected in the Navigator, you can filter used and unused media by clicking the Hide Used Files icon. When the icon is orange, all files are visible; when the icon is white, files that have already been added to the Timeline are hidden. Hiding used files is an easy way to avoid duplicating or missing files when you are creating a project.

The Filter by rating control at the top of the Library hides all assets that don’t have at least the specified rating from one to five stars (zero stars means ‘unrated’). To use the filter, simply click on the star that represents the minimum rating you want to bother with. The default filter setting is to show all assets regardless of rating.

See Inadvertent filtering for instructions on switching off all filters at once. To deactivate just the rating filter click the last selected star or double-click any star.

To display only stereoscopic 3D content, click 3D at the top of the Library. To return to viewing 2D assets as well, click 3D again.

Another way to narrow the field of displayed assets is with filtering by tags. Tags are keywords that you can assign to assets as you work. Once tags have been defined, you can use them in several ways to control which assets are displayed by the Browser. See Tags for detailed information.

At the top right of the Library is a search field that gives one further way to filter the display. As you begin entering your search term, the Browser continually updates the view to include only those assets with text that matches your search term.

Even when multiple terms are separated by spaces, partial-word as well as whole-word matches are allowed in each term. A dropdown list lets you choose whether the search will be satisfied if even a single search term matches the asset text, or if all terms must match for the asset to be accepted.

The various filtering methods can be combined at will. Should you leave any of the filtering types switched on when you don’t need it, it’s likely that some assets will be hidden that should be displayed. When an item is unexpectedly missing in the Browser, verify that filters are inactive.

The Browser guards against the possibility of inadvertent filtering by displaying a ‘filter alert’ that remains visible as long as any filter is in use.