AVID MEDIA COMPOSER 7 ESSENTIAL TRAINING – EDITED DOWN VERSION
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
3m 54s
Check it out: Overview of changes from version 6 to 7 (NEW)
Basic audio tools got the biggest makeover in version seven, so let's go over those right now. And to do that, i'm going to open up a sequence and choose this one here. If you want to make a basic clip based audio change you no longer have to open the audio mixer to do that. Rather, you can just open the Track Control Panel which you do right here (little arrow next to the timecode in the upper left part of the timeline) and then you can choose Clip Gain. When you do that, you'll notice that we have a Little icon in the lower left and a slider comes up and you're able to increase and decrease your audio right within the Timeline.
Next up for audio, let's go ahead and open up the audio mixer. New to this tool is a Master slider which will affect the audio levels of all of your tracks at once. So essentially, you can raise or lower the entire mix in Tandem which can be pretty useful.
Next up, I want to talk about AMA. Now there are a couple of changes here that I quickly want to cover. Let me go over to an empty bin here, instead of needing to go through the menu, going to the File and then AMA link, you can actually drag and drop your clips right into the bin.
I've got a folder of clips right here (in the Finder drive not MC) and you can either drag and drop this click, if I don't hold any modifier down, this will perform an import and it will import this based on your media creation settings. Or, if I hold down Alt or Option on a Mac, it will AMA link. As you can see, the file was brought in and I've linked to this file via AMA. We bring that up again.
You can also link an entire folder, so here I have a folder with lots of clips in it. I'm just going to Alt+Drag, or Option+Drag on a Mac, bring it in and then all of the clips are brought in automatically without having to go through any menus. Again, we'll go over this in much greater detail later in the course. But this is just a quick intro to the ways that these features have changed.
One more thing regarding AMA, you used to link to either AMA file or AMA volume. Now, it is just AMA link and you navigate to 1 file or you can Ctrl click or Cmd click on multiple files and bring everything in like so.
And of course you can still just bring in a folder of files by clicking on the Parent Folder. And then just one last thing regarding AMA, I'm going to go ahead and throw several of these clips into the timeline, so that we have some AMA media. And as you can see these clips are purple. And the reason for that, is that in the Timeline Fast Menu in Clip color, you can choose to have your AMA Media visually separate than the rest of your media.
So working with AMA and traditional media is now simple as ever and you even get a visual indication of which is which. I'm going to undo that, Ctrl Z.
And I just want to go over one more thing here and that is Frame Flex. Now, Frame Flex allows you to natively work with very high resolution files, like 2k, 4k and above. Now, just to quickly show you this, I'm going to take one of the clips that I brought in via AMA and we'll go ahead and grab this one for example.
I'm just going to go ahead and sort of go through this and let's say that I want to a tighter shot and on Kim here. I'm just going to right click and choose Source Setting and in the Frame Flex tab, I'm able to resize this frame, like so and you can see the results down here. And this is going to allow me to access very specific parts of the frame without applying any Effects. Now, just imagine this with a 4K file, for example you can be working in an HD project, bring in a very large video file, re-frame it and maintain the true HD resolution of the file while you do it.
I'll go ahead and say okay and you'll notice that the clip was reframed. Now if I Edited this into the timeline, which I'll do right here, in, out and splice, I'm able to easily go back by simply parking on the clip, going into the Effect Editor, and then you can see that even though I don't have an effect applied, because I used Frame Flex I get my sizing box and I can resize as I like. We'll take a much closer look at FrameFlex later in the course.
IF I WANT TO CREATE A NEW USER PROFILE, I would just click on Create User Profile and only in this default. And the reason for that is that if I ever need to go back to the Media Composer default factory settings, I can do that easily. However, I do want to use my own user settings, because user settings are customizable. It allows me to have a unique editing experience, in regard to what tools are available to me, how I access those tools, the arrangements of windows in my user interface, and so on. One other option within this drop-down is Import User or User Profile. I would choose this if I had already created a user profile and had them stored somewhere.
If I need to create a new project in this location, I click on New Project. And I immediately want to rename this. And I have a number of options that I need to choose from, which are located right here. Under Format, I can choose from a number of standard definition, NTSC and PAL choices, and lots of HD options. Now, I happen to know that my footage was shot in 1080i-5994, and I'm going to choose that here. I also have options for aspect ratios, color space, raster dimension, and this 3D option. Now I'm not working in 3D so I'm going to leave that off. And we're also not matching back to film, so I'm going to leave that unchecked. And I'll press OK.
Now I have a project located in the private location. If I move on to Shared, I would choose this if I am working on this computer with another editor that has a different logon. It's in the shared Avid projects folder and as you can see, there is nothing located here right now. For external, this is a location that is anywhere else that's not in the private projects folder or shared projects folder. This can be a flash drive location as indicated here, or my computer's desktop, or anywhere else in my computer system. This is a flexible option that allows me to dictate exactly where I want my project to live. The way that I dictate that is clicking on this folder here and navigating to that location.
I can simply click on my project, Swing Dancing Basic, and press OK. Media Composer launches, the project opens, and we're ready to edit.
The Project window is the central repository of everything inside of your project. As you see, there are six tabs going across here and, if I expand this, you'll be able to see all six. And we have the bin tab, the settings, our effect palette, format, usage, and info.
And if I want to open up multiple bins I can either do so separately or what's really great about Media Composer six is that they've introduced, tabbed interface. So I can just drag my bin into this heading right here and the bin will open right beside the previous bin, and I can toggle back and forth. Like so. And I can open up as many as I want, and as you can see, we really can't see what the bins are called anymore. To make it easy, there's this drop down menu, where I can toggle between them like so.
So I can have as many bins as I want open, and this is a really great organizational tool, so we don't have window clutter and so that we can contain all of the things that we want to work on at once, in one location.
To take a bin outside of a folder I can just drag into an empty space in the project window and out they come. To create a new bin, click on new bin or use my keyboard shortcut of Ctrl+N or Cmd+N
To empty the thrash, I come up to my fast menu again, and say Empty Trash, and it asks me if I'm sure; yes I am and it's emptied. Keep in mind most editors don't actually empty the thrash until they're done with the project. Because while it's nice to discard of things that you don't think you'll need in the future, it's always nice to bring it back in an emergency.
Most of the settings are user settings. This follows you, the user as you go from system to system, and from project to project. Because it's important you build your own editing workspace. So, A VERY COMMON USER SETTING, IS SOMETHING LIKE THE INTERFACE. double click on interface and this is going to show me what my user interface looks like. There's a couple of options I can choose. For example, perhaps I would like my interface to look a little bit darker. And I can apply that to see if I like it. And maybe I want my accent color to change from blue to, say, purple. And we'll apply that, and you can see the changes made over here in the interface.
ANOTHER EXTREMELY COMMON USER SETTING IS YOUR KEYBOARD. click on keyboard (or any other user setting), and I'm going to press Ctrl+D, or Cmd+D if I was on a Mac. This DUPLICATES MY SETTINGS. For example, I can have one keyboard that is dedicated to my general editing environment, and another keyboard that's dedicated to my audio environment. I would then move from setting to setting by shifting this check mark right here.
Examples of a project setting are things like Audio Project, where you define how your audio comes into this project. And things like Media Creation Settings. Go ahead and type M. Here's our Main Media Creation settings. And this is where I set things like my Media Resolution and the hard drives to which my media is captured to. Things that are very important for this project.
Finally, there's Site Settings. A common site setting is something like deck configuration, where I can choose how this system interfaces with the deck connected to it. It's something that is very specific to this system, and that's why it's called a site setting.
If I click on this button here that says untitled (at the bottom of the bin), you'll see that I have a number of options, presets, about the ways that I can display information within text view. So, if I click on capture, this is all information that is really useful during the capturing process.
THE MOST POWERFUL THING ABOUT TEXT VIEW IS WHEN YOU SET UP YOUR OWN VIEW. AND YOU DO THAT BY CLICKING ON THE FAST MENU WITHIN YOUR BIN, AND SELECTING CHOOSE COLUMNS.
LET'S GO AHEAD AND SETUP A VIEW THAT IS VERY VIDEO FOCUSED. So I'm going to select All None, to deselect everything that was in there. And we'll go ahead and choose Format and Frame, Tracks, Video and Video File Format. I'll go ahead and click OK, and as you see here, here's everything that we just chose. If you'd like to reorder the way that you look at this, you can just grab the heading and drag. So let's have our frames right by the clip name, and then let's go to Format, and we'll keep everything else the same. And I want to name this and use it again, so I'll come to this button that now says Format.1, and choose Save As. And I'm just going to call this Video View. Press OK, and now this is one of the options that I can select from as I toggle back and forth between my various text views. You'll also see the setting if I click on my Settings tab.
Another bin view is frame view. And I'll go ahead and select that from this drop down. And, this simply shows you thumbnails of all of the clips in your bin. so if you want to change the first frame, you just click on the clip. I'm going to press spacebar to play.
If I would like to increase the size of these frames, I press Ctrl+L, or Cmd+L on a Mac.
If I want to make sure that all of my frames fill the window, I come to the fast menu, and choose > Fill Window.
I'm going to expand the size of this and show you one more method that is really great in Frame View, and that's story boarding.
Come up to File and Print Bin so that someone can see the layout that you've chosen.
The final bin view is Script View. So, we'll choose Script, and as you see here this is kind of a combination between Frame and Text. But the real special thing about Script View is that I can insert notes. So, if I've gone though and captured these clips I can put my notes in this field right here. This is my favorite take, and let's say this one didn't work out so well. We can insert whatever information we want. There's actually no limit here, so you can actually copy and paste entire transcripts into this field for interviews. If I go back to Text View, and I chose Columns, and Display Comments, and click OK, these comments appear right here.
I have two open bins, here and here, and to the left of the bin name is a little star. This indicates that the bin has not been saved since something inside of it was modified. If I was on a Mac, this icon would be a little diamond. To save a bin, I just click on the bin heading and type Ctr+S, or Cmd+S on a Mac. As you can see, this bin is now saved, but this bin is not. So, TO ACTUALLY SAVE ALL OPEN BINS, YOU JUST CLICK ON THE PROJECT WINDOW. TYPE CTRL OR CMD+S, AND THEN ALL OPEN BINS ARE SAVED AT ONCE.
If you're in the timeline you can also type Ctrl+S or Cmd+S. Media Composer doesn't rely on you alone to save the project along the way. Media Composer also saves the project via a great feature called AUTO SAVE.
IF I CLICK ON THE SETTINGS TAB, AND THEN OPEN UP MY BIN SETTINGS YOU'LL SEE HERE THAT I HAVE AN AUTO-SAVE INTERVAL, AN INACTIVITY PERIOD, AND A FORCED AUTO-SAVE INTERVAL. I LIKE TO HAVE MEDIA COMPOSER SAVE MY PROJECT EVERY 10 MINUTES. And an inactivity period of 15 seconds is also a little high, I think so, I changed this to 5, and then I changed this to 15. back up their work they always back up in multiple locations.
ALWAYS REMEMBER, A CRASH SHOULD NEVER REALLY AFFECT YOU AS AN EDITOR, BECAUSE YOU'VE TAKEN THE TIME TO BACK UP YOUR PROJECTS IN MULTIPLE LOCATIONS EVERY SINGLE TIME YOU EDIT.
I'm going to minimize Avid, because backing up actually takes place outside of the application. I'm just going to go inside my Exercise Files folder, and copy my Swing Dancing Basic Project (folder), which, as you can see here, was modified on November 3rd. Copy. And then I have a back-up folder on my flash drive, so that even if my computer crashes, my flash drive has all of my project data. And as you see here, I already have a folder titled Back-up of Swing Dancing Basic, November 3rd, so that's the folder I'm going to put it in. Paste. There might be a couple of dialog boxes that ask you if you want to copy the file without it's properties. This is okay, so we're going to go ahead and say yes to all.
And if I come over to these buttons here. This is the step backward one frame. Step forward one frame. Step back ten frames. And step forward ten frames. Again, here they are on the user interface, but on our keyboard these are the 1, 2, 3, and 4 keys. I press 1 to go back ten frames or one third of a second, 2 to go forward ten frames. 3 to go back one frame and 4 to go forward one frame. And if I press the left arrow key I go to the left by one frame, and the right arrow key I go to the right by one frame.
ALSO, IF I WANT TO GO TO THE BEGINNING OF A CLIP, I CAN PRESS THE HOME BUTTON. AND IF I WANT TO GO TO THE END OF A CLIP, I CAN PRESS THE END BUTTON. If you take a look at the left and right side of the Play button, you'll see the Mark In button and the Mark Out button.
A GREAT BUTTON TO KNOW IS THE PLAY INTO OUT, SO YOU CAN SEE HOW THE CLIP LOOKS BEFORE YOU EDIT IT INTO THE TIMELINE. AND THAT CORRESPONDS TO THE 6 KEY.
Also, IF YOU'D LIKE TO KNOW THE DURATION OF THE CLIP IN BETWEEN YOUR IN AND OUT POINT, you can look up here in the centre duration box
I am going to Ctrl+click, or Cmd+click on a Mac Near the edit point, and it will snap right there. I can mark an end-point at the beginning. And I'm going to Ctrl+Alt+click, or Cmd+Option+click if I was on a Mac, and mark an out. This will snap to the tail instead of the head which is what I want here. And then I want to extract both video and audio. So to quickly select all of my tracks, I'm going to press Ctrl+A, or Cmd+A on a Mac, and then I'm going to press X to extract.
Once you've edited shots into the timeline, you'll often want to move them around. Whether this means switching locations, or just nudging them slightly one way or the other, it's important that you know how to reposition clips once you've edited them. THE YELLOW ARROW ON THE BOTTOM IS EXTRACT SPLICE SEGMENT MODE AND THE RED ARROW ON TOP IS LIFT OVERWRITE SEGMENT MODE. instead of editing shots from the source monitor to the timeline, these arrows are for grabbing shots and moving them around the timeline. we want to change the order of these two shots. So what I'm going to do is just click on the extract splice segment mode (yellow arrow), and then click on this clip right here.
And if I click and drag, and I drag to the left, you'll see that I get a four window display. Now, the first and the fourth windows represent the frames on either side of the clip that I'm about to drop down, so I can see exactly where I'm dropping it. The second and third windows represent the first and last frames of the clip that I'm dragging, so, as you might imagine I want to snap, to the point, in between two edits. And if you remember, I was able to snap to an edit by holding down Ctrl, or Cmd on a Mac, and this is no different.
I'm going to hold down Ctrl, and now, when I drag this clip you can see that it snaps to those edit points. Okay, so we're going to insert this shot right here, and I'm going to let go, and the shots changed position.
Another way to actually grab multiple shots at one time is to make sure that I have the correct arrow selected and then lasso, and then they're both selected using extract splice segment mode. So, I'm going to grab on, and then I'm going to hold down the Ctrl key and just move it over.
Now if you wanted to extract an entire segment in this case, I would just click on the segment and press the Delete key on my keyboard.
Switching shots in the timeline is very important, but sometimes you just want to nudge a shot without affecting any shots around it. To achieve this, you'll use the other type of segment mode, represented by this red arrow here. It's Lift Overwrite Segment Mode
And I'm going to select this, and by using the M, comma, period, and backslash keys on my keyboard, I'm going to be able to nudge this either by one frame, or by ten frames right or left. Now, the comma and the period go to the left and right. So if I press the comma, I nudge to the left. If I press the period, I nudge one frame to the right. If I press my m key, I nudge ten frames to the left. And if I press my backslash key, I nudge 10 frames to the right. So this is a great way to move your segments around the timeline.
Now you know how to edit shots with Splice and Overwrite, remove shots with Extract and Lift, and move shots around using Extract Splice Segment Mode and Lift Overwrite Segment Mode. Each of these functions is related to one another in a fundamental way. They add, subtract, and move around shots by correlating operation of either inserting and extracting. Or overwriting and moving material. Now, what I want to do is take it one step further and combine the functionality of a couple of these commands. If I hover in the upper portion of any of these segments in the timeline, I am enabling Lift Overwrite Segment Mode. If I hover in the lower portion of these tracks, I'm enabling Extract Splice Segment Mode.
So you may have noticed that all of these related functions are linked by color. The yellow functions of Splice, Extract, and Extract Slice Segment Mode are related. While the red functions of Overwrite, Lift, and Lift Overwrite Segment Mode are related.
To make a sub-clip, I can do one of two things. I can either drag this icon up here into my bin. And you'll see that there is an icon that looks a lot like a master clip, just a little bit smaller. And I immediately want to rename this. The other way I could create a sub-clip is to Alt drag, or Option drag if I was on a Mac. Right from the source monitor to my bin. So I'll hold down the Alt key and drag my sub-clip over, and you can see that I created one that way as well. This is a duplicate so I'm just going to delete the sub-clip and OK, and this is the one we want to work with. Now similarly we could also sub-sequence which means to just create a portion of a sequence that we want to use for later.
Trimming is a very powerful tool, but if you don't use it correctly, you can run into some trouble with audio and video sync. I want to trim my V2 track with these other three tracks, so that everything will move simultaneously. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to Shift+Click on this side of the edit up here on V2. So it's included in that trim. I'll go ahead and trim over to the left by pressing my comma again. And I'll release Everything stayed in sync. So bottom line. As you're trimming, make sure not to forget all of your tracks that are involved in the trim. While it might not look like they're involved, they definitely are because we have these points of sync that we need to maintain. So make sure that you have the shift clicking of our trim rollers as an available option as you go forward.
ORGANIZATION AND CUSTOMIZATION
YOU CAN STEP THROUGH EITHER ONE OR TEN FRAMES AT A TIME, USING YOUR ONE, TWO, THREE, AND FOUR KEY.
BUT THE REALLY GREAT THING ABOUT K IS THAT YOU CAN USE IT TO GO IN SLOW MOTION. SPECIFICALLY, IF I HOLD DOWN K AND J AT THE SAME TIME, I'LL GO BACKWARDS AT ONE QUARTER SPEED. IF I HOLD DOWN K AND L AT THE SAME TIME, I'LL GO FORWARD AT ONE QUARTER SPEED.
As we keep building sequences with more and more video and audio tracks, it can become very useful to be able to select exactly the tracks that we want, without having to click them all on, or click them all off separately. So to select all the tracks at once, I press Ctrl+A, or Cmd+A on a Mac.
If I want to deselect all the tracks at once. I press Ctrl+Shift+A, or Cmd+Shift+A on a Mac.
If I already have some of the tracks selected and I want to automatically select the reverse of what I have selected, I just drag a lasso through my track selectors. And the reverse are selected.
If I want to turn off all of the video tracks to a certain point I just have to Shift+Click on one of the tracks that is on, and drag up.
If I want to turn on certain video tracks, I just have to Shift+Click on a track that's off and drag down.
Now let's cover zooming. So far we've just been using our scale bar to zoom in and out. But again, keyboard shortcuts are better. So I want to draw your attention to the Timeline Fast Menu, where we see more detail, and less detail. This is mapped to Ctrl-, and Ctrl-, respectively. (FCP Option + and -) We're going to map those to other keys when we learn about mapping, but for now, let's go ahead and learn this. So, as I press ctrl+], or cmd+ ] on a Mac, I'm going to zoom in. And I can zoom in so far, that my position indicator actually splits into two. And this represents one frame of video, we covered enlarging tracks, but I want to cover how to make them smaller, as well. I'm going to go ahead and select all my tracks by pressing Ctrl+A. And I'm going to press Ctrl+K and that makes all of my tracks smaller. And again, Ctrl+L or Cmd+L on a Mac makes them larger. So sometimes I might like to have my video tracks large and my audio tracks small.
So, let's say I would like to match frame the beginning of her interview here, cause I want to see what came before that. So I'm going to select V1. Then I'm going to come into my timeline fast menu, and click on this button here that looks like a little frame of film. So, this brings up the frame on V1, so I'll just move my monitor down to V1, and we have this exact frame of video loaded up here. If I would like to match frame on V2, I just have to select V2.
Now, let's say I have something like eight, ten video tracks, and I want to match frame the material on V1. Rather than deselecting all of the above video tracks, and then finally getting to V1, I have another technique in mind. If I Right+Click on V1, even if V2 is selected, I can choose the option Match Frame Track. This again matches the frame on V1, and I don't have to worry about my track selectors.
The command palette, which is a collection of all the possible button and menu items that you can use to construct your most ideal editing environment. So we open the command palette by choosing it from the tools menu, or its keyboard shortcut is ctrl+3, or cmd+3 on a mac.
We also want to open our keyboard settings. I just need to click on the Settings tab, and I'm just going to click on any setting and type k to go down to the keyboard. In the first chapter, we duplicated the keyboard and made an audio and an edit keyboard, so we're going to be working in our edit keyboard, as indicated by this check mark. In the Command palette, we want to make sure that we have Button-to-Button Reassignment selected. That will allow us to map any of the buttons within this list to our keyboard.
So, I'm going to start in Smart Tools, because something I always do is I map the lift overwrite segment mode, and the Extract Splice Segment Mode to 9 and 0. Why is that? Well, we've already talked about how j, k, and l, and i, and o are conveniently located all in one space on our keyboard setup. So if I mapped Lift Overwrite Segment Mode to nine, and Extract Splice Segment Mode to zero, I can rest three fingers on j, k, and l. I can extend those fingers to i and o to mark, and then I can extend them just a little bit further to move material in the time line. I call this pyramid of power.
I'm also going to map my Match Frame button to my keyboard and I like to map that to Shift-M.
HOW TO MAP MENU ITEMS TO YOUR KEYBOARD. I'll go ahead and open my edit keyboard and I'll press Ctrl+3 to open my Command palette. And I want to change this to Menu- to-Button Reassignment, okay. NOW, WHAT I'M GOING TO SHOW YOU HOW TO DO IS MAP THE MORE DETAIL AND LESS DETAIL TO THE UP AND DOWN ARROW. Now as you'll see, as I bring this cursor through my interface, it looks like a little white menu. This is telling me that I am all set to map my menu items.
What I do is I click on my keyboard, I'm going to click on the down arrow, then I come to my Timeline Fast menu, and I'm going to choose the menu item, Less Detail. You can see that it was mapped to the down arrow. I'll do the same thing for the up arrow, again you press on the button first. Then you navigate to the menu item. And you can see that we now have this mapped to the up and down arrow. I think it's a lot easier to remember than Ctrl+ and Ctrl+.
I'M ALSO GOING TO MAP MY WAVEFORM TO SHIFT-W. So again, I'm going to hold down Shift, click on w, come down to my Timeline Fast menu, go to Audio Data, and Waveform. I'm going to press Shift-w to show my Waveform. And I'll press it again to turn it off. I think this is a much easier way to show your wave form, than to be constantly opening your Track Control panel.
I'm just going to open the Command palette one more time, to just briefly touch on Active palette. If you chose this, then all of the buttons within this menus are just active, they are those buttons, but you really never use this, because if you take the time to go into the Command palette to find a button, you might as well just map it to your keyboard. So, that is available, but it's something that I don't use that often.
I have my timeline here, and I'd like to make some changes. But before I do, I want to save this one out as the default setting in case I ever need to come back to it. So I'm just going to click on this menu down here and choose Save As. And, I'm going to just write in default.
OKAY, WITH THAT DONE, I'M READY TO CREATE MY VIDEO-CENTRIC VIEW. So I want to select my video tracks, but not my audio tracks or my time code track. So I'm going to Shift+drag to deselect all of my audio tracks, and then I'm going to press Control+l or Command+l on a Mac to enlarge these. Alright, that looks good. Now I'm going to go ahead and Lasso through all my tracks to select just my audio tracks. And this time I'm going to press CTRL+k, or command k on a mac. And one other thing I'd like to do is ADD SOME CLIP FRAMES TO MY VIDEO TRACKS. To do that I'm going to come down to my Timeline Fast menu, and chose Clip Frames. And as you see here we have a visual indication of what each one of these clips is. It's a thumbnail of the first frame of each one of these video segments. So this looks good for my video timeline view. There are more things you could add. For example, there are lots of different text options that you can add, but things are already getting kind of busy, so I'm going to forgo that. And then I'm going to come down to my menu here, choose Save As, and I'm just going to call this edit, as it's my main editing view. And say OK.
And now I'm going to CREATE AN AUDIO-CENTRIC VIEW. BUT BEFORE I DO, I WANT TO SWITCH BACK TO MY DEFAULT, SO IT'S A LITTLE BIT EASIER TO CREATE. And now with my audio track selected, I just want to make those a little larger. So I'm going to press Ctrl+L, or Cmd+L, and then I'm going to Lasso to select the reverse.
And let's go ahead and just make those video tracks a little bit smaller by pressing Cmd+k repeatedly. And now we want to globally insert our WAV forms, and our audio tracks. And to do that, I'm going to come down to my Timeline Fast menu, choose Audio Data, and WAV form. Alright, so we have a couple of other options within this audio data menu, which we'll learn about in the audio chapter, so remember how to do this because we'll probably add those to our timeline a little bit later.
Okay, we want to save this out, and I'm just going to call this audio. Say OK. Now, we can toggle between our various views quite easily. But, you know what, it can get even easier. Rather than toggling through them down here, let's map these to our keyboard. I'm going to open up my Command palette. So, I'll press Ctrl+3, or Cmd+3 on a Mac. I'm going to go to the More tab, and as you see here we have eight mappable timeline views. But which one is t1, t2 and t3, well, we're actually going to assign those right now. I'll go to my Settings tab and I'm going to go down to my timeline views You see here that we have our timeline views. Ideally, they'd be in alphabetical order. This might be a little bit of a glitch, but hopefully by the time you're watching it, things will be in order. But you know what, we're going to force this to go into alpha-numeric order by just putting some numbers in front of them. So I'd like my first timeline view to be my default view, so I'm just going to type in, a1 and then a dash.
I'd like my second timeline view to be my edit view. So I'm just going to type in 2 and dash. And I want my third timeline view to be my audio view, three, and we're all set. So this is going to be t1, t2, and t3. Let's go ahead and open up my keyboard settings. I'm just going to click on any setting and press k. And we want to open up our edit keyboard because that's the one that's selected, and let's go ahead and map those to Shift+1, Shift+2, and Shift+3.
We want button to button reassignment selected, and holding down my Shift key, let's go ahead and drag t1 to Shift+1, t2 to Shift+2, and t3 to Shift+3. Okay we're all set to try this out. I'm going to activate my timeline and let's go ahead and press Shift+1 default, Shift+2 edit, and Shift+3 audio. Works great. So as you can see switching back and forth between various timeline views is a real time saver in working with different elements in the post production process, especially when we can map those to our keyboard.
So far, we've looked at how we can customize our keyboard, interface, and timeline. Let's take it a step further and talk about how you can customize the layout of your bins, and this is a new feature as of Media Composer six. During various points in the editing process, you'll want to have different bins open and available to you. So let's go ahead and just open a couple of bins here. Most of the time we do want our Sequences bin open. And let's go ahead and put that up at the top, because I like to have my sequences nice and available to me on the top.
Then let's go ahead and pretend that we're working on our narrative story scene. So we don't need our interviews, but we do need our dancing B-roll and our narrative story B-roll. So I'm just going to open up this B-roll bin, and let's go ahead and just resize it, so that it fits in this space here. You'll probably have a little bit more space than I have here, so feel free to take up that space. And we'll go ahead and open this one, and this B-roll bin as well.
This view, having my Sequences bin here and my 3D roll bins here, this is something that I'm going to use quite often. So I'm going to come up to Windows > Bin Layout > New Bin Layout. And because this is the way I'm going to work most of the time, I'm going to call this Bin Layout, edit. Alright so now I'm going to click OK. As you see here this is now my Edit Bin layout. Let's go ahead and create one more. I'm going to go ahead and close this out, by pressing the red x.
And this time, let's go ahead and create a bin layout for when we're doing our interview scene. Again, I'm going to open up my Sequences bin, and let's open up our interview. And we'll also want our Music bin open for this. And we also want our event B-roll open here. So this is for a different type of project, but it's still very important for me to be able to have all of these open at once when I'm working on it. So I'm going to come up to Windows > Bin Layout > New Bin Layout, and let's just call this Edit 2. Press OK.
So let's go ahead and test this out. If I come up to Windows, go to Bin Layouts, I can toggle back and forth, between these various layouts. Now again, this is a new feature, and is really, really handy. I like it a lot so far. But you know what? It gets better. We're going to map these to our keyboard. So I'm going to come down to my Settings. Type k to go to my keyboard, open my Edit Keyboard. I'm going to go to my Command palette, Ctrl+3 or Cmd+3. I'm going to go to Work Spaces.
You'll probably see that I don't have my Edit bin layout, or Edit 2 bin layout, but you know what, these are drop-down menus, and I can make these anything I want. So I'm going to make this my Edit layout, and I'm going to make this my Edit 2 layout. Okay, so there they are. They're ready for us to map. We want to make sure that button-to-button re-assignment is on. And in a moment I'm going to press Shift. And I think I'll map them to Shift+Minus and Shift+Equals. So I'll press Shift, and just drag this to Shift+Minus.
Drag this to Shift+Equals. And let's go ahead and try it out. Alright, I am activating my timeline and I'm going to Shift+Minus and that's my Edit 1 layout. And I'm going to press Shift+Equals, and there's my Edit 2 layout. So as you can see, if you customize your Bin layouts, this can be a real time saver.
a workspace is the entire editing interface, which includes all of your main windows, as well as bins and tools that you open and keep open. By default Media Composer has six work spaces it's just basic editing where we have a source monitor and a record monitor and our timeline, our project window, and any open bins. We have audio editing. We have color correction. There's also fullscreen playback. And Escape out of this to get out of full screen playback. We also have effect editing. And finally our capture work space. And by the way, if you ever accidentally resize any of your windows and you want to get back to just the regular old way of editing. Just come up to windows and go to work spaces and go to source record and everything will reset for you.
I'm going to show you how to create your own work space because you never know what tools you want to have open. Which bins, how you want to timeline and your composer window to look, so let's take a look at how to customize this.
I'm going to open up my audio mixer, my audio EQ tool, and my audio tool. right now these are floating windows but, as we know, we have the ability to send this to a tabbed interface. So, I'm going to just grab the title of my audio tool and drag it to this window, and do the same thing here. Now we can toggle through these tabs. And as you see, it's kind of resting on top of my project window, and I have some bins behind it, so I'm going to need to do some resizing here. So let's go ahead and make my project window a little smaller. And size down my timeline as well. And I'm just going to do a couple of changes as far as positioning of my audio tools. And, I'll resize my composer window here, and I've just got a little space for my bins down here, then let's go ahead and change this.
Just a little bit so we get it exactly how we like it. So, this is the configuration of what my audio editing workspace looks like. I have my Composer window. I have my Project window, my Timeline. I have some space for some bins. And then here's my Audio tools, which are tabbed here in this main window. So let's go ahead and save this out. I'm going to go to windows, work spaces, new work space. I'm going to name this three-audio and that will become apparent why in just a moment.
So I'm going to name this three audio and say OK. Okay, so now if I come up to Windows->Workspaces, this is one of my options. So I can go back to Source->Record, and I'll go to my three-audio. So why did I call this three-audio? Well, if you've watched some previous movies in this course, you know that I named my timeline view three-audio. And we're about to link our audio editing workspace to our audio editing timeline view.
So, let's go ahead and open up my Settings. And I'm going to go down to my Workspaces. There's my three-audio workspace. I'm going to go ahead and open it. And up at the top, it says, Link to Settings. I'm going to link to Named Settings. And I'm going to call this link to other settings called three-Audio. Notice I can also link to a bin layout. Now I don't really have the space to link to a bin layout so I'm going to leave this alone, so I'm going to click OK.
And you see that this automatically populated with my audio timeline view. So now I'm going to go back to Source Record Editing. You'll notice that my timeline view stayed as my audio editing timeline view because I haven't linked my source record work space to any particular timeline. Let's go ahead and do that now so that we can see if any visual change when we switch between our work spaces. Again, I'm going to go to settings, and I'm going to go to Source->Record Workspace.
Let's go ahead and map this to my two-edit timeline view and press OK. Now, let's go back to our audio workspace. So I'll go to workspaces, three-audio and there we go. This is getting really really powerful and as you can see it's extremely customizable. It gets better, we can map those to our keyboard. So let's go ahead and open up our command palette. Ctrl+3 or Cmd+3 and we'll open up our keyboard.
Press K to jump to my keyboard. And again, it's my Edit Keyboard. I'll go to Workspaces. I'm going to pull up Source Record. And I'm going to pull up three-audio. I'm going to map Source Record to Shift+S, via button-to-button reassignment. And I'm going to map my audio to Shift+A. I'm going to go ahead and close and now let's go ahead and try it out.
I'm going to just activate my timeline here. And I'm going to press Shift+S. Here we go in our source record editing mode. That's linked to my edit timeline view, and I'll press Shift+A to go to my audio view, and there you have it. We're switching entire work spaces and entire timeline views with the press of a button.
I also actually need to map a marker to my keyboard, which we know how to do. I'm just to go to Settings, press K to jump to my keyboard, open up my edit keyboard. And I'm going to open up my command pallet by pressing Ctrl+3 or Cmd+3, and if I click on the more tab, here are all the different colors of markers I have available to me. I'm going to go ahead and just mark my red marker to F5, a green to F6, and a blue to F7. So I'm going to go ahead and click on my timeline to activate it. And I'm going to put a red marker there, so I'll press F5. And the marker window comes up, and I can leave a note. Now this is a color correction note, so if I have a colorist that I'm working with, I can leave a note for them. Or if I'm doing my own color correction, I can just come back, and every one of the red markers, I know is a color correction need. So I'm just going to say, match this lighting. Again, I could change the color of my marker here as well, but we've already got red, which represents color correction.
I can put markers on my audio tracks, too, I just need to deselect video, and whatever the highest, most selected track is where my marker is going to go.
So, if I wanted to, then, display my markers, I could. I can just right-click on my record monitor and choose markers. Here they are, arranged by color and timecode, and if I double click on any of these, my position to cater will snap right to that marker. I can also print this if I wanted to.
Again, this could be very long list. It can be very helpful to show this to other people. So I can go to File and print markers or Ctrl + P if the markers window is open. And I can also export markers from the file menu. If I export markers that exports it as a text document that I can then email to whoever I want to. Also notice that in the record monitor I can see the marker along with the text that I have associated with it. However, this is only available if I'm parked on it.
Now because markers can be used for various purposes, sometimes I'll only want to show markers of a certain color. To display markers of one particular color or to take away markers of certain colors, I just go down to the Timeline Fast menu. Say show markers, and then I can uncheck the colors that I don't want to show. So, if I only want to look at my editorial markers and take away my color correction markers, I would just deselect red, and you don't see it anymore.
It is there though, so I can bring that back up by just selecting it. So, as you can see, markers can help you stay organized and communicate with others.
Female 1: The next two videos cover organizational add-on features that are available for you to purchase for your Media Composer application. We've already seen the power of the find tool. An additional plug-in, called PhraseFind, increases your find capabilities by actually analyzing the dialogue of the clips in your bins, so that you can find that exact sound bite you're hunting for. So, I'm going to open up the find tool, just like we did before. I'll go ahead and click on my project window. And I'll press Ctrl+F or Cmd+F on a Mac, and everything should look familiar.
Again, we have our indexing indicator, saying that it's analyzed all of the text in my bins. And then here it says its analyzed all of the spoken dialogue of the clips in my bins. And then right to the right of that, we actually can choose the language that we're searching through. Right now, it's expecting the clips in my bins to be in English, but if the clips were in any other language this is where you would select that. And we also have some text to the right of that, that probably won't be there, but this was based on a search I was doing in an earlier video.
So I'm going to come up here to my text field and we're going to type in text just like we did for find. And what I'd like to do is find all of the places that Kim talks about vintage clothing, because that's what we're editing right now. So I'm going to type in vintage clothing, and then instead of pressing Enter or clicking on the Find button, I'm going to come over to PhraseFind and click that. It's going to take just a moment, and you'll see that it found 19 instances of what it believes are the words vintage clothing.
This is probably a lot higher than the actual number of times she said it, because I want to draw your attention to this column right here. The score column represents Media Composer's confidence that it actually got it right. So it's using some voice recognition software from Nexidia to analyze the spoken word, and it's not 100% accurate. But you can look at this score to determine how accurate it thinks it is, so we're going to start with the first one here. It has 77% confidence that it got it right.
Let's go ahead and double-click on it to load it into the source monitor. And notice it also brought it up, highlighted the clip in the bin, and brought the bin up. And I'm going to play this and see if this says vintage clothing. Female 2: Vintage clothing. It's, it's all part of the. Female 1: Excellent, got it right. Let's go on to the second one and see if our 76% score is accurate. I'll press play. Female 2: Vintage clothing is, is designed for. Female 1: Okay, so we're two for two, and just for fun let's go down to the bottom clip and see what our score of 50% came up with.
Female 2: You did. Well, they did the same thing back then and. Female 1: Not accurate at all So you really do want to pay attention to the score, and the ones near the top of the bin will probably contain your requested text. So as you can see, PhraseFind is an incredibly powerful tool. Also, while it is an extra $500 as of this recording, you can see that it may be well worth the purchase if you work heavily in dialog.
Using ScriptSync
Script sync is one of the most exciting features in media composer. Like phrase find, it uses nextedia phonetic searching capabilities, to analyze the spoken word within the dialogue in your clips. But it goes a step further and it actually syncs the spoken word to the written word. In other words, you can sync your master clips to your script line by line. Also, like phrase-find, it's a plugin available at an extra cost. Let's take a look at how this works. I'm in Microsoft Word. It can be any word processing program that produces a plain text document, but there's a couple of choices I want to take you through.
I'll choose Save As > Other Formats, and I need to choose plain text. Notice that I've already provided you a plain text document in your exercise files. So I'm going to send this to the desktop for our purposes. I'm going to click on Save. I want to chose other encoding. And then I want to come up to US ASCII. And I want to insert line breaks. Say OK. If you get a warning, you can say yes, and here's our plain text document.
All right, great, we're done with Word, and we're going to back into avid, and we want to bring the script in, so I'm going to go to file, new script, and navigate to my transcript, and open. And here is my script which is a digital transcript of the interview with Kim. So I'll go ahead and open up the interview bin. And, here's our interview clip. We don't want to load it into the source monitor, we actually want to attach it to the script. Before I do that, however, I have to tell Avid what portion of the script I'm syncing it to.
Well it happens to be the entire thing, so I'm just going to drag my mouse over the entirety of the script, and then I just drag my master clip on top, and it's now attached to the script. It's not synced yet, it does not know where in this dialogue matches with this script, but that's what we're going to do next. So once I've attached my master clip to my script, I come up to the script menu, choose script sync, and here I have a couple of choices.
I choose the language that both the master clip and the script is in. I also choose the applicable audio tracks. In this case, I have my audio on both a1 and a2. In the middle are a lot of choices for you to define where your dialogue is versus where other things, like the speaker or stage dirctions So, I happen to have my speaker with a colon, defining every instance of that. So I'm going to come over and say, skip text before colon.
If you put capital letters, that's what you would choose here. So, I'm going to come down here if I'd already previously synced the script, I could overwrite my marks. Or, I could sync between the first and the last mark, not applicable here, so let's go ahead and press okay and see how it works. It does take just a little bit but it's much faster than real time, this is a six and a half minute interview, and this is going to be done in less than ten seconds. So visually, it might not have seemed like much happened, but I assure you it did. If you take a look at our line here you can see script marks along every line of dialogue.
So, let's go ahead and just double-click on one of these marks. You'll see that it loads the interview into the source monitor, and it places an in point and the position indicator at the point of sink. Let's go ahead and play to see how it worked. Female 2: Swing dancing brings you together, brings you to a simple time. Female 1: And, that was the one I clicked on, you can see it worked great. Let's go ahead and try one more, let's double click on this script mark.
Female 2: For many people who swing dance, the, the vintage lifestyle. The vintage clothing. Female 1: Again, worked great. Script Sync is a highly accuracte application, in my experience it's over 90% accurate. It's very powerful and it's well worth your looking into.
INTERMEDIATE EDITING: BEYOND THE ROUGH CUT
Female 1: You already know how to trim, and you know how to use JKL navigation, so in this movie, we're going to put it all together, to introduce one of the most powerful types of trim in Media Composer, JKL trim. JKL trim allows you to perform a trim while playing the video at either real time, or at a variable speed. I have my interview sequence here, and I have a couple of locators that I put in, saying I need to fix a few things. So let's go ahead and enter trim mode. If I want to enter trim mode on these tracks right here, I'm going to hold down Alt or Option on a Mac and I can apply my rollers inside the tracks.
Let's go ahead and play loop and see what we're looking at here. I'll press space bar. Female 2: Dancing brings you together. Female 1: She doesn't quite say swing dancing, it's cut off a little bit there. So because I have filler on the other side, this can be a dual roller trim, and I'm just going to stay in trim mode Place my fingers on j, k, and l, and then I'm going to roll back with the j button.
This is going to trim to the left in real time. When I'm done trimming, I'm going to press k. Okay, looks like we got the beginning of that word added. We added 16 frames to the b side, and let's go ahead and play it and see if it worked. Female 2: Swing dancing brings you together. Female 1: Alright great. Let's go on to my next locator here. I'm going to enter trim mode on all four tracks, because we don't want our video 2B roll to go out of sync.
Let's go ahead and play loop to see what the problem is here. Female 2: Store in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, little girl she started giving me those clothes. Store in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, little girl she started giving me those clothes. Female 1: So, it looks like a couple of words are cut off here, but it's not exactly apparent which way we need to go. So, let's just zoom in. Let's also enable our audio timeline. As you remember, we made this in a prior movie. We could just switch to three audio, or again, I like to use the keyboard, so that was Shift-three.
Zoom in a little bit more, and, let's playthrough. I want to change my watch point from the video to the audio. I'm just going to click on my audio rollers. And this way, it will loop on either side. I'm going to go ahead and press space bar. And then I'm going to press q, to play just the a side. Female 2: in the 30's, 40's and 50's. in the 30's, 40's and 50's. Female 1: Alright, that seemed fine. Let's go ahead and do the same thing, but for the b side. I'm going to press space bar and then I'm going to press w to play just the b side.
Female 2: The little girl, she started giving me those clothes so. Little girl, she started giving me those clothes. Female 1: So it looks to be a problem with the b side. So we need to enable the b side, and I'm going to roll back with j again, but this time, I'm going to go very slowly, so I'm going to hold down k at the same time that I press j. This will enable me to go in slow motion, or one-quarter speed. So I'm going to hold down k and roll back with j until I think I've got that dialogue back.
Alright, I heard a little pause there. I'm going to go ahead and let go, and let's play through. Female 2: in the 30s, 40s, and 50s. and since I was a little girl, she started. Female 1: Well, we got it back, but I think we got a little too much. We don't need her saying at the beginning. So I'm going to go ahead and play through and see if I can get a better idea of where this can start. Female 2: In the 30s, 40s, and 50s. and since I was a little girl, she started. Female 1: I think this right here is the word since, so again I'm going to hold down k, and then go forward with l.
Oh, I actually hear it right there. I'm going to let go right here. And let's go ahead and play through. Press space bar. Female 2: in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, since I was a little girl, she started giving me those. Female 1: We got it. So by going back and forth in slow motion using JKL, we were actually able to play the edit as we were trimming. This is the power of JKL, we can play through as we're trimming and this is why it's called dynamic trimming.
You actually see the footage, watch the result as you trim in either real time or at a variable speed.
In this movie and the next, we'll cover two more powerful trim methods, slip and slide. First, we'll explore slip which allows you to trim to change a shot's content. Slipping a shot means that you access a shot's handles to change it's content but you leave the shot part exactly where it is in the timeline. That is, it doesn't move while you make the adjustment. So I have a sequence here, and I have a locator downstream telling me that there is a problem that I need to fix. Let's go ahead and play through, and see what we think.
Obviously we have a problem here, we have him flipping up the hat and the hat is already on. But we like the timing, we don't want to move this clip at all, we just want to change its content, which means that we need to access its handles. So, we're going to zoom in. We could use our scale bar down here, but in a previous movie I mapped my more detail to my up arrow, so I'll go ahead and zoom in with that, and I'm going to enter slip mode. There's a couple of ways to do this. I can either lasso the entire segment from right to left and this gets me into slip mode.
You know that you're in slip because you have a roller on the inside of the beginning and end of your segment. You also have a four window display, and we're going to go over exactly what each one of these windows does when we perform our slip. Before doing that, I want to show you one more way to enter slip, and I'm going to get out of slip by the same way that I get out of trim, which is to click on the time code track. You can also just enter trim mode and then right-click on the segment and choose Select Slip Trim.
So, with those two methods at our disposal, let's go ahead and perform the slip. We can use our trim buttons. We can use the equivalent trim buttons on our keyboard. The M, comma, period, and backslash. We can drag the rollers. We can use JKL. Any way we that we know how to trim, we can also slip. So, I'm going to use JKL because it's my favorite way to trim and I'm going to hold down K and I'm going to rock back with J because it looks like we need to access an earlier part of this clip.
So, I'm going to hold down K and rock back with J. And, then, letting go there, because I think that the shot with him bringing up his hat is going to match nicely with this frame right here. So, as we were slipping, you see that the first and the fourth frames remain static because those are the frames on either side of where my shot is going to lie.
And, because I am not moving this shot, they stay the same. And, my second and my third frames are updating because I'm changing the shot's content. This is now the first frame of my shot. This is now the last. I still have my K key pressed down, now I'm going to release. You'll notice that I actually went to the left by 65 frames. That is over two seconds, and now I am going to play through. When I am in a slip, it does a pre-role, which is currently set at two seconds before the clip, and it does a post role, which is at two seconds after the clip.
Let's go ahead and play through, and see if this matches better. We're still really zoomed in so I'm going to press the down arrow a couple times to get myself zoomed out. But I thought that that cut really worked. It looks like we fixed that. Let's go on to another sequence, and this is again our interview sequence. Again, we have a couple more locators that indicate some places where some slip trims might be useful.
Let's go ahead and zoom in. And we'll play through here. Couple of times where the, the rules were defined. We want to match that up a little bit better. So, we'll go ahead and enter slip. I'll just lasso from right to left, and I think we'll probably have to access a moment earlier in time. So, earlier means to the left, which means I'm going to go back with J. Again, I think I'm going to hold down K so I don't miss it and we'll go left.
And, I'm just tapping J one at time as I keep K depressed so that I can get it just perfect. And it looks like this is going to match up well. I'm going to now release the K button and we have altered this shot by 55 frames. Let's go ahead and play through. Brings you to a simple time where, the rules are defined. Not quite. I'm going to go back a little bit more. I'm going to press K while tapping J.
I'm going to go back with L. Let's try that out. And, let's go ahead and play through. Brings you to a simple time where, the rules are defined. One person follows. One... I think that could work. I think it probably needs a little bit more tweaking, but it's good for now, and you can get it exactly perfect in your sequence. So, as you can see, slip is a great way to be in tune with your sequence right down to the frame as you tweak a shot's content, but maintain it's duration and position.
Another very useful trim method is slide, which allows you to change a shot's position, but not its content or duration. It's a great tool for moving clips back and forth within the larger structure of the sequence. So we have a sequence loaded and again we have a couple of locators with comments about the timing, about how our video corresponds with our audio. There are some things that don't quite match up. Let's go ahead and watch it and see how it could be made better.
So a couple of things. I think it'd be better if this shot here started right as that horn came in. So basically this shot is going on too long and it'd be nice if this sort of punched in right here when that horn comes in. And let's go ahead and watch that and tackle that first. So I'm going to zoom in by pressing my up arrow and let's go ahead and play through here.
Here's where the horn comes in, and here's where the shots start. So we want to move that over but we don't want to affect any other clips in the timeline. So a slide will be perfect for this. I actually want to slide both this shot and the one next to it over together because they're synced up perfectly, cause he's putting on his hat through that edit. So we want to slide both of those shots downstream and to do that we're going to enter slide mode by pressing Alt and Shift or Option and Shift on a Mac. And lassoing from right to left.
We know that we're in slip because we have the rollers on the outsides of our edits, and again this is going to let me move my clips to the left. Again, we can use our interface trim buttons. We can use our keyboard trim buttons. We can drag or we can use JKL. So I'm going to use JKL and I'm going to stop as soon as I get to this point right here in the waveform. I don't think I even need to hold down K, I'll just go back with J.
And I went a little bit too far, so I'm going to nudge it forward by holding down both K and L. Alright, and let's go ahead and play through this. I'll press space bar. I actually mis-guessed, I think this is the beginning of the horn, so again, I'm going to go forward with the K and l to get it exactly perfect.
And because we're using JKL, you can actually hear it come in right there. I'm going to release the K key and let's play through. Alright, looks good. So let's survey what happened. We moved this series of clips over to the left by 30 frames, or by 1 second. The a side clip became shorter. And the c side clip became longer. So, if this is our b, we have just moved that down and shortened the duration over on the a side and lengthened the duration on the b.
And if we zoom out, you can see that no other clips were affected. The duration of the sequence has stayed the same. Let's move on down to this edit here and see what we have going on. I think this is another audio queue problem. And I'll go ahead and play through. So it would be nice if these two dancers started dancing right here when the music changed again.
Now, we don't want to actually move this clip, because it syncs perfectly with the one right next to it. So the way I'm going to fix this is to actually slide the clip to the left Over to the right so that it covers up the beginning of this clip. I'm going to zoom in by pressing the up arrow. I'm going to enter slide using another method. I'm going to enter trim, right click and select slide. And we want the end of this clip to **** up right here.
So again I'm going to just click over here so that we have a better frame of reference. And I'm going to hold down K and go forward with L. And I'll release. Again, what we are looking for is for this clip to start right here as soon as this music change happens. Let's see if we like this.
Alright, I really like that. I think that the energy coming into this clip is good, and it's always nice to cut on the beat, so it looks like we achieved that with this slide trim. So, as you can see slide is a great tool for the fine tuning process and I'm sure you'll see yourself using it often as you continue to refine your edit.
Throughout the editing process we've been setting in and out points to bring material from the source to the timeline. In this movie, we'll learn how to use the Replace tool where we can perform edits without marking any in or out points. So, in my sequence here, I have a couple of locators and they are communicating to me that I need to switch some shots around. Specifically we need to replace this one with an extreme long shot. Now this is a very specific dance sequence with very specific moves, so I need to match it up perfectly.
So, I'm going to open up my B-Roll Dancing 2 bin and Swing Dance All Medium Shot will correspond to Swing Dance All Extreme Long Shot. They do the same dance moves in each one, so we just need to find the moment where we can sync from the source to this sequence. Alright, so if I scrub through here to get a general idea. They're meeting. We've got one turn. We've got two turns. And then the start of a third.
So, we want to find that same moment up here in the source. So, they're meeting, one turn, and two turns, and the start of a third. So, I think that about right here is where we need to sync up so that everything downstream will make sense. And we're not going to set any in or out points. We're basically saying, this moment in time, right here in the source needs to match up with this moment in time, right here in this sequence. Everything's going to be front-timed and back-timed accordingly, so Avid will do the math, we just need to say where this sync is going to happen.
And then we're going to perform a replace edit. The Replace Edit tool is found in the fast menu in between the source and record monitor. And it's this blue arrow here. I'm simply going to press it, and let's take a look and see if that worked and if everything syncs correctly. I will go ahead and play through this. So, it matched really well with the shot of the feet after it and everything after that will look okay except we have another locator here.
Let's go ahead and see what the notes are for this one. We want to replace this with a long shot. So, this is the dip, where she brings him down and he goes to the ground. And we see a close up of her legs and then we see him over on the right, dipping down. So again, we want to pick that moment to sync up, so we need to kind of get him right here as he's coming down. And we want to load the clip in the source. The one we're after is Swing Dance Dip Long Shot and let's go ahead and try to find that moment where he is in about that location.
So, we have here, this moment in the source and this moment in the sequence. He's down. He's going down. Lets go ahead and perform the Replace Edit. One thing we do want to do is just deselect our audio because this is a video only edit. And into the fast menu, this is a totally mappable key. So, if you find yourself using Replace Edit a lot, go ahead and map with the Replace Edit button to your keyboard. I'll go ahead and perform this and let's go ahead and play through and see how our sync is.
So, she lowers him over here and he continues to go down right there just like we did before except now we've got a totally different shot. So, Replace Edit is really nice when you need to replace one camera angle of one action with another camera angle of the same action or you can use it to replace a sound byte. For example, if someone was filmed in more than one angle at the same time, you can replace a long shot with a medium shot quite easily by using replace.
BASIC AUDIO MIXING
in this movie we'll explore audio levels and how to read them via the audio tool. I'm going to open up the audio tool by going up to Tools>Audio Tool, we're pressing Ctrl+1 or Cmd+1 on the Mac. So the audio tool is a device where you can measure the levels of the audio in your sequences and clips. Now levels, unlike volume, are a constant value of the power or intensity of sound. So this measurement, which is measured in decibels, is actually relative to a reference audio level. which is typically set at the threshold of perception of human hearing. So therefore, normal sounds need to peak right around here. So, we're talking about the human voice here mostly. That's between negative 20 and negative 14 on the digital scale and between zero and six on the analog scale here.
IF WE WANTED TO CHECK THE LEVELS FOR JUST THE INTERVIEW AUDIO, WITHOUT HEARING THE MUSIC, WE CAN DO THAT BY SOLOING. I'm just going to press these two s's for solo (in the timeline with track panel opened, little green lights will go on). And let's go ahead and play here.
Just to reiterate, levels are totally separate from volume, which is the common source of confusion. You can prove this to yourself by turning the volume completely off on your computer and playing the audio. You'll still see the levels in the view meters here. We have a few things to consider when setting the audio levels and pan within a sequence and within our clips. WE'LL NEED TO USE THE AUDIO TOOL TO MAKE SURE THE AUDIO LEVELS FALL WITHIN ACCEPTABLE LIMIT, AND WE'LL ALSO NEED TO MAKE SURE THAT THE AUDIO IS PANNED CORRECTLY FROM LEFT TO RIGHT.
One of the most exciting changes in Media Composer version 7 is the ability to change timeline clips' audio levels right within the timeline and source clips' audio levels right from the bin.
Her levels are too low. The music is too high. We're not going to deal with the music right now. We definitely need to mix that, so I'm going to just mute those two tracks for right now (in the timeline click on the right near the audio select buttons and a red light will go on). So we're just dealing with her audio here. And what I want to do is actually raise her audio levels to that normal range, so if I open up the audio tool. We want that to peek right here between negative 20 and negative 14. What we want to do is make sure which of these tracks we want to keep.
Do we want to keep both of them, or maybe we want to ditch this really low level track and just keep this one. Let's go ahead and just solo this, and make it a termination. And also, this one. Female 2: Brings you to a simple time where the roles are defined. Female 1: So I think I'm going to just eliminate this all together, and use this audio, which is her Again, we're just looking at levels here, there is that hum in the background, which we'll eliminate in a future movie.
So what we're going to do is open up the track control panel, which I'm going to do by clicking on this little triangle here. I'm going to enable clip gain. If I want to do that for all tracks at the same time, I just hold down Alt or Option on a Mac, and choose clip gain. And you can see that everything is affected at once. Now, what did this do? Well, our waveforms became light gray, and we also have this little icon in the lower left corner of all of our clips, and then you can see a number.
Right now, it says zero decibels. That means zero decibels of change from the original source audio. So what I can do is actually just click on this, and then this pop-up slider comes up. Bring this down to negative infinity, making this you know, totally quiet. I can do that. If you click on this pop up you can just drag this slider, you can type in a number. So, if I wanted to specific number like negative 40, you know that goes down to there, but I'm just going to drag that down to negative infinity. You can also click this and then just use your up and down arrows to go one tenth of the decibel at a time or shift up and down to go one decibel at a time up and down, like so.
So I'm just going to drag that down to negative infinity and then let's go ahead and focus on our a1 track here. We want to make sure that it peaks in this area, so I'm just going to go ahead and bring it up a little bit. And let's play. Female 2: Dancing brings you together. Brings you to a simple time. Female 1: Alright. That's pretty good. Maybe just one more. I'm going to go up on one more decibel to five. I can just do shift up arrow, and I'm at five, and I'm just going to play this. Female 2: And I think I might just go up to six here.
Okay, so I'm just going to come in here, and type in six, and six here as well (for the other clips). So now, we should be able to hear her just fine. Peaking properly, we still are only coming out of the left channel, so we're going to have to pan that to the middle because we eliminated this lower-level audio here. We're going to have to use the audio mixer that but, I just wanted to show you, there's a very easy way to come in to the timeline and make basic decibel adjustments without having to open up that audio mixer.
Now there is one more thing I want to show you regarding changing clip levels which is adjusting the clip gain on one or more clips right from your bin. So, I'm just going to go up to my bin here. And we have the same source clip that we've been working with. This is the interview, so you happen to know exactly the changes that we need to make. Normally you'd obviously have to play it and diagnose it, but in this case, I just want to quickly show you how to do this. I'm just going to right click on the clip in the bin. An then I am going to go to apply game.
Now you can do this for one clip in this case or as many clips as you want. I can shift click on multiple clips and do this for multiple clips simultaneously. In this case I do just want one. And I am just going to go to apply game. And we have here a decibel number that we're going to raise or lower the gain by. So in this case I'm going to raise it by six decibels and I'll say OK. Now this had both the left and right channel and we eliminated the right channel. I'm not going to do that from the bin but what I can do is center the pan if I want to.
You can also remove the pan. So I'm just going to center the pan here and yes I do. And this should sound a lot better. Now, in our prior decision, we did eliminate that right channel. In this case, we're not. But let's go ahead and take a listen to it and see what we think. Let's go ahead and look at the audio tool and play. Female 2: Brings you together. It brings you to a simple time where, the roles are defined. So it's peaking properly. Again we have that buzz, which we'll take care of later. But that's another way to go about it.
You can actually fix the level and pan right from the bin, so that when you edit it into the timeline that work is already done. Bin based clip level adjustments are a really handy way to make your changes before the editing process even begins. And, as you can see, Media Composer 7 has brought about some very useful clip based level adjustment tools, which you can use in the timeline or in the bin, depending on which stage of the editing process you're in.
the Audio Mixer to correct these problems giving us a lot more control over our adjustments. we need to open the Audio Mixer and the Audio tool, which you can do by just bringing them up via the Tools menu, like so. But I actually recommend in this case to open up a work space.
Now the Audio Mixer is a place where you can adjust the level and pan of your source audio as well as your timeline. Let's first look at the timeline here. Notice that there's an exact correlation between the tracks that we select in our timeline versus the Audio Mixer. So if I deselect A1, notice that it likewise deselects in the Audio Mixer. I can do so from here as well. So exact correlation there as well as our Solo and Mute buttons. So if I solo here, notice it solos there and mutes all the rest.
So depending on if you click in the source or in the record, or the timeline, that is the audio that you're adjusting.
Now, if you're adjusting for tracks of audio, you're fine with this view. And as you can see in our case, that's all we need. But if we had more tracks of audio, . I can switch to eight panes. So I'll just click on this number four here. And if I drag over, you can see that now I have up to six. And basically if I needed 16, I can toggle again.
we have a master fader
I'm going to just park here so that we can see A1 through A4. And we'll just go ahead and shift-drag, so that all of those are selected, and you can see that they're selected here as well. Now, each track has a decibel slider, so you can raise and lower the levels of your audio here, and each track also has a pan dial. So you can pan back and forth from left all the way to right. And if you'd like to center pan any of your pan dials, you just Alt+click or Option+click on the pan dial.
If I would like to adjust my A1 and A2 in tandem, I can just click on both of these group buttons. And now, when I drag the decibel slider up, they both go at the same time and by the same amount.
we're actually going to start with a source clip adjustment. So I'm just going to click in the source monitor so we can adjust the source clip.
Make sure to take a look in the Audio tool. Remember, it should be peaking right here for a human voice.
Obviously, too low, and A2 is a lot lower than A1.
In a prior movie, we decided to actually to drop A2 altogether and just focus on A1 and then pan that to the middle which is what I'm going to do right now. I'm going to go ahead and make sure that A2 is selected, which it is, and I'm going to bring this down to negative infinity. And now I'm going to pan this to the middle. So I'm just going to Alt-click or Option-click a Mac on my pan dial here. And you can see that it is now panned to the middle. So what I'm going to do now is actually make the adjustment. And instead of sort of playing it and then making the adjustment, and then playing it again, and then making it, I'm going to do something that's a lot more fluid.
And that is using this button here, which is the Audio loop play. So I need to set a duration between an in and an out point. And, you know, about two seconds or so is good. I've basically got that here. So basically as it plays through this loop, I'm able to make the adjustments on the fly. So I'm just going to click this button, and them I'm going to ride this decibel slider up until this is peaking in the proper area.
And then now whenever I edit this into the timeline from this point on, those adjustments will be reflected.
Now let's go ahead and preform an adjustment to some of my sequence audio. We won't have a chance to adjust everything, but we'll get a feel for the workflow. It's a good idea to always focus first on your principle audio, your dialogue, and then mix everything else, like music and sound effects and so on, once you've got those base adjustments. So I'm just going to solo my dialogue tracks here, and I'm just going to go ahead and play here.
the Audio Mixer is a clip-based adjuster. Right now I'm in clip mode, so it's adjusting per clip, or basically where I am parked here in the timeline. This is the clip that I'm adjusting. Fortunately, I can make global adjustments. And so I would just park here, and whatever adjustments I have on this clip where I'm parked, is going to be reflected on the entire track. If I come up to this Fast menu here (in the audio mixer), and say Set Level on Track Global. And then I'm also going to Set Pan on Track Global.
This is also a really good reason to keep all of one person's dialogue on one track, and then you can make these global adjustments really easily.
Now say, for example, I had some other audio, you know, down stream and it's just these clips that I would like to adjust, I could just mark an in and an out around this. And I'm just going to select A1 and A2 here. If I come up to this Fast menu, notice that instead of it saying set level on track global and set pan on track global, it says set level on track between in and out. So I do have some control over where these global adjustments are made if I set in and out points, so that can be really helpful to me.
So what The Master Slider does is it changes the levels of the complete audio mix all tracks for the entire duration of the sequence simultaneously. As you can see, the Master fader is always visible to the right of the other faders in the Audio Mixer, and it's labeled Master.
but it can be useful for you if you need to make a uniform adjustment across all tracks.
Just to clean things up and for good work flow, I'm going to eliminate these clips on the timeline (bad audio on A2 that was lowered to negative infinity). I'll go ahead and get my red arrow here and unlink the video and audio. Let's go ahead and just delete these clips altogether. You'll notice that when I hit Delete there, they didn't go away. That's because that took off the audio adjustments, which is what happens first when you delete. And now when I go ahead and delete, they'll go ahead and go away. So we're just focusing here on A1 and then A3 and A4, so that cleans that up just a little bit.
And what we need to do now is to open up the Track Control panel, which is this button right here. And we're going to come into A3 and A4, and we're going to turn on volume. This is to tell Media Composer that we're going to key frame the volume as opposed to the pan, for example. So I'm going to go ahead and choose volume here. Now if you aren't able to do this, just make sure to come into the Fast menu and under Audio Data, you want to make sure that this is selected, Allow Per Track Setting. That will allow you to kind of come in and use the Track Control panel here.
So I'm going to turn off A2 through V2. So I'm just to Shift-drag up and now we just have A3 and A4 selected. And now I'm ready to add my key frames. So, I'm just going to come over and add my first set of key frames by pressing the Apostrophe key, and it adds it to the selected tracks, A3 and A4.
And we'll come here and add it right before she starts talking. And then right after she stops talking, we'll go ahead and add another key frame, and have it ramp all the way up about right there. We have it all mapped out, we haven't actually made any adjustments yet. Before you make any adjustments, you need to make sure that this button right here is pressed, the Key Frame button (bottom left of timeline), otherwise it wont allow you to make those adjustments. It's on by default, so we're good to go. I'm going to come in and actually zoom in on my tracks a little bit, make A3 and A4 a little bit larger. And you'll see why in just a moment. I'm going to go ahead and press Ctrl+L a couple of times, that's Cmd+L on a Mac, and you'll see that we get these little decibel lines, which can be helpful.
I want to do several at one time. Because we basically want to bring A3 and A4 by the same amount and then also bring them back up by the same amount. I'm going to Shift-click on my key frames like so. And let's go ahead and just drag one of the key frames down, and I'm going to take a look down here to see how much I'm bring it down by.
Now just a couple more shortcuts for key framing. If I need to adjust this ramp, like if I wanted it to happen more gradually or more slowly, I need to hold down the Alt key or the Option key on a Mac. So I'm going to go ahead and just Shift-click on both of those and Alt drag this to the left. And you'll notice that I'm able to move the key frames left and right. If I just drag onto the key frame, I can not move it left and right. It only lets me move it up and down. And if I want to delete a key frame, I select it, and press the Delete key on the keyboard.
And then one last thing, to select multiple key frames instead of you know, clicking and then Shift-clicking, and so on and so forth. You can actually just lasso that. So to lasso all of those at once, what I'm going to do is start here in this gray area below the time code track and just drag a box around all four of those. And if I wanted to do that, say, you know, up here, I would just need to hold down the Alt or Option key as I drag that lasso. And you could see here that now we can adjust everything all at once.
Also, if I wanted to snap to these decibel lines, you can see here that it's snapping from one decibel line to another, I'm just holding down Ctrl or Cmd on a Mac.
So the very first tool that I want to briefly examine is the audio EQ tool. So it's Tools > Audio EQ. It's a very simple three band EQ tool where we can adjust the low shelf which is going to correspond to low frequencies, the parametric midrange which is going to correspond to midrange frequencies like the human voice and the high shelf, which corresponds to higher frequencies.
I'm just going to play this so that we can, you know, sort of assess the issue with this audio. I'm going to solo it so that the music doesn't drown it out.
Basically it's kind of of like a fan noise, a very slight buzz, and to be honest with the music on you can't hear it to much.
. First thing I'm going to do is set an in and an out, just a portion of her audio, so that it doesn't have to cycle through the entire clip. You know, you can come in and you can adjust this frequency curve by simply dragging these sliders around and, you know, manipulating them manually. But, what I want to show you first are some of the preset options within the audio EQ tool.
So, I'm going to come up to the fast menu here and I am going to, for example, choose female voice with presence. And what this is doing is it's boosting the typical frequencies around the spectrum of the human voice for a female and it's rolling off lower frequencies. So I'm just going to play this so that you can see what it's done. Okay, that isn't eliminating our buzz, so let's try something else. Now one thing that is always good to try for some of these very focused options that are eliminating very specific types of sounds.
Like, for example, NTSE hum buster. It's going after some very specific frequencies here. So I'm going to go ahead and choose this. Take a look at the frequencies that it is eliminating and let's go ahead and try this one. So it didn't eliminate our specific buzz, but, it can sometimes help a lot. Same thing with things like the tape hiss filter. Okay, you can see that it's rolling off these higher frequencies, where you can frequently find tape hiss.
As you can see I can't actually edit these curves once a preset has been applied. There's this button here, Override with Default EQ where I would need to come in and manually make these adjustments. But like I said, it's nice to actually use these presets to sort of see what the software does, and then you can kind of try on your own to mimic that and to make further adjustments if you need to. If you wanted to roll off, like for example, both the high and the low end for example.
You can also affect this particular peak right here by clicking on this option where it says two octaves, and change it to a quarter octave for example. And then it has more of this notch curve as opposed to a soft curve. Definitely play around with the audio EQ tool, it can be very useful for slight adjustments. But I'm going to tell you right now that probably that our issue needs a little bit more work. So I am going to remove that effect (Remove Effect button under the Source Window). And let's instead go for the Audio Suite tool.
So I'm just going to go to Tools > Audio Suite. And right now it doesn't do anything until we actually choose one of the effects to apply to this. So the Audio Suite tool comes with some very useful plug-ins. Which all hail from Pro Tools. For this demo we will be using the Audio Suite tool here. But just so you know, if you go into the Effect Palette, and you can find all of these RTAS effects right here, that's Real Time Audio Suite. These are the effects that you apply to tracks.
So for example, we're going to try out the Audio EQ 7 Band, from this list right here in just a moment. But if you wanted to apply it to track, you certainly could. You just open up the track control panel and then you would just drag the effect that you want to apply to that track in one of these five boxes like so. So now any adjustments that we make, if you go ahead and click on this, you can see the tool that comes up. Any adjustments that we make to that track, are made to all clips on that track. And it's in real time.
And come back to this menu right up here. So as you can see, there are lots of very useful, professional plug ins. For our purpose though, we're going to add an EQ effect. So let me show you the interface for a couple of these. so we already you know, took a look at the seven pan very briefly, but I'm going to apply that again. And then what you do is you just click on this little plug icon, and it opens up the interface. And, you know, this is very, very powerful in that you can actually these nodes up and down, left and right. You can have a very intricate curve happening where you are eliminating and boosting frequencies all along this frequency curve. You can also come in for each of these specific nodes and make further adjustments like so. Now again, this is just a bit too advanced for this course, but if you're comfortable with adjusting EQ, I highly recommend this plugin.
Let me go ahead and cancel this. And we'll remove that. And instead, let's go ahead and attach the one band EQ. And I'm going to go into the plugin here Again, much simpler here, but this can really, really help out. So first of all, we're going to come into the Q filter and set it rather high, so that we have a very narrow frequency band, something like between eight and ten here. Then we're going to take the gain and bring it way up You can see what's happening here. If I bring it up to, you know, between 12 and 14, you can see that we have a very focused curve, because we're zeroing in on very specific frequencies. Lemme just show you what happens when this curve is wider and narrower. And again, we want it to be quite narrow. And, this dial right here (FREQ), moves it along the frequency curve. So the reason that we actually boosted it up is that its often easier to identify the offending sound when you make it louder, and then, the strategy is to just reverse so that you eliminate those frequencies.
So, again, I can come in, and when I hit Preview, I'm going to just sweep this along the frequency curve until I can try to identify that sound. When it becomes the loudest, I'm going to reverse the curve, and then we'll see what happens. Female 2: Swing dancing brings you together. Swing dancing brings you together. Swing dancing brings you together. Swing dancing brings you together. Swing dancing brings you together. Swing dancing brings you together. Swing dancing. Female 1: And again I can play with this for a while to get it just perfect which I definitely challenge you to do. And then you would just reduce this gain, right here, so that you're eliminating those frequencies. We'll just go ahead and listen to that. Female 2: Swing dancing, brings you together, swing dancing, brings you together, swing dancing, brings you. Female 1: So we definitely helped it out, but I think it needs some more work.
USE THIS METHOD TO FIX BUZZ SOUNDS:
AND FRANKLY, FOR THIS TYPE OF ISSUE, THERE'S CERTAINLY AN EASIER WAY TO DO THIS WITHOUT NEEDING TO KNOW ANYTHING ABOUT FREQUENCY CURVES, AND IT'S FREE. I'M JUST GOING TO GET OUT OF HERE AND MINIMIZE MEDIA COMPOSER FOR A MOMENT. AND I HAVE HERE A PROGRAM CALLED AUDACITY.
It's available for both Mac and PC, and it's a free program. Now, this isn't available as a plug-in inside of Avid, so you actually have to export the clip outside of Media Composer which I've actually done right here as a WAV file. And you just drag and drop it right into Audacity. You can choose how the import is going to occur. I'm going to actually make a copy of the file before editing and say OK. And this is my audio file. I'm going to go ahead and play it. Female 3: time where the roles are defined.
Female 1: So what we want to do is actually tell Audacity what it is that we want to eliminate. So, this part right here is what I want to eliminate. You want to make sure that it's a part where she's not speaking. So you can see, that's a good profile to give it. And then what you do is you come up to Effect > Noise Removal. And then you want to tell it, get noise profile. This is what I want to eliminate. So now it knows that it wants to eliminate this buzz from this audio clip.
Then you simply select everything that you want to affect, and you come back up to Effect, back to Noise Removal and you can change any of these parameters if you like. But in this case, I think i think they're fine. So I'm going to press OK. And that's all there is to it. Let take a listen. Female 3: Brings you to a simple time, where the roles are defined one person. Female 1: The buzz is totally gone. So all you have to do is export this, by going File > Export and I'm just going to say fixed. And then we just need to bring that in the immediate composer and you're good to go.
BASIC EFFECTS
we want to look at this option right here, target drive. This is only if I render it, and you'll never need to render a quick transition to see it play out. So this option is really not important right now, because we are not going to add and render this dissolve, rather we're just going to add it. There's one more thing I'd like to show you about the quick transition and that's just how to apply multiple transitions at once.
Let's say that I would like to have a few transitions in between all of these dance shots. Just really quick ones. I would just mark an in at the beginning of the sequence, and I'll mark an out at the end. We'll go back into the quick transition. We want a video only dissolve that is centered on the cut. We just want these to be maybe about four frames long.
Again it doesn't matter about the target drive because we're not rendering them. But you'll see this new button. It's applied to all transitions between in and out. I'll go ahead and just check that. If I had any existing transition effects there I could either skip them or overwrite, but we don't have any, so it doesn't matter. And again, I'm just going to add the transition not add and render. I'll go ahead and press Add. And you'll notice that every transition in between my in and out points received a dissolve.
to further adjust their duration and position. There's a quick way to do this via the Transition Manipulation tool, which is the last of the buttons in the smart tool. So I'm going to go ahead and select it, and I'll zoom in so we can really see this. And you'll notice that when I hover over a transition, my cursor turns into a hand. So this allows me to just drag a transition to the left or to the right. I can create a custom transition by having some of it before and some of it after. You'll notice that as I drag, I see the six frames here. This is the first, middle, and last frame of my A side, and this is my first, middle, and last frame of my B side.
So, as you see as I drag, this updates so that I can see exactly what portion of the shots will be included in the transition. Also, if I hover on the edge of the transition, I can adjust its duration one side at a time. So if I bring this in over here and on the right, if I bring this in, I can customize exactly how long it is. And then if I drag, I can customize its position.
to remove this transition, I just come up to the Remove Effect button above the Timeline. Again, you can Map this if you'd like. I want to browse through Avid's other effects. I find those in the Effect Palette, which is this third tab right here, in the Project window.
The Effect Palette can also be a floating window, which can be found in the Tools menu, and Effect Palette, or Ctrl+8, or Cmd+8 on a Mac. But I like to work with it right here in the project window and let's find another transition that we can put here. So, in the blend catogory are quite a few of those transitions that are really useful. And I'm specifically going to chose Dip to Color. To apply a transition from the effect palate, you just click and drag with your mouse and then release somewhere near the edit point. To see these parameters up close, let's go ahead and open up the effect editor, and I do that by clicking on the Effect Mode button, right here in the timeline. Or I can bring it up via the Tools menu and Effect Editor. (Or I can map it to a key). At the bottom, we see the duration of this effect. Here it is, one second long, and if I want change this I just highlight this and type in a new value. And if you look to the left of that, you can see this button here, where, again, we can choose where this transition lies. And the next thing I want to do is actually change the color that it flashes to. So right now it's going to black. We just want to go to white, and we're going to just click on the button to the left of this little color well. And I'm going to choose white and OK. And let's go ahead and just play through this and see how it looks. So that didn't give us much indication, so again we're going to have to go back out to the timeline and see if our flash to white happens right on that symbol and if we get the effect we're after. We applied a dip to color, which was a 30-frame dip to black, and now it's an 8-frame flash to white.
I want to show you how to apply a segment effect now, and we're going to come to the image category. And we're going to apply something just very simple. We want to put her flower on the other side of this frame. So we just want to basically flop it. Well we have a flop effect. We apply this in pretty much the exact same way as a transition. Just click and drag, but instead of dragging onto an edit point, you just drag onto the segment itself (or a clip), and release. And you see that we got an immediate effect. If I come into the effect editor, notice that I don't have any parameters to change, because a flop is what it is, it just flopped the image.
we have kind of an extreme long shot right here. And what I'd like to do is start out at this length, but then zoom in a little bit before we cut to the next shot, which is a medium shot. So we just want to come over to our effect pallet, and we're going to go to the image category, and I'm going to grab a re-size and just drag it right on this effect. So we just come over to the Effect Editor. And we see here under scaling that we have both x and y values. So if I wanted to just uniformly re-size this shot, I would want to click Fixed Aspect, because we want both our x and y values to increase at the same rate.
Alright so what we do want to do is to start off zoomed out, and then about midway we want to slowly zoom in. And then stay zoomed in for the duration. Okay so we don't need to change anything about the first key frame because we would like to maintain this size. If I click on the second key frame though. I can come back to my Effect Editor, and then perform the zoom in. So let's go ahead and just zoom in until we like the size, and I can also reposition. You see here I have X and Y parameters. And if we'd like this to stay at this rate from key frame two to key frame three. I could just log all of those numbers, come down here, and put them back in, but that's kind of a pain, so instead, I'm going to just copy the key frame parameters from key frame two to key frame three. And to do that, I'm just going to press Ctrl+C Or Cmd+C on a Mac, and I'm just going to Click on my third key frame and Press Control V, or Command V on a Mac.
And then it zooms back out at the end. You know, I actually don't want it to do that at all. I want it to maintain this size throughout the duration, so we're going to need to make a few adjustments. So, what I'm going to do is actually just delete this last key frame because we don't want it to go back out to this value. I'm just going to click on the key frame and press delete and it's gone. And then I'm just going to Alt+drag or Opt+drag on a Mac, so that I can just drag my key frame down to the end. Now, another way to do this is to use your m, comma, period, and backsplash keys. If you click on a key frame and then press one of those keys I'm moving one field to the left if I press comma. One field to the right, if I press Period. Ten fields to the left, if I press M. And, ten fields to the right, if I press Backslash key.
when you apply one effect on top of another, the second effect replaces the first. There's a couple of ways to nest in Media Composer. The first way is, if you just park on the effect and then you step into the effect using this arrow down here. When I do that, the flop actually goes away, mind you it's still there. We just can't see it. And we're applying another effect inside of the flop to the raw video. DONÕT DO IT THIS WAY.
Do it this way, apply my first effect, ie a Flop and double click on it in the timeline. What happens is that I am now seeing the raw video as it is now on V2 with the Flop effect is still applied and video also on V1. So then grab a new effect, ie Color Effect and drop it on the raw video on V2. If I now open my Effect Editor I will see both effects and I can manipulate them both here. I can add another effect by now double-clicking on the V2 color effect, which will open the raw clip now on V3 and I can add ie a Resize effect to V3 and select V3 and I can play with the parameters in the Effect Editor or drag on the image in the Record window and move it around. Doing it this way works fine, but sometimes it wonÕt.
For instance, if I go to the Film category and drop a 16:9 mask on a new higher raw Video layer it may not apply because I resized the image. So instead of climbing inside the effect and applying the effect to the raw video, what we're going to do is actually apply it on top of everything so that the mask goes on top of all of these nested elements. This is called an auto nest and the way I do that is, I find my 16 by nine mask. I hold down Alt or Opt on a Mac, and I drag on top and there it is. We have our mask, we have our color effect, we have our resize. And we have our flop all in one.
Most of the time, it works just fine to just grab an effect and either Alt+drag or Opt+drag on a Mac, one effect on top of another on top of another, and that's actually usually the way I work.
However, because of ordering, sometimes you do need to either climb inside. Or put effects on top depending on the way that you work, in order to make your effect look the way that you want it to.
create a new bin, and I'm just going to call it effect templates. Park on the effect and open the effect editor. Click and drag on the icon next to the effect title and drag and drop it into my FX bin and rename what it is.
When you are saving out a transition, and you think you're going to use it lots of times, you can actually set up a new bin, call it quick transitions, exactly spelled, and instead of putting it just in a bin called effect templates, I'm going to put it in this bin and then close it out. Now, when I park on any transition, and open up the quick transition dialogue box, when I click on the type of transition I'd like to add, you'll see, your custom transition is at the bottom of the list. So, if I apply that, I can then come in and alter my duration, alter how it starts or ends, and then go ahead and just add it. This works the same way with segment effects/clips.
A composite is created by combining different effects that have an element of transparency so that you can vertically see through the various layers. I have two video clips stacked on top of one another. On V1, I have Kim and Dave just dancing in this medium shot. And on V2, I have a close up of their feet. And the goal is to see the feet and them dancing in the medium shot simultaneously.
So I've already stacked it for you, now we just need to grab a vertical effect, or an effect with an element of transparency so that we can see through to V1, and so I'll just go to the effect palette. And the blend category is an excellent place to find some vertical effects. I'm going to just grab this superimpose and drag it right on top of V2. Now, right away we see both clips because the default value for a superimpose is 50%. And let's go ahead and look in the effect editor to see what this means.
What I'd like to do is actually start off fully opaque. Come up to 50% and then come back down. All right, so I'm going to apply a keyframe here to begin, and we'd like to hold on our transparency in the middle, so I'll apply two keyframes like so. And one at the end.
On the first keyframe, activate my effect palette here, I want to see just the medium shot here. So let's go ahead and drag our level down to zero, and then I'd gradually like to come up to about 50% or maybe a little bit less. Let's go ahead and experiment here, see how we like it. Yeah, I'd like to have it right around 40, 42%. There we go.
All right, so again, we're going to copy and paste our keyframe parameters, so I'm just going to click on keyframe two. Ctrl+C or Cmd+C on a Mac. Ctrl+V or Cmd+V. And we want to go to the fourth keyframe, and we want to be fully opaque again. So I'm going to go back down to zero. Let's just see how it looks by playing it in the effect preview monitor. Okay, looks pretty good. I might change the position of a couple of these keyframes so that that lasts a little bit longer.
So, I'm going to go ahead and just grab this. I'm going to Alt+Drag or Opt+Drag on a Mac so that we get to this transparency a little bit sooner, and I'll Alt+Drag over here so that it lasts a little bit longer. And now I'm going to come back out to the sequence, and play it in the context of its adjacent shot, to see if we like it. Go ahead and press Play. All right. I think that's what we're going for.
As you can see, the superimpose effect allows you to see more than one video track at a time, and it's a great tool for juxtaposing like or unlike images to communcate a realtionship, or idea between images. In the next movies, we'll take a look at some more complex vertical effects, as well as combining more than two video layers to create a composite.
A PIP is an effect that produces multiple images on screen simultaneously by way of a split-screen, vignette, or other transposition either with fully opaque images or a combination of opaque and transparent images.
On V2 I have a medium shot of Kim dipping Dave down. And on v one, I have the long shot. I want to do is actually put both of these shots in boxes within my frame. I'm going to come to my Effect Palette. And in the Blend category I'm going to apply a picture-in-picture effect to v2, and I would apply one to v1.
However, what we're going to do is actually kind of, steal some of the parameters for the adjustments that we make on v2 and apply it to v1. By default, Media Composer gives the picture in picture a 50% scaling and it centers it right in the middle of the image. We're only going to be working with border, scaling, and positions. So I'm going to simplify it for myself, and have just those open.
Most of these adjustments can be done via Avid's powerful Color Correction tool, however, one effect that can offer some great basic adjustments is the color effect. the color effect is found in the effect palette in the image category. I'm going to open up the Effect Editor, and as you see here I have six parameter categories in the color effect. We have luma adjust, where we can adjust brightness and contrast. Luma range, where I adjust my white point and black point, luma clip, we have chroma adjust, where we can adjust hue and saturation, color style, where we can add some posterization and solarization, and color gain, where we can add or subtract various color channels.
I'd like to do is make this really graphic looking, so we're going to increase the contrast and the saturation. And then add some posterization as well. So I'm going to open up Luma Range and to increase contrast, I can crunch my blacks and whites, which means I'm going to decrease the white point. And increase the black point.
And then I'm going to come into Chroma Adjust and bump up my saturation and just so you know, all of the effects in the color effect from the top to the bottom, they're applied in order. So I've first crunched my blacks and whites, then I've upped my saturation, and now I'm coming in to add some style as far as the posterization, and I'm going to bump that up. And it's still a little dark, so I'm going to make sure I bring in some brightness here. Okay, so I think that's the basic effect that I'm after.
I want to save this out, so that I can use it again on a different clip. I'll come over to bins, create a new bin, and I'm just going to call this color templates. And again, we just click and drag the icon to the left of the color effect name into my bin, and I'm going to call this graphic. All right. So, now I'm going to apply this to my picture in picture composite.
Again, because we've saved it out, we don't actually need to go back into my effect palette. Rather I can just double click and I see my raw video underneath within the nest and I'll just click and drag. And do the same thing for V2. Click and drag with my mouse and release on V2, and again on V3. And to close the entire nest, I'm just going to double click on V1. Okay, that's pretty good. That's what I'm after, and if I want to apply this to multiple clips after this.
I can do that by shift clicking on multiple clips, and then all I have to do is double click on the clip in the bin. So I'll double click on my graphic template. You'll see it's automatically applied to these next two clips. And we've used the color effect to create this stylization.
If you simply want to speed up or slow down a clip without the need for a clip to change speed within the clip, you can use the Motion Effect editor. And if you'd like to make a freeze frame out of a clip, which means the clip has absolutely no motion and is merely a static image, you can use the Freeze Frame Creation tool. Both of these tools produce new clips with new media.
Now to use the motion effect editor, I am going to need to map it to my Interfacer Keyboard, and just so you can it, I'm going to map it to a button underneath my Source Monitor. So I'm just going to go ahead and click on that now with my clip loaded in the Source Monitor. So by default, it gives you a value of 50% speed. the best render method to choose, most of the time is Interpolated Field. It's going to produce a much smoother result than if you choose duplicated or both. VTR is also nice but I usually choose interpolated. This is going to produce new media. So you need to choose the target drive. and I'm going to create and render and select which Bin I want it to go to and click OK. I will now have a new clip in my bin, which the icon will let me know itÕs a motion effect and next to it it will tell me the FPS. It will also automatically be loaded into the Source Monitor.
TO MAKE A CLIP GO IN REVERSE, TYPE A – (MINUS) IN FRONT OF THE 5 SPEED NUMBER IN THE MOTION EFFECT WINDOW.
Finally, there's one more thing to show and, again we'll go ahead and open the Motion Effect editor, and it's this button right here, Strobe Motion. I'm going to go ahead and choose something a little bit more reasonable, maybe 150%. And I'll leave that in forward motion. And I'll go ahead and click on Strobe Motion. This is going to produce an update every x number of frames. So it starts off with 5 frames. To show you a more drastic result, I'll go ahead and change this to 15. So, every half a second, we're going to get a frame, which is going to PRODUCE A STROBE MOTION EFFECT.
TO MAKE A FREEZE FRAME, add my clip to the source monitor and put the playhead on the frame I want to freeze and go up to Clip – Freeze Frame. The very first thing I need to do is to choose the render method. Go to the bottom and choose Using Interpolated Field and then go back again to Clip – Freeze Frame and choose how long I want it and then select my drive and OK and then select my Bin and ok.
If I want to vary the motion within the clip, the speed, and direction of a shot, you should use the Time Warp effect. Imagine that you'd like to start with a shot in real time, then speed it up significantly, then slow it down all the way to a stop or freeze frame, and then go in reverse.
My shot should be in the timeline and to the Effect Palette (near my settings and Bin tab) and in the Timewarp category drag the Timewarp effect on to the clip. Click on the Effect Mode button to open the effect editor. If when I open the graphÕs arenÕt opened, click on the 2 boxes under the Timewarp icon and word to open them. use these scale bars to make sure you get the entire graph in your view, so I'm going to just re-position these so that I can see the entirety of my position graph, that's going to help me out a lot.
I'm going to work in my position graph to create my variable motion, and then I'm going to look in the position graph to make sure I have enough frames to get the job done. I have 100% speed here. I'm going to apply several key frames, let's say from about the beginning of the clip to a quarter of the way in. I want to increase my speed (add a keyframe), and then about halfway through, I'd like to drop it to a freeze frame (add another keyframe), which will hold for a little while. And then, at the very end, I want to go in reverse motion (add another keyframe). Now that IÕve planned it out, I need to do it.
I'm going to click on my second key frame, here. And I can either drag it up, or I can come in here (Percent Speed window), and type a value. Let's say, 300%. I'll type 300. And, Enter. and let's go on to my next key frame. I can use my fast-forward button here. And, here we want to go to a freeze frame, so I'm just going to type in zero, and again on this one, type zero, and then on my last key frame, let's go ahead to minus 150. So that'll go in reverse motion one and a half speed.
Now by default, I'm in spline, which means that I have a nice S curve inbetween each of my key frames. If I right-click on a key frame, I have other options that I can choose from. If I choose Shelf. That means that I'm going from one value to another without any ease in or ease out. I can also choose linear, and I can choose bezier and this gives me direction handles on each one of my key frames so that I can customize my ease in and ease out. Leave it on Spline. If I now look at the clip in the timeline IÕll see a Blue Dot which means I need to render it. Most Time Warp effects are Green Dot, which don't need to be rendered. But, I'm going in reverse motion here, so I am going to need to Render it. Choose Blended Interpolated. Then click on the Render Effect button on the bottom left corner and choose the drive and Ok. Once itÕs rendered the blue dot will go away, I can close the motion effect editor and I can play the clip in the timeline. just remember you construct your variable motion in the speed graph and you just monitor it in the position to make sure you have enough frames to do what you want, if I donÕt itÕll cause a freeze frame.
BASIC RENDERING AND SYSTEM PERFORMANCE
If you notice your system struggling, there are several things you can do to help it along so that you can maximize the playback of real time effects. If you're playing many streams of video, the spring buffer can always stay totally full. It's only partially full and while you're not dropping frames yet, Avid gives you a warning that you might drop frames soon. This is displayed as solid yellow or blue dashed lines, in the time code track in the time line. And if your playing back to many streams, the spring buffer emptys completely and this results in dropped frames or red warning bars in the time code track at the bottom. This simply means your not achieving real time playback. So, with this explanation, there are a couple of options in media composer that can help you play back your media in real time. If these were blue lines, that would mean that my drives were being taxed.
There is a couple of other methods, but these are the main ones that will help you out to make sure that you can play back your media in real time. Again, your video quality menu and switching to a different format of media, will help you out if you have a lot of different tracks to play.
So, let's take a look at a couple of options to help you out in case you need to play back your media in real time, which is usually desirable. If you come down to this menu right here, the video quality menu (3rd icon to the right of the fast menu in the timeline) and right click. You'll see that you have three options: full quality, draft quality, and best performance. In full quality the frames are being sent through your system at full resolution. But at draft quality, you can send the frames to your system at one quarter resolution. Now, when you're dealing with HD media, you really can't tell the difference, so I highly recommend that you work in draft quality.
Full quality should only be for screenings and output. So let's go ahead and play this back, and see how it goes. Alright, so that went much better. We're looking down here in the time code track, and we see that we started to get a little bit bogged down about right here. We're getting these yellow warning bars saying that my computer processor is being taxed, and oh, at the end, we dropped frames. So, you can actually go down one more step to best performance. This is sending frames through your system at 1 16th resolution. You will notice a degradation in quality here, but again, if real time playback is the goal, sometimes a drop in quality is okay. Let's go ahead and play this back. Alright, so we were able to play all of that back just fine. We had a couple of warning bars near here the end, but we had no red lines which means that we are able to play back in real time, and the spring buffer just emptied a little bit near the end, but not completely.
THE VIDEO QUALITY MENU IS A TREMENDOUS WAY FOR YOU TO BE ABLE TO BE ABLE TO PLAY BACK THE MAXIMUM NUMBER OF REAL TIME STREAM. AND DEPENDING ON WHAT YOU'RE DOING, YOU CAN JUST SWITCH AND BACK FORTH AND LIKE I SAID, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND DOING HEAVY COMPOSITING THEN BEST PERFORMANCE CAN REALLY HELP YOU OUT.
I ALSO WANT TO SHOW YOU THE FORMAT TAB. THE FORMAT TAB WILL ALLOW YOU TO SWITCH BETWEEN THE HD FLAVOR TO AN SD FLAVOR, AND THIS CAN OFTEN HELP YOU OUT AS WELL. So instead of playing in a 1080i/59.94 project, and we switch to something of a like frame rate like a 30i NTSC I'll go ahead and switch over. And we'll go ahead and play it through in draft quality. I'm going to press my space bar. It should play fine with no warning bars in the timecode track.
If I have a lot of video layers stacked on top of each other and I drop frames while playing it, I may need to render part of it as opposed to all of it to be able to play back in real time. Going up to Clip-render in to out is a bad idea as it wastes time and drive space.
If you export a sequence, the effects are automatically going to render when it creates the video file, so you don't need to render the effects when you just export a Quicktime. However, if you're going to tape, you're going to need to render your effects because you need to play back at full quality. So, I will need to render all blue dot effects when going out to tape or when screening my cut. IÕll also need to render when my sequence isnÕt playing back in real time.
Ideally, we would be switching to full quality if we were going out to tape, but I'm just going to demo this in draft quality, for now. So, I'm going to go ahead and play this through, by pressing space bar. we may have some feedback that our drives were being taxed, right around here. And then, we just started dropping frames. So, from here on, we were having trouble. And, we're going to need to render that in order for that to play back in real time. Therefore, we're going to use the diagnosis bars in the timecode track to render intelligently. To do this, I'm just going to add a video track, Ctrl + Y or Cmd + Y, and I'm going to come into my Effect Palette. And, I'm going to go to the Image category, and I'm going to apply a mask. Now, where am I going to apply this mask? The mask is just an effect that I can render so that I can render everything on v9 and below.
Therefore, I'm going to apply my mask from this point in the timeline, on over, alright? So, I'm going to monitor v9. What I want to do is at this point, slightly before, I'm going to apply an edit on v9. Let me just deselect v8 through v1 by Shift dragging through my tracks, and I'll add an edit, and I will drag my mask effect over on this portion of v9 and this is the only effect I'm going to render.
I'm going to ignore everything else, because all of the tracks on v9 and below are going to be rendered when I render this mask. So, remember how many frames were dropped. And then, when we render this, Render Effect, Data Drive, OK. It's going to take just a little bit of time. And, we'll go ahead and play through this and let's see if we solved our problem. I'm going to go ahead and press the space bar to play.
BASIC COLOR CORRECTION
First of all, you need to ask yourself what part of the image is supposed to be white. Secondly, you need to ask yourself, what in the image is suppose to be black? Third, is the image too dark or too bright? Fourth, is the image flat? If yes, we're going to open up the tonal range by setting our blacks and whites, and that should help out a lot. Fifth, is there a color cast? It looks like there is a color cast especially in the highlights weighted towards yellow so we'll probably need to cool those down. We'll be able to take specific measurements for those so that we can be really accurate there. Finally, how is the saturation level especially in the flesh tones?
The first of the video scopes that we'll take a look at is the YWave form monitor, which allows us to see and measure the luma, or light and dark values of an image. let's go ahead and open up our color correction tool. We can do that by pressing on this button in the timeline, which looks like three monitors. Or we can come up to Windows > Workspaces > Color Correction. When it opens, We have our three monitors, and in the middle monitor is the image that we are correcting. We can populate anything in each of these three monitors, so if you click on this pull-down menu, You can put in the previous shot in the sequence, the next, two before, two after, or any one of the video scopes. So we've got Y waveform selected.
in the middle here, we have our color correction tool. we also have a curves tab, but this is a little bit more complex, so in this course we're going to focus in the HSL tab. at the bottom, we have our sequence
In our y wave form monitor, we have video black at 16. And at the top, we have video white at 235. So the goal is to set values in our image that are supposed to be black, down at 16.
And values in our image that are supposed to be white at 235. Everything in between are mid-tones, so we can weight them more towards white, or we can weight them more towards black. Over here on the right side are just the percentages of luminance. So we have 0% luminance which corresponds to black. And 100% luminance which corresponds to white. So with that, let's go back into Avid and take a look at our image. We want to make sure that the black values in our image come down to 16.
We also want to make sure that the white values in our image come up to 235.
So we're going to start with set-up. Setup controls our black point. If we adjust setup to the left, we are bringing down our blacks, and notice that our waveform adjusts accordingly. And if I want finer adjustments, I just hold down Shift while I drag to the left, and we get really fine adjustments here, because they are quite pronounced if you don't do this. Okay, so now we have our blacks.
The way that we can see where we came from is by clicking on this monitor here called Dual Split. And we can either look at it half and half, or what I like to do is drag this all the way over to the right so that we can toggle the before and after by clicking on it over and over. We've brought our blacks down to where they should be, now we have to look at our whites. So you want to pick something in your image that is actually white and use that. All right, so we want to make sure that this goes above 235 if possible, so we're going to use our gain which is going to control our white point. My black levels may go up a bit in the monitor and if so drag the Setup back down again to make it better. Notice that if I go too far down with my blacks, you get an indication in the wave form that it becomes white, and you've gone below 16. This is a problem, because these produce illegal luma levels, and they'll be refused if you try to broadcast it.
The last control I want to talk about is gamma, this controls the midtones. So if I generally want to lighten the image, or generally darken the image, I can do so with this slider. just keep in mind you want to keep your blacks at 16. All right, so, as you go forward tweaking your gain, gamma, and setup values, make sure that you continually monitor that with the Y wave form, and you will produce a really nice result in getting your luma values where they should be.
As you remember from reading the Y-Waveform, the true value of video black is 16, and the true value of video white is 235. Black and white should have no color cast, because black is the absence of color, and white is all colors together. Therefore, black and white are true neutral colors and should read at 16 and 235, across all three color channels of red, green and blue. Alright, so we have our corrected image, as far as setting our blacks and whites, and now we're ready to correct Color Cast.
We do that by switching to the RGB Parade, and we measure this graph by looking at the three color channels, as we read the image across from left to right, three times. So, in reading this full image, we come back over to our red, green and blue. And we need to make sure that our black values are aligned, and our white values are aligned. If my shot has a pretty strong red color cast, in both our blacks and our whites.
And so, we'll probably need to change the values within our shadow chroma wheel and our highlight chroma wheel. So let's take it one step at a time, and find out exactly what our blacks are measuring at. To determine this, we come over to our color swatches here, and if I hover my mouse in this box, I get an eye dropper, and if I click down and then bring it up to my image, you'll see the numbers change in the red, green, and blue channels, within that box.
So, I'm just going to click and release (over something black in the image), and we'll take a look at these values, we have red 46, green 21, and blue 15. Now again, we want these to all be measuring at around 16, we'd really like to have them within ten of one another. So, it looks like we need to bring the red values down. We can isolate this, by coming over to our shadow chroma wheel, and drag away from red. So, we're going to decrease the amount of red in our shadows and increase the amount of blue and cyan.
So, we're just going to grab this cross and drag down. And as you see, my waveform updated and I'm now in much more alignment, in fact I might have gone a little bit too far. Let's go ahead and take a measurement. To do that, I'm just going to click and drag with my mouse, up to my monitor and release. Yup, and now we have red 235, green 26, and blue 35. So we have a little bit too much blue, let's go ahead and tweak back a little bit.
We might not be able to get it exactly perfect, but as you go through and tweak this, I encourage you to get it as close as possible. This does look pretty close though, we're in alignment, this is much better. Again we'll take a measurement, click, drag and release and 25, 29, and 30. So we're still riding a little bit high, above 16. We might need to go back into my Y-Waveform and bring our black values down a little bit. Let's just toggle over there real quick, to read those.
Yeah, we're a little bit high, so I'm going to go back down with setup a little bit, and back to RGB and let's take another measurement. 26, 26, 26. Alright, so we're within ten, again we might want to go in and tweak a little bit, but this is really great, we've removed the color cast, everything is in alignment across the bottom, in our blacks. Now we need to do the same thing for our whites. So, let's go ahead and take a measurement. We don't have anything exactly pure white like a white sheet of paper, so we're going to have to rely on this hanger here.
And we'll probably not be all the way up at 235, so we're going to try to do something called Approach white. So if it's right around 200 or so, as long as all three color channels are aligned, that'll be just fine. So, let's take a measurement, go ahead and click with my eyedropper and release, right there on the hanger. And we've got red 247, green 181, blue 151. Again, we're way too high in the red, let's drag toward blue and green in our highlights, and you saw the red come down.
We're getting in more alignment, so let's take another measurement. 227, 187, 157, so we're getting closer. I'm going to probably need to tweak with my mid-tone chroma wheel as well, because these values are falling into the mid tones as well. So sometimes you need to have your mid-tone chroma wheel accompany, either the highlight or shadow. Let's bring this down and you can see things adjust, let's take another measurement, 223, 188, and 165. We still need a little bit more blue across the board, so I'm going to go ahead and keep tweaking.
And again, you can get this exactly perfect. We may not have the capability of getting it aligned exactly right, but this is looking a lot better, and this measurement is, is a lot better. We've got 213, 204,189. So, we'll need to get a little bit more blue in there, but at you can see, let's take a look at our before and we'll bring that over, so we can toggle. And after, so we're looking much, much better. In the next movie, we'll take a look at how to bring out her flesh tones, by looking at the Vectorscope and manipulating our hue and saturation.
Besides blacks and whites, the human eye is very perceptive to skin tones. By using the vector scope, you can adjust chroma hues and saturation as well as correct the hues of skin tones. Alright, so we have set our accurate blacks and whites. We've removed our color cast. Let's head on over to the vector scope. I will click here and pull down and choose vector scope. Alright, so the vector scope represents the hughes that go around the color wheels. Starting with red, then magenta, blue, cyan, green, and yellow.
. If this was just a blank image with a little green dot in the middle, this would be a desaturated or black and white image, so as you go out from the center. The saturation increases, so this measures hue by where this green trace is lying within these colors. And then it also measures saturation, so the further out it goes, the more saturated it is. You want to make sure that the trace does not go beyond the edge of the circle because that represents illegal chroma values. You also have an invisible line that runs right in between yellow and red. And this is called the eye line, and it represents the line upon which all flesh tones should reside.
Flesh tones in general should extend about one third the way out from the center of the circle. So, we want to bring her flesh tones out in saturation and just looking at this for her other hues, Alright, so in general we want to use this to correct our flesh tones. Again, I don't think we're going to need to make any hue adjustments, we just want to increase the saturation. You won't see any saturation sliders here in the hue offsets tab. We need to switch to controls. And here's our saturation. We can click and drag, or we can hold down shift to get a finer control. Okay, so I like that. I think that's a really nice corrected image. I want to show you the before and after. But before I do, I want to do one more thing to our image. I'm going to load the Y Waveform.
And, if you notice here we have a couple of peaking values. But we do need to bring that back down within legal levels for our correction. So we just need to click on this box here (next to Clip Low). It's going to clip all of our blacks that are below 16 at 16, and it's going to clip all of our whites that are above 235 at 235. So when I click on this box, you see that it got brought down within legal levels.
I should toggle before and after to see it. I can save it to my CC Template bin and use on other clips by clicking while in Windows – Workspaces – Color Correction and clicking and holding down a on the Create FX Template icon and dragging and dropping in my CC Bin and rename it.
DO THIS: I can color correct an image with one button. Go to my Settings Tab and open Correction and then go to Auto Correct tab. Under the first/or only drop down menu select HSL Auto contrast (because we want to first set our whites and blacks). Then in the next/new drop down menu choose, HSL auto balance. So these are the two things that we did minus the saturation change, when we just performed our automatic color correction. Click OK. We've now programmed the color correction effect to do this. And then, if I come into my effect palette, you'll notice in the image category that I have something called a color correction effect. And that's what this is. I'm simply going to drag this effect onto this segment/clip and release. And you can see that all of my automatic corrections were done for me.
the first thing that we do is set our blacks and whites, using the y waveform monitor. Then come down to these buttons here, where we see auto black and auto white (under the Setup area). So first I'm going to set auto black by clicking on it. And you can see that all of my black values are brought down near 16. And now I'm going to set auto white, where the brightest parts of my image are brought up to 235.
And there's actually a function that does this all in one. By clicking on the Auto Contrast button alone, it will simultaneously set my blacks and whites in one move. So I'll click on this button, and you can see that the darkest parts of my image were brought down and the lightest parts were brought up. Now, we still have a color cast, so I'm going to move on to the RGB parade. Just like we did with manual corrections. And as you can see, the red channel of our black values is high, just as with our highlights. So, what Avid is going to do, is it's going to analyze the balance between the blacks in all three color channels, and the whites in all three color channels, and try to bring those into alignment.
And it does this via the AUTO BALANCE TOOL, which is this first button right here. So I'll go ahead and click on auto balance, and when I do so, watch my cross-hairs in all three chromo-wheels. And it brought my blacks in alignment. And it brought my whites in alignment. And it's really hard to see the blue trace right here, but we have the whitest part right up here at 235 in all 3 channels. Alright, so this did a pretty good job of correcting my image with automatic corrections. If I use my dual split button, you can see the before and after. And one thing it didn't do was touch my saturation, so I want to bump up her saturation just a little bit after I perform my automatic corrections. Remember you have that control in the controls tab, right here. And I'll just go ahead and warm her up just a little bit, look at my vectorscope when I do that.
I think you'll agree that the manual correction does look better. We're able to remove more of the color cast and I just think it looks brighter, but we did do a pretty good job of getting most of the way on the automatic correction. So my advice would be that if you use the automatic correction, do it to perform a baseline adjustment, and then tweak the results further until you get the results that you could with a manual correction.
CREATING TITLES AND AVID MARQUEE
Making sharp-looking titles is an absolute must in video editing. Whether it's full-page graphic, a lower-third, or an animated title sequence, Avid Marquee is a great solution for title creation. Marquee is an application within Media Composer, and it's the more advanced of the two title tools. Both applications can be accessed via the Tools menu, and Title tool application. And as you see here, I get a dialog box asking me if I want to use Marquee or Title tool. There's also a persist checkbox if I want Media Composer to open the same Title tool each time.
So I'm going to choose Marquee. And as you see, Marquee opens. And it's a new application. It's on top of Media Composer. Media Composer is in the background. I'm going to go ahead and just maximize this. So we get the maximum amount of real estate. And you see here that we see Kim. This is the frame in our sequence that we're parked on. This is just a reference video frame. It's not going to be part of the title, but it allows us to create the title on top of it. If you'd rather not look at it, you can click on this background key and you'll just see black.
I also recommend that you put on your safe title safe action lines. The safe action line is this outside line, and it guarantees that all action within this line will play on standard television sets. And within the safe title line is where you should make all of your titles. Let's come over here to the Marquee tool palette. We have two that we want to touch on right away. The Edit tool and the Text tool. The Edit tool allows you to re-position and re-scale text and objects.
We don't have anything to re-scale or re-position yet, so let's move on to the Text tool. The Text tool allows me to type my text. If I just click in my video frame and type, the bounding box will expand as I type. And then I can go back to my Edit tool and move it around. Notice that when I increase the size of my bounding box, nothing happens to the size of my text. However, if I hold down Alt while increasing the size of my bounding box, my text increases size as well.
If I hold down Shift and Alt or Shift and Option on a Mac, my proportions are constrained. Also, notice that when I move my text around with my Edit tool, it snaps to my safe title lines. This is really convenient. Up here at the top, I have a toolbar, and I can choose a font. I'll just choose Arial. And notice that this made my text wrap. You can always just increase the size of your bounding box if you don't want that to happen.
To the right of that is another way that I can change the size of my text. I can either type in a value, or there's a value shuttle to the right of that where I can dynamically change the size of my text. If I want to move back to the default value, I can click on my Reset button right here. Let's go ahead and just increase it slightly, and make my bounding box big enough for that. Coming over here, I can change the value of my kerning. Kerning is the space in between my letters. So again, I have a value shuttle that I can make things closer together or further apart.
And let's go ahead and just increase the size just slightly. And again, I'm going to have to increase the size of my bounding box to be able to fit that in. And I'll go down a little bit. To the right of that, I have a color well. I have a couple of ways that I can choose colors. If I click on this button to the right of the color well, I have my color swatches. I also have a color spectrum, where I have a lot more choices. And if I click on color picker, that opens the Mac or Windows color picker where I have control of not only my hue but also my saturation, brightness, and opacity. So, I'll just click OK there.
And I want to show you one more tool and that's the Eyedropper. If I come down to my Eyedropper and then click, I'm able to choose any color within my frame. So if we want to match the red in her hair here, the flower, I can choose that. Obviously we're going to need a way to separate that from the background, but fortunately there are ways to do that. We also have the ability to left justify, center justify, right justify our text, or justify it evenly across the bounding box.
I'll go ahead and leave that left justified, and come over here to the Quick Title Properties window. Coming over here to my Quick Title Properties window, I have another base color, which you can see matches this one over here. And because I really can't see my text here, I'm going to come back to something a little bit more readable. I'll go ahead and choose this light pink. And then to the right of that, I have opacity control. I can make it more transparent or fully opaque.
And I'll leave it fully opaque for now. All of these controls are fully animatable. So if you were producing animated titles, you could bring something from transparent to opaque, back to transparent quite easily. But in the context of this movie, these are the basics. We have the ability to create and move titles, change the way they look, and we're getting the first introduction to the Quick Title Properties window. We're going to continue with the Quick Title Properties window in the following movie when we explore shapes and gradient.
In this movie, we'll explore two common Avid Marquee tools, gradient and object creation. Alright, let's take a look at our title here. It's very simple. And, in this movie, let's work on making it a little bit more snazzy. If you're following along with the exercise files and you want to pull up the title at this point in time, just go to File > Open and then navigate to kim1. So, I'm going to come over to my Enable gradient. We're going to skip over lighting. This is beyond the scope of this course.
So let's go and check Enable gradient, and let's take a look at what happened here. In each letter, it proceeds from black to my light pink color. So, it's produced a local letter-based gradient all the way across the board. Now, rarely do you actually want it to look like this, so there's a couple of gradient controls that you can adjust in order to make this look a little bit better. First, I'd like to choose the color of my own gradient. So, I'm going to uncheck the Tint box here and now, I'm going to select my gradient colors by right-clicking here in the triangle.
So, lets again choose our light pink color and right now, it's going to white. If I want to try something else, I can right-click in this triangle and choose a different color. Again, the gradient is still local. We'll be able to change that by changing our mapping from Local to Container. Notice that the Container is the bounding box, so as I increase the size of the bounding box, the gradient changes. Another way I can change my gradient is to move this stop to the left and to the right and it's basically saying where one color is shifting into the other.
Another way I can change the way my gradient looks is by changing it from a vertical gradient to a horizontal gradient and you can see that now, it goes from white to pink from top to bottom. And I can also choose a radial gradient. So it goes from red in the middle out to white on the outside. Let's go ahead and choose a horizontal gradient. So we're going from a very light pink to a darker red and, I think it still needs a little bit of definition from the background.
So that's where some objects can help us out. We have two object creation tools here, the Rectangle tool and the Ellipse tool. The Rectangle tool allows you to draw a rectangle, and I'll go ahead and just, draw it right over my title here. I can't see my title so I'm going to need to send that to the background. I do that via the Object menu up here, and I'll just Send to Back. If I had multiple layers, I could send it back one layer at a time with Send Backward. I'll Send to Back and use my Edit tool to resize here.
And let's actually make it go across the entire frame. Okay, little tweaking there. Now, let's go ahead and change the color of my object as well. I could come in and change my base color. I could come into the Enable gradient and make sure that I get the color I like in here. Again, I'm going to uncheck Tint and let's go ahead and choose, some colors here that might help me stand out from the background.
I'll choose a, the light pink over here on the left, and a very, very light gray over here on the right. What I'm going to do is actually add some opacity to this. I'm going to right-click again and I'm going to choose my color picker, and I'm going to bring my opacity way down so that it fades into the background. And I'll say OK, and we're getting a nice band across the bottom here. I really think that my letters could use a little bit more definition from my object.
So let's come on down here to our drop shadow. I'm going to enable the drop shadow and you can see that by default, it gives it a 50% opaque shadow. I like my shadows a little bit crisper, so I'm going to choose 75 and I can then just drag the shadow and dynamically change it or you can just type the values in here. I think I'm going to just change this to 0.5 and negative 0.5 and we're starting to get some better definition here.
You know, I think I'm going to go back into my object and make this a little bit transparent, too. So, again, I'm just going to right-click > color picker and then dial down my opacity and say OK and we've got a nice semi-transparent band across the bottom and we have our title right here and it's really readable. Okay, so our title is coming along. I'm probably going to adjust a few more parameters and I'm going to add her title, swing dancer, underneath it. If you're following along with the exercise files, feel free to experiment yourself and in the next movie, we'll talk about how to create Avid title templates to make this job just a little bit easier.
It's great to get creative and build your own titles, but if you prefer, marquee has several styles available as templates. You can use these templates and then modify them as you want to create attractive graphic and lower third titles. Alright, so I finished building my lower third here, I've added her title and another shape, and made a few other adjustments. And that's great, but if I wanted to have a starting place I could have used one of Avid's title templates. So to demonstrate that I am just going to to choose a new title.
And I'm going to come down here to the styles library, and I'm going to come down here to the style's library. And I'm going to choose Templates, and then Avid Templates, and Lower Thirds. Now, I can load each one of these separately by double-clicking. And it gives me one of the templates. I have to press Undo, so control+Z, or command+Z, if I want to try out another one. Because if I just double-click another one, they load on top of one another. And that's not what we want. So I'll kind of go through. Actually, that one looks nice.
Let's go ahead and modify this one. Now, I'm going to go ahead and enable my Safe Title, Safe Action lines here. And as you see, by default, it falls within my safe title boundaries, which is nice. I'm just going to move it over a little bit. I want to show you another way you can move things in Marquee. If I select with my edit tool, one of the objects, I can come down to the transform properties box and I can move over like so. So I can, sort of, nudge this over to my right side, and same thing here.
Just quickly kind of get that aligned. Okay, so let's go ahead and manipulate this a little bit. I want to match my color scheme a little bit better. So I'm just going to click on my rectangle. And then as you see, my Enable Gradient box is checked and it already has some gradient colors in there for me. So, I'm going to change the purple color to more of a red, so that it matches a little bit better. Again, I'll right click, and let's go ahead and get this dark pink.
And notice that it actually has three color stops. So, I'm going to right click, here, and we'll make this one more of a dark red. And I kind of like how it goes opaque. It still is a little bit blue, though, so let's change this to a dark gray. And then again we can move our color stops back and forth to see where these colors change, and it's starting to look pretty good. I want to make this maybe fully transparent, so again I can come right click, come to color picker.
And, move my transparency to the left, and we're really seeing through that object now, down to the raw video. So, again I can just come in here, we already have some styles applied to this, including the drop shadow. Okay, so now I'm going to select my Text tool. And come in here and just re-type her name. And then go ahead and re-type her name here too. We're just going to put her title instead of her location.
Okay, so that's looking pretty good. I can make a couple of other adjustments, but as you see, we were able to get to this point a lot quicker by using one of Avid's templates. And you can explore those on your own. There's lots of nice choices. There's lots of different types of Avid templates, so feel free to explore through all of these menus and then customize a way to quickly create your own title creations.
Female 1: Alright, it's time to work with our title in Media Composer. In this movie, we'll take a look at how to properly save the title and how to add it to our sequence. Alright, so I'm back to the title I created, and I want to add this to my sequence in Media Composer. To do that, I'm going to come up to File > and Save to Bin, and I'm going to name this. Just name this kim2. And press OK. It's going to ask me what bin I would like my titles to go into. I have created a titles bin, I recommend that you do this too.
Also, there will need to be some media created for this, so you'll need to choose the appropriate drive. I'll choose my data drive. And I'm going to go ahead and save. All right. So the title goes into my titles bin. And it also loads in the source monitor. There's two whole minutes of title here. So I'm definitely not going to need all of that. But I will need about three to four seconds. And it's going to go on top of my video. And I'm going to put titles on their own track, on V3. So I'll press Ctrl+Y, or Cmd+Y on a mac.
And then we're going to patch our source video up to our timeline video, so v1 to v3. I'm clicking and dragging with my mouse and I'm just going to de-select all other tracks. So it's clean, and what I want to do is actually put an in and out point around the area that I want my title to fall. So I'm going to do this on the fly, I'm going to go ahead and press play, and then mark an in with an i, and an out with an o, where I want my title to go.
All right, so I have here about two and a half seconds for my title. I might make it a little bit longer. So I'll just extend my out point slightly and now about almost three seconds. Now I'm going to bring my position indicator in from far left. Because I'm probably going to want to put a title fade, so I'm going to need handle to achieve that. So I have two minutes to play with here. So I'm just going to park right here and mark an in. And this is an overwrite, so I'll press B, and let's play through this and see how we like it.
Female : 2 And there's only three things that matter is the music, the dance floor, and your partner, and you just forget. Female 1: Alright, so I think that looks nice. It does just pop on and pop off though, so I'd like to add a title fade. To do that, I'm just going to park on the title, come up to the timeline fast menu. And then choose this button right here, the e with the little fade off the side of it. And when I press on this, this is going to ask me how I'd like my fade up and fade down to go. And I recommend a value of eight frames. And I'll press OK.
And let's play through this and see how we like it. Speaker 2: And there's only three things that matter, and it's the music, the dance floor and your partner. Speaker 1: All right, that looks really nice. So, in Media Composer, if I wanted to change this further without bringing it into marquee, I just want to show you the tools for that. I can just park on my title and then go to the effect editor, and we have several very basic parameters that we can choose. I can adjust the size and I'll just bring that back down to 100.
Because I don't want to change my size. I can change the position. I can crop it. I can change the foreground or opacity. All this is available to me. And if I want a few more choices, I can click on the promote to 3D in the lower right. And I actually have a whole host of options. I'm going to close this, because I don't need to change anything for right now. So because marquee and Media Composer are interconnected so well, saving and editing titles is a pretty straightforward process. Occasionally, you'll need to go back the other way, from Media Composer to marquee, to make adjustments to the title.
We'll explore how to do that in the next movie.
Editing as with writing is all about revision. Effects and titles need revision too, so in this movie we'll take a look at how to bring the title back into marquee so we can work on it some more. All right, so my title's in my sequence, but my producer gave me some feedback that we need to change the font and the gradient. So I'm just going to click on the effect editor, if I'm parked on it right here in the sequence. And then I'm going to click on Edit Title. This is going to reopen marquee, and here is my title, and I can work on it a little bit further.
So the font for the show, is actually Cambria. So we need to change it from Aerial to Cambria. And let's switch this one as well. I'm just typing in Cam so it will snap me right to the Cambria within the list of choices. And, my publisher wasn't too thrilled about this gradients so I'm going to disable the gradients. And let's go ahead and darken this color just a little bit.
I'll go ahead into my base color and choose this darker pink here. We'll go ahead and also disable the gradient here and leave that white. We still have our line that goes from pink to white with a red shadow. And we'll just lengthen this just slightly, and we'll see how this one works out as far as working in our sequence. So, I'm going to go ahead and close marquee. I'll just click on the red X in the corner.
And I'm going to go ahead and save this to my bin by clicking on Save to Bin. And, I'm going to close my effect editor here. You'll notice that my title is now loaded in the source monitor and it's also replaced in my sequence. So, I automatically have the revision plugged right into my sequence and let's go ahead and play and see how we like it. Female 2: The things that matter, and it's the music, the dance floor and your partner. And you just forget everything. Female 1: Alright. So we'll just take that to the producer and see what the comments are.
And if there's more suggestions for revision, it's really easy to go right back into Marquee and make those adjustments.
One of the most common types of titles is a roll, which you're probably familiar with as the type of title used in movie credits. Another common type of title is a crawl, which is used in tickers that are used on sports and news stations. In this movie, we'll take a look at how to create a roll, and then you can use that information to create a crawl if you like. Alright, so, I am back in marquee. And we'll go ahead and maximize our real estate here. And we don't need to see the background image because we're creating a roll, which is going to play over black, so I'm going to disregard my background.
And to create either a roll or a crawl, you just click down here on the R or the C. So I'm going to click on R, and then I'm going to go into the text tool, and I can either begin typing text for my roll or I can import text. So I happen to have all of the information that I need on a plain text document. I'm going to go to File > Import > Text, and I'm going to import my roll text. This is in the additional files if you're following along with the exercise files.
And I'll go ahead and click Open. And you can see that all of the text came in. And I have this scroll bar along the right so that I can see everything. We just want to center justify everything. So I'm just going to press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A on a Mac to select everything. And press Center Justify. And I'll also change this to Cambria because that is the font for the show. And I'll just type in cam, for Cambria, and there we go. All right, so it's very, very simple.
But that's all we need. So I'm going to save this back to Media Composer. File > Save to Bin. And I'll just call this credits. And OK. It does render for just a little bit. And I'm going to minimize Marquee. Because I have this dialog box, where I have to make a few choices. So I'll name it Credits, I'll have it go to my titles bin, and the media will go to my data drive, and the DNXHD 145 resolution is just fine. So, I'm going to click Save.
And it might not seem that much happened but if you look here at my titles bin there is my credits. It's also loaded in my source monitor. Now you can't really tell that. But if I scroll through, you can see the entire rolling title, so I'm just going to mark the entire title. I'll press T to mark an in and an out at the beginning and end. Then I'm going to come down to the end of my sequence where the credits go, and I'm just going to overwrite this on V3. So I'll press B. Now, this entire title is going to take two whole minutes to go through all of those names.
Way too long. So the way to get your title at the length that you want is to actually trim it down. I'm just going to lasso the end of my title, and drag it in, significantly, and let's go ahead and see how long that is. I'm going to press T and check up in my center duration. I'm still at 30 seconds. I'd like to get down to, probably less than half of that. All right, and, now we are at 12 seconds, I think that should be pretty good.
So I'm going to render this. It is a blue dot effect, so if I play through it, I won't be able to see anything, so I'm going to have to render it to see how I like that speed. So I'm going to come over to Render Effect, and choose my data drive, and I'll press OK. And by the way, I'm just going to render this for a short time before I stop it, because all I want to do is check the speed, and then I'll either ditch it or continue. So I'm going to press OK, and then I'm going to press Ctrl+period or Cmd+period on a Mac when I'm about a quarter of the way through, and I'm going to choose to keep the partial render.
So if you notice here, I have a red line throughout most of it, but we've rendered the first part, so let's just check the timing. I'm going to go ahead and press Play. Alright, so I think that timing is just fine. If I wanted to quicken it even more, I would just go ahead and trim it in further. If I want to slow it down, I would trim it out, but in this case, I'm just going to render it. So we're going to go ahead and render effect, send it to my data drive, and our media is being created so that we can see our roll in real time.
Alright, notice that my red line disappeared. So I'm just going to extend my music so that it rolls under my credits. I'm going to go ahead and delete my transition by removing effect. And, let's go ahead and roll this out. And let's see how this looks Alright, looks good. So, as you can see, rolls are a way for you to get a lot of information across in a short amount of time, and so are crawls.
One of the most powerful tools in Marquee is called Auto-Titler, which allows you to create multiple titles of the same template based on information in a simple text document. Let's take a look at how it works. Alright, so here is the title that I've created from scratch, and what I'd like to do is use this template for about seven or eight other people in the same show. So what I'm going to do is the use Auto-Titler to achieve that. Before going into Auto-Titler, I'd like to first show you how an Avid template looks in regards to its text boxes, which is a really important part of this.
So, I'm just going to go to File and New Title. And then I'm going to go into Templates and then Avid Templates, Lower Thirds, and I'm just going to load one of these. And as you see here, we have two text boxes. And I'm going to open up these layers so you can see what each of these corresponds to. So I'll click on Name, and you can see that this corresponds to something called Text box 1. I'll click on Location, and this corresponds to Text box 2. It's really important that these are names just like this or Auto-Titler won't work, so just keep that in mind as we go back to our own template.
So I'll go back to our template. And I'm going to open up the layers. And I'll click on the name here, and you can see that it's just called Text Box. So I have to call this Text Box 1. And here, we'll just go ahead and rename this to Text Box 2. Okay, and one more thing we have to do. Because there are quite a few names that are longer than Kim's, We need to make room for them to be created. So I'm just going to extend the bounding box, and then right justify that.
And pretty much everybody is a swing dancer, but I'll just extend the bounding box just for safe measure. And right justify that. Okay, so now we are set to go ahead and get our text document. Let's go ahead into Microsoft Word, and I want to show you what each of those text boxes corresponds to. So the very first line that you type corresponds to text box one. So I'll just type Kim's name and one carriage return, and then her title.
Then I'll press Enter twice and we'll go onto the next name. And one return, and the title, which corresponds to text box two. And two returns, and keep going. So this is a great way for you to really quickly enter in some data. Maybe perform a spell check on it, hand it off to others, make sure everything looks good. And I actually have a finished text document, so let's go ahead and get that. Everything looks good here, we have Text Box 1, Text Box 2, corresponds correctly.
And so now we're going to go up to File > Auto-Titler. I'm going to go to my desktop into the exercise files, into additional files. And then in the credits folder, I have my Auto-Titler document. I'm going to go ahead and press Open. We're going to start on number one here, press OK. The titles are automatically being created, fitting into my template. All right, wonderful. All possible titles are created, you can access them from the Windows menu.
So you can't really see much here, because these are giant high definition titles. I'm going to have to scroll down a little bit, and scroll over so you can see them. Okay. So I can pull each of these up from the Windows menu, check them out, make sure they look good. I think they look great. And then when you're done, you just send them to Avid in the same way that you send any title to Avid. You go to File, and this time since there are multiple titles, we're just going to press Save All to Bin.
This does take just a little bit of time, so I encourage you to go through this yourself. But basically that's all there is to it. We just created eight titles with just the click of a button using the Auto-Titler.
11 CAPTURING AND IMPORTING
importing involves bringing in movie files, graphics, animations, photographs, and the like, and then taking that file's native type and transcoding it to Avid's native file type, which is MFX. Now there's quite a few options that you'll need to consider when you do this. Now, before we actually do an import, I want to show you where avid's native file types are kept. If I go to my data drive, which is my D drive. I'm going to see a footer called Avid media files at the root directory of my media drive. Inside there, I have an MXF folder, and inside there I have a numbered folder, and inside there, I have all of my MXF files. And again, these are the files that are created whenever I import any media, capture any media, or create any media, like when I render a file.
Click on the Format Tab as we have here a lot of different information about the format of the media in my project. Now earlier in the course I recommended that you FIND OUT WHAT FORMAT YOUR MEDIA WAS SHOT IN AND THEN SET UP YOUR PROJECT ACCORDINGLY. We're still not going to go into much more detail than that, but I do want to address a couple more things about this format. So depending on what I have chosen here as my project type and my raster dimension, that's going to effect the media type that I have in my media creation settings. I can find my media creation settings under tools, and media creation, and that corresponds to Ctrl+5, or Cmd+5 on a Mac. Now, again depending on my project type, I have different resolutions available for import, I'm going to leave this on DNXHD145, but you can see that we have a few options.
One to one is totally uncompressed, so it's going to produce very large files. Everything else is going to have an element of compression. Below that, we choose where our media is going to go. So, I want my media to go to my data drive, and when it does that, it goes inside that Avid mediafiles folder. So I'm all set here, I can go ahead and apply to all and apply to all, so that all media I create is the same resolution and goes to the same place. I'm going to go ahead and click OK.
Next, I'm going to talk about the available settings for import. YOU NEED AN OPEN BIN TO PERFORM AN IMPORT. And you can just right click and choose Import and here at the bottom should look familiar. We can choose the Video Resolution. Here's everything that we previously saw in media creation settings as well as the drive. But the real important button is the options button. I'm going to go ahead and click on Options and we are going to discuss everything here. But I want to discuss a few important things within the image tab. If I know that my image is sized in the exact same resolution as my video, which as you see here is 1920 by 1080, then I'm going to choose option number 1.
UNDER VIDEO MAPPING, I RECOMMEND THAT YOU CHOOSE 601SD OR 709HD FOR THE VIDEO COLOR SPACE UNLESS YOU KNOW THAT IT WAS CREATED IN THE RGB COLOR SPACE. Again, this is beyond the scope of the course. But by and large, most of the time, you can choose this last option here. Here's where we choose how long our still frame duration is going to last, so this is going to be a 30-second photograph that we're going to bring in. I'm going to go ahead and leave this one ordered for current format, and we don't have an alpha channel, so I'm going to ignore this. I'm going to go ahead and click OK so we've set our settings.
Now right next to it we have a vertical image, which is also 1920 by 1080, but the wrong way. So let's see what happens when we bring that image in using the first option. Import, and we're going to make sure our first option, image size for current format, is chosen. And I'm going to click OK, and we're going to navigate to our vertical image, and open, and let's go ahead and load this one up. Oh, doesn't look very good.
Now, what Avid has done is it's stretched and squeezed and made it fit. So that's what happens when you choose option number one, when something is not sized correctly. So we obviously want to bring this in a little bit differently. I'm going to go ahead and right click, import, and we'll go ahead and choose again, but now we'll go to options, and I'm going to choose option number four. Resize image to fit format raster. Options two and three do have their time and place, but for the purposes of this course, usually it's either size correctly, or you need Avid to re-size it and then keep the shape, which is what option number four does.
I'm not going to touch anything else, but I'm going to click OK And let's go ahead and Open, and let's load this one. Alright, so it looks a lot better. Our shape was maintained and we can work with this. Now in a future movie, we'll actually talk about how to link to photos instead of import them, but if you do import them, you do need to note the difference between the various import options.
SO ONCE YOU FIGURE OUT YOUR IMPORT FORMAT, YOUR DESTINATION DRIVE, AND SEVERAL IMPORTANT IMPORT SETTING, YOU'RE GOOD TO GO. AND KEEP IN MIND, THIS PROCESS WORKS NOT ONLY FOR PHOTOGRAPHS, BUT ALSO COUNTLESS VARIETIES OF MOVIES, GRAPHICS AND ANIMATION FILE TYPES.
While importing files is fairly straight forward. BY FAR THE MOST POPULAR WAY TO ACCESS YOUR MEDIA WITHIN MEDIA COMPOSER IS BY USING THE AMA WORKFLOW, WHICH IS AVID MEDIA ACCESS. Now this allows you to quickly and easily link to files without importing, transcoding, or copying. You just get instant access to your files and you can start editing. Now Avid natively supports many, many popular codecs. Which if we go to their webpage, is Avid.com/ama, that will get you there.
SO TO GET STARTED WITH AMA, I JUST OPEN A BIN, LIKE I HAVE HERE. AND I CAN EITHER GO UP TO FILE > AND AMA LINK OR I CAN JUST RIGHT-CLICK IN THE BIN, AND SAY AMA LINK.
And I'm just going to navigate to the file that I want to bring in. So I'm not importing it, I'm linking to it. I'm going to go ahead and say open. And the file is brought in. One other thing, just take a look at the icon type. It kind of looks like a Master clip on the left, but on the right is a little chain link to let you know that this is an AMA clip.
LET'S BRING IN AN ENTIRE FOLDER. And I'm just going to go to this folder right here. If you take a look inside, it's a rather intricate folder hierarchy (DCIM folder, MVI files, THM files, etc). It goes down, this is basically coming from a camera card. I just copied my entire camera card right into my system. Just so you know, I wasn't able to provide this to you for the exercise files, it's just too large, but feel free to grab your own folder of files. And again if they're QuickTime files you don't even have to install the appropriate AMA plugin.
So, now I want to show you a different way to link by AMA. So, instead of going through the menu, you actually just Alt-drag or Opt-drag on a Mac right into your open bin. Again, you can just load them and begin editing with them right away.
Now this is terrific. But I wouldn't be doing my service if I didn't say that THERE IS A DOWNSIDE TO EDITING WITH AMA. AND THAT'S THAT THE FILES AREN'T STORED IN THE MANAGED MEDIA LOCATION, THAT AVID MEDIA FILES FOLDER. INSTEAD, IT'S UP TO YOU TO PERFORM GOOD MEDIA MANAGEMENT AT THE OPERATING SYSTEM LEVEL YOURSELF. SO TO HELP YOURSELF OUT, I HIGHLY RECOMMEND SETTING UP A FOLDER ON THE ROOT DIRECTORY OF YOUR MEDIA DRIVE RIGHT BESIDE YOUR AVID MEDIA FILES FOLDER, kind of like this right here. So if this is my Avid Media Files folder, this is my AMA Media folder, and then everything that I'm liking to via AMA, I just put inside there. It's never going to get lost. I'm not going to misplace it, it's not going to be living on my desktop. It's going to be living right beside my Avid Media files folder. Which I believe is a smart work flow, smart media management.
WHAT DO YOU DO ONCE YOU HAVE YOUR AMA MEDIA INSIDE MEDIA COMPOSER? One option, as long as you're not linking straight to a camera card connected to your system, as long as you're linking to an actual folder full of media that's already been transferred to your system, is to just edit the entire show with the AMA media, start to finish. As long as you're not experiencing any performance lag, you're totally fine to do this. Then, when you have edited your sequence, you can transcode it so that just the portions of the clips that you actually used in the sequence are converted to native Avid MXF files.
Now, OTHERS PREFER TO TRANSCODE THE AMA FILES RIGHT AWAY, BEFORE WORKING WITH THEM. NOW IF YOU DO THIS, YOU'RE GUARANTEED EXCELLENT PERFORMANCE, AND YOU'RE ALSO GUARANTEED ROCK-SOLID MEDIA MANAGEMENT.
And it's probably obvious, but you absolutely need to transcode the files if you're linking straight to a camera card. You need to transfer those files off the card and onto your drive. So while we won't go into every option and every work flow, I did just quickly want to show you HOW TO TRANSCODE AN AMA FILE, SO THAT IT CONVERTS TO A NATIVE AVID MXF FILE. You just right click on the file in the bin here, and choose consolidate transcode. I'm going to go ahead and click transcode. And in this case, I'm going to choose my C drive. And, as you can see here, up at the top, there is an option to transcode only AMA linked medias. That can be very handy, but since I only have one file selected right here, I really don't need that option. Then I just come down here and select my target video resolution. So I think I'm just going to go one to one, and you can also convert your audio if you like. And let's go ahead and transcode. Notice that Run in background is an option so you can select as many files as you want, set up the parameters as you like, run in the background and then, you know, continue working.
I'm going to go ahead and just transcode here. Shouldn't take too long. As you can see here, I have my two clips. This is the AMA clip, and this is the transcoded file that I just created. Now, best of all, you can mix and match clips however you'd like.
Now, if you're ever curious about which of the clips in your timeline are AMA clips, it's really easy to find out. Just come down to the timeline fast menu and you choose clip color, and I'm just going to select AMA. Notice that, that's purple, and you'll see that it's going to highlight anything in the timeline that's AMA in purple. linking to files via AMA is really easy and it's certainly becoming the preferred and most popular way to get your media into your project. As long as you're aware of media management and don't move the original files from their linked location, the AMA workflow is quick, easy, and efficient.
When working with high resolution graphics and photographs, it's often nice to be able to keep the files at their native resolution, rather than converting them to the video resolution that's set within your media creation settings. YOU CAN DO THIS BY USING THE AVID PAN AND ZOOM PLUGIN. Let's take a look. Okay, so I have this image here, and natively, it's about 4,000 pixels by 2,000 pixels. But I just imported it into my project, and as you may remember, the format for my project is 1920 by 1080. So I cut the resolution by more than half.
If my goal is to start zoomed in on Dave, and then proceed to be zoomed in on Kim, and then zoom out. Then, if I apply a resize effect, which I have right here, you'll notice that my image is really pixelated. And it doesn't look good. Therefore, I'm going to use the Avid pan and zoom effect to be able to link to my high resolution photograph, and not convert it to the video resolution. Okay, so I just have this in my sequence as a reference, so that you can see how it looks.
AND THE FIRST THING THAT YOU NEED TO DO WHEN WORKING WITH THE AVID PAN AND ZOOM EFFECT, IS TO JUST PUT A PLACEHOLDER IN YOUR SEQUENCE. So, you can put it on top of another video segment, or you can just place an add edit, and put it right over visual filler, which is what I'm going to do right now. Okay, so I'm just going to go to my Effects tab. And apply the Avid pan and zoom effect. And obviously nothing happens yet but I'm going to come up to my effect mode and I'm going to Import Image.
And here it is. I'm going to go ahead and just press Open, and Avid brings it in. Okay, so we don't quite realize how high resolution this is until we start playing with it. So I'm going to put a couple of key frames in here. And so we're going to start zoomed in on Dave and then zoom in up to Kim's face and then back out for the big surprise. And let's go ahead and start on the first key frame when we are zoomed in on Dave.
Now remember, this is what it looks like when you import it as a video resolution. So, keep that in mind as we perform this. I'll press this button. So there's two ways that you can look at this. Source or target. Let's go ahead and start in source. And I'm just going to slide my zoom factor over, and then I'm going to use my X and Y position to zero in on Dave here.
I'm going to select this key frame, and then press Ctrl+A or Cmd+A to select all of them. And I need to tell Avid how these animations happen. And there's lots of choices, I'm just going to go ahead and choose a constant ease in velocity and a constant ease out velocity. And with a linear path. You can feel free to explore all of these on your own, but ONE PIECE OF ADVICE I WILL GIVE YOU IS TO CHOOSE THE GAUSSIAN FILTER. I think it's kind of the sweet spot between really high quality and not crazy long render times.
So that's what I found about the filter type. Alright. Just to do a preview, let's switch from source to target. And it's going to stutter a little bit because it hasn't been rendered yet, but I'm going to go ahead and just play through. Okay, so I'm definitely too far out on the zoom out, let me just fix that.
Alright, so I'm going to go ahead and render this out. I'm going to come down to Render Effect. I'm going to send it to my data drive. Again, the render filter that we're using is the Gaussian here. I'm going to go ahead and click OK. Alright, we're all set. Now, before I play, do see that we have some warning bars in a time code track. In an earlier movie we did talk about this, that our system is definitely being stressed. It's hard to push a 4,000 by 2,000 pixel image through the system, but now that we've rendered it we should be in good shape.
Again, we do kind of go out of frame downstream here, but I think you'll get the effect. Go ahead and play. Okay, so I would definitely want to smooth that out and make sure that my key frames didn't show any of the black background, but you get the idea. WE ARE LINKING TO A HIGH RESOLUTION IMAGE AND WE'RE ABLE TO ZOOM IN REALLY TIGHT SO THAT IT'S NOT PIXELATED BY TRANSFERRING IT TO A VIDEO RESOLUTION.
When bringing in files via AMA, sometimes you're working with very large files that you might want to resize before bringing them into the timeline. Fortunately this is very easily done with Media Composer's new Frame Flex tool. So, Frame Flex allows you to natively work with very high resolution files like 2k, 4k and above. And, just so you know, it works equally as well with AMA files and with traditional files. It doesn't have to be AMA, but in this example we are going to AMA link. Now for our purposes, I'm just going to work with a 1,920 by 1,080 HD clip.
And, as you can see it is a long shot of Kim and Dave dancing. So let's say that we wanted to have a little bit of a tighter shot in on them. We could of course apply a re-size or a 3D warp like we learned before. But let's look at some other options. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND RIGHT-CLICK AND CHOOSE SOURCE SETTINGS. AND WE'RE INTERESTED IN THE FRAME FLEX TAB. RIGHT AWAY, I CAN JUST RESIZE THIS FRAME HOWEVER I WANT.
So if I want it sort of tighter in on them like so, you can see the result down here. If we wanted to focus in on their feet. This is now a shot of their feet. So I'm just going to go ahead and say OK, and you can see that now our shot's completely transformed.
I want to show you one more thing, and to do that, I'm going to change my project aspect ratio to 4 by 3. So this doesn't look right. Well, ONE OTHER THING THAT FRAME FLEX CAN DO IS REFORMAT YOUR CLIPS.
If I go to source settings and my image aspect ratio is 16 by 9, but I can change my project aspect ratio to 4 by 3, for example. So that conversion is being applied on the fly. And I'll go ahead and say OK. And now everything is reformatted and I don't have to apply any separate effects. I'm ready to go. I'm going to change that back for now, project aspect ratio 16 by 9. And let's go ahead and bring that back to 16 by 9 here's as well.
Let's say I go ahead and edit this into the timeline. And marking in in and out. And I'll press v to splice that in. So even though I don't have a traditional Avid effect applied to v1 here, I can still edit it in the same way that I would any other effect. So I just open up the Effect Editor, and as you can see, here is my Re-sizing tool that I can kind of come back and get it in the exact size that I would like.
So if I want to zoom all the way out again, there we go. And I'll go ahead and close the Effect editor, and I've made the adjustment.
SO FRAME FLEX IS A REALLY GREAT WAY TO CHANGE ANYTHING ABOUT YOUR CLIP RELATED TO ITS SIZE OR ITS ASPECT RATION WITHOUT ACTUALLY APPLYING ANY EFFECTS.
THE AVID MARKETPLACE IS A NEW BUILT-IN APPLICATION THAT ALLOWS YOU TO SHOP AROUND FOR STOCK FOOTAGE, AUDIO PLUG-INS, VIDEO PLUG-INS, TRAINING MATERIALS AND MORE. In this movie, we'll explore how to shop for and bring in stock footage to your project. Okay. So as of Media Composer Six, we have a new Marketplace heading. I'll go ahead and click on this. And we have lots of places that we can go, but I'm going to choose Media Libraries, and it brings us to a dialog box that opens up the Thought Equity stock footage search tool.
Now, you'll have to go to thoughtequity.com ahead of time and set up an account, so that you're either immediately brought to this screen, or it might have you log in first.
Notice that I can come along the left side and qualify it further, if I need to have a certain format, if I want to have a certain footage type. Go ahead and just click on one of those links and the search results will filter down even more. I'm going to press the Plus sign. Add to Stock Footage and it looks like it's adding my clip to my bin.
Now it's not adding it to my Avid bin yet, rather it's adding it to my clip bin here on the Thought Equity Avid Marketplace. So if I go to My Bin, it should be right there in the stock footage bin. You can create your own clip bin by coming to this option here. So I'm going to go into Stock Footage, and here is my clip, or my comp. And I'm simply going to download this, which is going to bring it into Avid. I'll go ahead and click on Download Comps for Stock Footage. It brought up my clip. It has a little bit of information about its size and the instructions for download.
I'm going to go ahead and just click on Download 1 Comp, notice that it's processing down here, and if I come back to my Avid bin, here it is. Now notice that we're linking to it via AMA, so we have an AMA clip. And I can load it into my source monitor. Notice that it does have a watermark, but I can literally just treat it like any other clip, edit it into my sequence. And then when I'm sure that I want it, I can come back and right-click and Buy Stock Footage. And that'll send me right back to the site where I can purchase my stock footage clips.
HOW TO USE THE CAPTURE TOOL TO BRING IN MEDIA FROM TAPE. . Okay. So, once you have turned on your camera or deck, you can start Media Composer. You don't want to start Media Composer and then turn on your camera or deck, or it might not read it. So I've done that, and now I can go ahead and open the Capture tool. The Capture tool is found within the Tools menu, and Capture, or Ctrl+7 or Cmd+7 on a Mac.
And THERE'S ALSO A CAPTURE WORK SPACE HERE.
by default, if it sees the deck, which is does in this case, it's going to ask me to select a tape. I want to select a new tape here, so I'm going to press New. And I'm just going to name this, and I want to name it something very unique. You never want to leave a tape named new tape. And I recommend that you attach both a number and a project name to it.
So I'm just going to call this 001 swing. And then my next tape in the swing project could be 002 swing, and so on. Okay, so I'll just go ahead and select that. We are ready to tell the Capture tool that this is the tape that we're recording from. So I'll click OK. And as you see here, the Capture tool is now reading the 001 swing tape, and this is going to be the tape that's forever attached to this footage.
MEDIA COMPOSER HAS THE CAPABILITY OF CAPTURING ONE TRACK OF VIDEO AND EIGHT TRACKS OF AUDIO. In this case, I just want to bring in two tracks of audio. So my left and right channels. And I also want to MAKE SURE THAT I SELECT TC OR TIME CODE. THIS IS GOING TO ALLOW ME TO RECAPTURE ANY OF THE FOOTAGE AT A LATER TIME IF I SHOULD NEED TO, so you always want to make sure to capture time code with your video and audio.
Below there are video and audio input options. Now, I just have a FireWire camera connected to my system, so the only thing that I have available here is host 1394, which is FireWire. HOWEVER, IF I WAS INTERFACED WITH A BREAKOUT BOX WITH MANY, MANY OPTIONS, I WOULD HAVE OPTIONS FOR COMPONENT, COMPOSITE, AS VIDEO, YOU NAME IT. AGAIN, IN MEDIA COMPOSER, EVERY CLIP HAS TO GO INTO A BIN,
And come down here to RESOLUTION. Now, we talked a little bit about resolution before. But basically, WHATEVER MY PROJECT FORMAT IS AT, WHICH RIGHT NOW I'M IN A STANDARD DEFINITION PROJECT, THIS WILL GIVE ME STANDARD DEFINITION RESOLUTIONS. AGAIN, 1 TO 1 IS UNCOMPRESSED. EVERY OTHER CHOICE HAS SOME COMPRESSION, AND I'M GOING TO CHOOSE DB 25, WHICH IS A REALLY POPULAR SD COMPRESSION. And of course I'm going to send my media to my D drive. So we've set our bin, our resolution, and our drive. This number over here tells me how much of this resolution media I can capture to my drive.
12 MANAGING MEDIA
An important part of the post-production process is managing your media in a way that doesn't totally clutter your work space and drives. Therefore, deletion is often a necessary step in cleaning up after a project. SOMETIMES YOU WANT TO DELETE DATA SO THAT YOU CAN CLEAR UP DRIVE SPACE OR SO THAT YOU CAN BETTER ORGANIZE MULTIPLE PROJECTS ON ONE DRIVE. In this movie, I'm going to talk about the three ways to delete media from your bin. In the next movie, we're going to actually talk about how to do this in the media tool, so that you can do it across multiple bins, and even multiple projects.
Alright, so TO DELETE MEDIA FROM YOUR BIN, YOU SIMPLY HIGHLIGHT IT, AND THEN PRESS THE DELETE KEY on your keyboard, and the Delete dialogue box comes up. We have three choices.
We can either delete the master clip and not the media file. We can delete the media file and not the master clip. Or we can delete both. Let's go through these three options. The most often used choice is to delete the media file but not the master clip. This is because your master clip even when the media file is not present still has all of the metadata that defines it. It knows how long it is, it knows its time code, it knows its associated tracks, it's codecs, everything.
So, if I was to delete this, which I will by pressing OK. And yes I'm sure. And I load this into the source monitor. You'll see that this media is now offline. However, I'm going to expand my bin. And I'm going to come into the bend fast menu. Choose columns. And I'm just going to select them all, and click OK. Notice that, even though my clip is offline, we still know a lot of information about it. All the way across, it still knows a lot about my clip. So, this will allow me to very easily bring this back online, by either batch capturing, or batch importing. I would capture, if it came from tape, I would do a batch import, if it originated as a file. To do either of these, I simply right-click, and choose either Batch Capture, or Batch Import. Indeed, you can bring an entire project back online years after the fact, by simply doing a Batch Capture, or a Batch Import.
Again, that would be deleting a sequence rather than a master clip, but for the purposes of demonstration, we're showing this with a clip. I'm going to go ahead and choose my clip again and press Delete.
And I'd like to talk about THE SECOND WAY OF DELETING SOMETHING. I COULD CHOOSE BOTH MY MASTER CLIP AND MY MEDIA FILES. AND THEN I CAN ALSO FURTHER CHOOSE JUST MY AUDIO, JUST MY VIDEO, OR BOTH. AND THIS IS ONLY IF I'M SURE I WILL NEVER, EVER NEED THIS DATA AGAIN.
And you know what? To be honest, unless this was a project you know you'll never be coming back to, you can't say that you're not going to be able to spare a few megabytes of space to keep your project file safe. So, bottom line, unless you're sure, just keep your project data. You may thank yourself later that you did. So just to show you that it is going to completely disappear from my bin, I'll go ahead and do this. We'll delete both the master clip and the media file, press OK, yes I'm sure and it's gone. If I want to get that back, I have to recapture and re-import, and then it's not going to fit succinctly back into my sequence if it's edited there.
So you've really gotta be sure.
I'm going to click on my clip again and press Delete, and I want to discuss the last method. I could select my master clip, and not my media file. YOU WOULD REALLY NEVER, EVER WANT TO DO THIS. This means that you have the large media file, your large video and audio file, that will remain on your drives, clogging up space and you're going to delete the small, important metadata, that refers to that file.
AGAIN, most of the time, you're going to choose option number 1, deleting the media files but keeping your project data, so that you can bring your project back online in the future if needed.
IF YOU EVER NEED TO DELETE MATERIAL ACROSS MULTIPLE BINS, MULTIPLE PROJECTS AND MULTIPLE DRIVES, YOU'LL MOST LIKELY WANT TO USE THE MEDIA TOOL. THE MEDIA TOOL IS LIKE A SUPER BIN, ALLOWING YOU TO BRING MASTER CLIPS IN FROM A SELF SELECTED GROUP OF PROJECTS OR DRIVES, AND THEN MANAGE THE MEDIA ACCORDINGLY.
I'm going to open up the media tool by coming up to Tools and Media Tool. And as we see here on the left, we have the drives that we can choose from, and on the right we have the projects that we can choose from.
Now, my drive only has one project on it, but I do want to give you one note about the projects in this list. This is not necessarily the projects on your system. You can delete all of the projects from your system, and there will still be a list of projects here, because what this list is measuring, is the project that the media on your drives, was originally captured into. That metadata is stored in those media files. So, even if you delete a project, your media files can still live on the drive, and the project name will still be listed here.
Down here, you can choose whether you want to search through master clips, pre-computes, or media files. Master clips are obviously the clips in your bins. Pre-computes are render files, AND MEDIA FILES ARE THE ACTUAL MEDIA FILES ON YOUR DRIVES. YOU'LL ALMOST NEVER CHOOSE THIS, THIS IS SOMETHING THAT YOU MAY CHOOSE IF YOU CALL TECHNICAL SUPPORT AND SOMEONE WALKS YOU THROUGH IT, BUT OTHERWISE, LEAVE OPTION NUMBER THREE ALONE. So, if I choose Master Clips and Precomputes, I'm going to choose the master clips and render files on my Data drive in the Swing Dancing project.
Again, if I wanted to access multiple projects, and I have them available to me, I would just select them here. I'll say OK, and as you can see, there's quite a lot of stuff here to look at. If you look at it though, you'll notice that this is just a big bin. I have the headings across the top, I have the ability to choose columns, and display just certain pieces of metadata.
I have the ability to show Text View, or Frame View, or Script View. I have the ability to Custom sift. Searching for something, I have the ability to use the Find Tool. Anything I can do in my Avid project I can do in the Media Tool too. But this is searching across the drives and the projects that I selected at the previous screen.
WHEN I PRESS DELETE ON A CLIP IN THE MEDIA TOOL, WHICH I WILL GO AHEAD AND SELECT THIS CLIP AND PRESS DELETE, I HAVE THE OPTION OF DELETING VIDEO, AUDIO, OR BOTH. WHEN I PRESS DELETE HERE, IT'S GONE. THERE'S NO GETTING IT BACK UNLESS I RECAPTURE OR IMPORT IT. SO I'M NOT GOING TO DO THAT IN THIS CASE.
Also, because the media tool looks at media on your drive, you can do something pretty special here. I'm going to close the media tool for a moment, and I'm gong to come back to this bin. And I'm going to pretend that I accidentally deleted this master clip. If you remember from the last movie, I said that this is something you never want to do. If I highlight the clip, press delete, and delete the master clip, leaving my media files on the drive and say OK, it's gone from my bin, and I have what's called an orphan file. You can use the media tools to your advantage to help you out in this situation. If you know that you have an orphan file you can go get it back.
So, if I go to tools, and media tool, again I can select my data drive, the projects that I want to look through, master clips, and I know that that is not a render file, so I'll just de-select that and press OK. And, I can go ahead and sort this, so that everything's in alphabetical order, it already was. And, here it is; Dave smiling. So I literally just pick it up and put it in my bin. I'm going to click with my mouse drag over, and there it is. Notice it didn't leave my media tool, because again the media tool reads the media on the drive. And after all, this media is still there. But, I got my master clip back and I've reunited the master clip with the media file, and Dave is still smiling.
THE MEDIA TOOL IS REALLY POWERFUL, AND WHETHER YOU NEED IT TO DELETE MEDIA ACROSS MULTIPLE BINS, MULTIPLE PROJECTS, OR MULTIPLE DRIVES, OR WHETHER YOU NEED TO RESURRECT MASTER CLIPS THAT YOU'VE ACCIDENTALLY DELETED FROM YOUR BINS, YOU'LL CERTAINLY FIND THE MEDIA TOOL WILL HELP YOU OUT IN A VARIETY OF SITUATIONS.
OFTEN, ONCE YOU'VE EDITED YOUR SHOW, YOU'LL WANT TO KEEP THE MEDIA ASSOCIATED WITH YOUR FINISHED SEQUENCE AND DELETE THE MEDIA THAT DIDN'T MAKE IT INTO THE CUT. IN THIS MOVIE, WE'LL LEARN HOW TO ISOLATE THAT UNNEEDED MEDIA FROM YOUR NEEDED MEDIA AND DISCARD IT.
Okay, so here's our sequence. Let's pretend it's the sequence. We like everything in here and we want to delete everything that is not in this sequence. In addition to the clips, we also have some rendered files. We have some rendered blue dot effects. We have a rendered composite here and some more rendered blue dot effects. So, we want to make sure that we keep all of the master clips, and all of the render files, or precomputes, associated with this sequence. SO, TO DO THAT, I'M GOING TO MAKE SURE THAT I HAVE THIS BIN OPEN, AND ONLY THIS BIN. IF YOU HAVE YOUR SEQUENCE IN A BIN WITH OTHER THINGS, I WOULD HIGHLY RECOMMEND TAKING IT OUT AND PUTTING IT IN ITS OWN BIN, AND THEN OPENING IT, and you'll see why in just a moment.
And now I'm going to OPEN UP MY MEDIA TOOL, AND SELECT THE ASSOCIATED DRIVES AND PROJECTS THAT THIS SEQUENCE IS RELATED TO, AND I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT I CHOOSE BOTH MASTER CLIPS AND PRECOMPUTES. OKAY, SO I'M GOING TO SAY OK. Again, here's all the media that we've been working with. And again, we just want to look at the media associated with this and then discard everything else. SO I HAVE THIS BIN OPEN. I'M NOW GOING TO GO TO THE MEDIA TOOL FAST MENU AND CHOOSE SELECT UNREFERENCED CLIPS. THIS IS GOING TO HIGHLIGHT EVERYTHING THAT IS NOT ASSOCIATED WITH MY SEQUENCE THAT'S IN MY OPEN BIN. I'M GOING TO SELECT UNREFERENCED CLIPS AND THEN HERE'S WHERE IT SAYS SELECT UNREFERENCED CLIPS. WE'LL SELECT ALL CLIPS THAT ARE UNREFERENCED BY SEQUENCES IN CURRENTLY OPEN BINS. THAT'S THIS. REFERENCES TO CLIPS FROM BINS THAT ARE CLOSED ARE NOT TAKEN INTO ACCOUNT. OKAY, THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE WANT. SO WE'LL PRESS OK. AND NOW IT'S HIGHLIGHTED ALL OF THE CLIPS AND PRECOMPUTE FILES THAT ARE NOT ASSOCIATED WITH MY SEQUENCE, WHICH IS MOST OF THEM. AND THEN, WHEN I PRESS DELETE, I HAVE THE OPTION TO BREAK IT DOWN EVEN FURTHER. I CAN SELECT JUST MY VIDEO, JUST MY AUDIO, JUST MY PRECOMPUTES, ANY COMBINATION THEREIN. AND IF I PRESS OKAY, IT'S GONE, BECAUSE DELETING THINGS FROM THE MEDIA TOOL IS PERMANENT.
However, I don't want to do this, so I'm just going to Cancel, but you may want to do this. YOU JUST WANT TO TREAT THIS PROCESS WITH CARE. YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU'RE DELETING ONLY THE MATERIAL THAT YOU DON'T NEED. ONCE YOU'RE SURE THOUGH, THIS IS A GREAT WAY TO CLEAR CLUTTER FROM YOUR DRIVES.
13 OUTPUTTING MEDIA
FIRST ON THE CHECKLIST IS TO CLICK ON THE FORMAT TAB, AND MAKE SURE THAT THE PROJECT TYPE IS SET TO THE FORMAT THAT YOU WANT TO OUTPUT. You know, sometimes you switch to an sd flavor of your hd project to maximize playback. You just need to remember to switch that back.
So, i've got the proper project type. And, NEXT I NEED TO COME DOWN TO MY VIDEO QUALITY MENU. Now, especially for printing to tape, you need to switch this to the highest quality possible, which is full quality. So that your sequence goes out full quality to the tape.
NEXT, I RECOMMEND THAT YOU MAKE SURE THAT THERE'S NO OFFLINE MEDIA IN YOUR SEQUENCE. This is especially true of really long sequences where you can't automatically eyeball it. So you can find that out by coming down to the fast menu here and then going to clip color and then choosing offline. Now, when you check this, anything that's offline will appear red. So I'll click OK. I don't have any red clips, so everything's online and I'm good to go there.
Also, I should note that IF YOU HAVE A COMBINATION OF STANDARD DEFINITION AND HIGH DEFINITION VIDEO, YOU'RE GOING TO NEED TO TRANSCODE TO ONE RESOLUTION OR ANOTHER. So I don't have this combination right now, but just in case you do, you JUST CLICK ON YOUR SEQUENCE, THEN RIGHT-CLICK, AND CHOOSE CONSOLIDATE TRANSCODE. THEN WITHIN THE TRANSCODE OPTIONS, YOU JUST WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU SELECT THE APPROPRIATE RESOLUTION TO TRANSCODE EVERYTHING IN THE SEQUENCE TO. Again, my entire sequence is HD. I don't have any SD elements. So, I don't need to perform that step.
NEXT, I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT ALL NONE REAL-TIME EFFECTS ARE RENDERED AND THAT I'VE RENDERED ANY PORTIONS OF THE TIMELINE THAT MIGHT HAVE A PROBLEM WITH PLAYBACK. Now, because I've switched to full quality, and because I have several blue dot effects in my timeline, you'll notice that virtually all of my effects need to be rendered. I can either go through and perform some of the intelligent rendering methods that we learned in a previous movie or you can do something called creating a video mix down. CREATING A VIDEO MIX DOWN WILL TAKE ALL OF THE CLIPS IN ALL OF YOUR VIDEO TRACKS AND MAKE ONE MEDIA FILE, AND ONE MASTER CLIP OUT OF IT. TO CREATE A VIDEO MIX DOWN, you just mark an in at the beginning of your sequence, you mark an out at the end of your sequence, and then you select the appropriate tracks. So I want to select my video tracks, and then I come up to Special and Video Mix Down. You select your target bin, your target drive, and your target resolution, and click OK.
Now, I've actually prepared a video mix down ahead of time, so I'm just going to show you right here, that it turns into a source clip, and it's my entire sequence rendered out into one master clip that corresponds to one media file. So, I've got my video mix down.
NOW, I WANT TO TALK ABOUT AUDIO MIX DOWN. Now, in the case of this sequence, I only have two audio tracks, so I wouldn't need to perform an audio mix down. BUT IN THE CASE THAT I HAD 10, 12, 14 AUDIO TRACTS, IT'D BE A REALLY GOOD IDEA TO CREATE AN AUDIO MIX DOWN SO YOUR SEQUENCE WOULDN'T HAVE ANY PROBLEM DURING PLAYBACK. I'll just do it to demonstrate. Again I want to select my audio tracks so I'm just going to lasso through to select the end verse. And I already got my in and out point set. So I'm going to go up to SPECIAL > CREATE AUDIO MIXDOWN. I want to create a stereo mix and it's actually going to put the mix on the track of my choice, so I'll go ahead and put the mixdown audio on A3.
The audio master clip will go into my selected bin, and the audio media will go onto my selected drive. I RECOMMEND THAT YOU SAVE A PRE-MIXED SEQUENCE SO THAT YOU CAN ALWAYS COME BACK TO WHAT WE HAVE HERE, and I'm going to press OK, all right. So notice in my bin I have my new sequence, I have my pre-mixed sequence, I have my video mix down, and I have my audio mix down. So, to put it all together, what I'll do is, I'll just delete A1 and A2, so that I just have my audio mix down here. So I'm going to deselect A3 and I'm going to press Delete. Yes, I do want to delete these tracks. Don't worry, we have a premix version, in case we need to come back to this. Say OK. And, I'm likewise going to delete my video tracks. Delete, and OK. And I got my video mix downloaded in my source monitor. So I'm just going to edit this, right on top of my audio mixdown. Go ahead and overwrite, by pressing B. And here we have our entire sequence in two tracks, one video track and one audio track. AGAIN, THIS IS NOT A REQUIRED STEP, BUT IF YOU DO HAVE A LOT OF VIDEO TRACKS OR A LOT OF AUDIO TRACKS, I DO RECOMMEND PERFORMING A MIX DOWN SO THAT IT'S REALLY EASY TO PLAY OUT OR SO THAT IT'S REALLY EASY TO EXPORT A FILE.
Alright, SO WE'VE CHECKED OUR PROJECT FORMAT. WE'VE INCREASED OUR VIDEO QUALITY. WE'VE MADE SURE THAT ALL OF OUR VIDEO IS ONLINE, AND WE'VE EVEN MADE A VIDEO MIX DOWN AND AN AUDIO MIX DOWN. WE'RE ALL SET TO EXPORT THIS, and in the next movie, we're going to learn how to print a tape by using a digital cut.
When exporting files from Media Composer, there are several types of files that are useful in DVD creation and making web based movies. We'll go over these in this lesson. Okay, so I have my sequence here, and we're working with the mixed down version of the sequence. You don't have to mix down, because when you export files, Media Composer will render all the video and audio effects upon export. But if you've done the work in making a mix down, the whole process is going to go much quicker.
So we've got it done, so we'll go with that. And I'M JUST GOING TO RIGHT CLICK ON THE SEQUENCE AND CHOOSE EXPORT. THIS IS WHERE WE CHOOSE THE DESTINATION AND WHERE WE CAN NAME IT. Under export setting, we have quite a few different settings that we can choose here. And I'm going to choose send to QT movie, because we're going to make a Quicktime. When I click on options, we have even more choices that we can make. Up here at the top, if I click in the Export As pulldown menu, there are quite a few file types that I can choose here. I'm going to choose Quicktime movie. To the right of that, I have Use marks and Use enabled tracks. If I select Use marks, it will export between an in and an out point that I have in my sequence. If I choose Use enabled tracks, it will export only the tracks that I have enabled in the timeline. Next, I have Same as Source and Custom. Same as Source is going to export a Quicktime the same resolution that I'm working with in Media Composer. Under Same as Source, I can select to export video and audio, or just video or just audio, and I can choose my color levels. 601709 is what I'll choose, and I can also choose my display aspect ratio. So we're working in 16 by 9 standard definition, so that's what we'll choose here.
If I had chosen custom, this brings up a whole host of other options I can select. The biggest being the Format Options button right here. If I click on this, this will allow me to customize my video and audio settings, and I'll just show you what it looks like in here. I've a compression type list, that if I wanted to select a specific compression on the way out of Media Composer, I could choose something from this list. I don't want to, so I'm going to click cancel. And cancel again, to get me back to my main window. Again I can choose video and audio, or just video, or just audio. I can also customize the size of my frame. So if I want to go to the web, I can pick a very small size on the way out. I also can select my file field order And again, my aspect ratio. I'm going to chose Same as Source so we don't have so many options to go over here. And I'll go ahead and save that out. If I had made some choices, I could save a template for using later.
I'll go ahead and save, and this is going to be a full QuickTime movie. So I'mgoing to call this QuickTime movie. And I'll Save, and it exports. Alright. So I have a QuickTime movie on my desktop. We'll look at it in just a second, but I first want to create one more type of file. If I right click on the sequence and choose export again, INSTEAD OF SEND TO QT MOVIE, I'M GOING TO CHOOSE QUICKTIME REFERENCE. Then when I click on Options, you see that it gives mea couple of other choices. Again, I can use marks or use enabled tracks. I have the same file types within this menu. But it allows me to render all my video effects on its way out or mix down the audio tracks. Now, why is it asking me this? When I export a QuickTime reference, It's not actually exporting a stand alone movie. Rather, it's only exporting a pointer file. It points to my media on my drives. Therefore, if I have any non-rendered video or audio effects, that media obviously doesn't exist. Therefore, I can choose for it to render the video effects, or mix-down my audio tracks upon export. Now again, we've done the work ahead of time in making a video mix down and an audio mix down, so we don't need to check those boxes. I'm going to Click Save, and I'm just going to title this QuickTime reference, and save that out. And you can see that that was pretty much immediate. Again, it's not making any media, it's just making a pointer file. So, I'm going to minimize Avid. And here we have a QuickTime movie, and a QuickTime reference.
Let's go ahead and check the sizes of each of these files. I'll Right Click, and Properties. And you can see that this is almost 200 megabytes. If I check the size of the QuickTime reference file, you can see that it's 5 kilobytes. That's a lot smaller. Again this is a stand alone movie and if I took this to another system, it would play as long as I had QuickTime installed. If I took my QuickTime reference to another system, it wouldn't play, because it wouldn't be able to read my media.
So, stand alone movie, reference file which is just another word for a pointer file. You can usually take either one of these files to a third party encoding program like Sorenson Squeeze or Compressor, and make it into a different type of file. You can also take either one of these types of files into a DVD authoring program, and author a DVD. So a QuickTime reference is often a really great option, because it doesn't take a lot of time to export, and it works in the same fashion.
I am going to go ahead and open back up Avid again and I am going to right click on my sequence and choose 'Send To' this time. This is a list full of canned templates that are really common ways to export things out of Media Composer. For example, I can choose DVD, and I can either choose DVD authoring or DVD one step, where it actually sends it straight to a DVD authoring program package with Media Composer. But I'll just go ahead and choose DVD authoring, so you can see what this looks like. This has a lot of export options, all of which is customizable. And here's the summary of everything that I have chosen for my DVD authoring export. If I changed any of the choices up here, I could save a template for using later.
TROUBLESHOOTING
Media management is a crucial part of successful editing. As we saw in a previous chapter, when you delete media, the master clip recognizes that its correlating media is offline. Well, there are other reasons that a clip can go offline, too. Sometimes some or all of your media will be offline simply because the master clips in your bin can't find the media with which it's supposed to be linked. In this movie, we'll take a look at how this happens and how to solve these issues. Usually, the reason that media shows up as offline is because the media is simply not on your drive in the first place.
Often, you may accidentally capture or import media to the internal hard drive, the system you're working on, instead of to your dedicated media drive. If you do this, and then switch editing systems, with your media drive, then your media is going to show up as offline. So before beginning to troubleshoot, make sure that the scenario is not the case. Now if it is the case, you're going to have to go find the media files and transfer them over accordingly. Or if you can't find them, you'll need to re-capture or re-import your media. So to check where Media Composer thinks your media should be, you can just make sure you're in text view in your bin, and then go to Choose Columns and just to simplify this, I'm going to choose None. But then I'm going to display my drive.
Okay. And in the drive column is where Media Composer captured the media to. So if your drive is D but this says C, then you know that you accidentally captured to the internal drive, and you're going to have to go find that media or recapture.
If you're sure that the media should be on your drive, then you can begin troubleshooting. Now often media becomes offline because there's something wrong with either the media drive, or your media folder. So, before troubleshooting offline media problems, make sure to exit Avid first, which I'll do now. And then first go after your drive. Make sure your drive is plugged into your Firewire port, turned on, and is shown as mounted on your computer. If the drive isn't mounted, then you want to try swapping your Firewire cables as well as try plugging the Firewire into a different port on your computer. Also try determining if another hard drive will mount on your computer, or if your hard drive will mount on another system. Now, IF YOUR DRIVE IS PROPERLY MOUNTED, BUT YOUR MEDIA IS STILL OFFLINE, IT'S TIME TO TAKE A LOOK AT YOUR MEDIA FOLDER.
Now, as you may remember from a previous movie, IF YOU CAPTURED OR IMPORTED MEDIA IN THE TRADITIONAL WAY, YOUR MEDIA IS IN A MANAGED MEDIA FOLDER CALLED AVID MEDIA FILES. Now, I'm going to go to that drive. I know that my media is supposed to be on my data drive, my D drive. And I know that I NEED A FOLDER ON THE ROOT DIRECTORY OF MY MEDIA DRIVE. NOW, ALL ROOT DIRECTORY MEANS IS THAT IT CAN'T BE INSIDE ANY OTHER FOLDERS. IT HAS TO BE AT THE TOP LEVEL. So I'm going to look for a folder called exactly Avid Media Files, and as you see here, we don't have that. So, the media is somewhere else. I can either search for it, or you can kind of look and see if there's somewhere else it might be. I see this folder here called Avid Media. So, I'm going to look in there. Ah-ha, and there it is. So, this is spelled correctly. And, it's just in the wrong location. So you just need to move that back to your root directory, and now Avid will see it. Again, I WILL STRESS THAT THIS IS FOR TRADITIONALLY CAPTURED OR IMPORTED MEDIA. IF YOU ARE ACCESSING YOUR MEDIA VIA AMA, THIS IS NOT THE STEP THAT YOU SHOULD TAKE. IN THAT CASE, YOU SHOULD SIMPLY RELINK VIA AMA LIKE WE DISCUSSED IN A PREVIOUS MOVIE. Okay, so we have our media files folder in the right location on the drive where Avid is expecting it.
THERE'S ONE MORE THING YOU CAN TRY (KIND OF LIKE TRASHING PREFERENCES IN FCP). If you go inside the Avid MediaFiles folder, there will be an MXF folder This folder is just a label folder. There's nothing inside of it, but it helps me identify what the media is inside of this. Inside the MXF folder will be a numbered folder. It doesn't have to be 1, it can be any number. But in this case it is 1. And I'm just going to pop inside here. And as you notice, all of my files that I see here are MXF files, or Avid's native media asset. If I scroll down, though, I'll see two files that are not MXF files. These are my database files. They tell Avid where each of my media files is, and, what it is. They work in conjunction with one another, to tell Avid those two pieces of information, what and where. Now it could be, that one of your databases is corrupt. Therefore, not sending the correct messages to Avid, and throwing your media offline. SO I RECOMMEND EVERY FEW WEEKS, COMING INTO YOUR AVID MEDIA FILES FOLDER, AND DELETING THESE DATABASES. BECAUSE WHEN AVID RELAUNCHES, IT'S GOING TO NOTICE THAT THOSE DATABASES AREN'T THERE. IT'S GOING TO RE-SCAN AND RE-INDEX ALL OF YOUR MEDIA, REFORM THESE DATABASES, AND AVID'S GOING TO HAVE A REFRESHED VIEW OF ALL OF IT'S MEDIA. AGAIN THIS IS A GREAT WAY TO SOLVE OFFLINE MEDIA, BUT IT'S ALSO GOOD HOUSEKEEPING. So I'm just going to Shift + Click to highlight both of them, and dump them in my recycle bin. And as you see everything else in the folder is an MXF file.
So, I verify that my media files folder is in the correct location. I've deleted my databases. And I'm just going to relaunch the program. Okay, so Avid has recognized that the media files are gone. So it's rescanning. And soon it will re-index all of my media, and it's going to get a fresh look on all of the media in that folder. Again, this is a great thing to do every couple of weeks for good media management. All right. So let's go back into our project.
We've verified that the media is on the drive. That the drive is working properly, that the connection is good, that the media files folder is in the correct location, and we deleted our databases for good measure. Let's go ahead and look inside. Okay, great. Our media is back online and we're good to go.
Now, occasionally this won't work and you'll have to take it a step further by using the Reeling function, which we'll explore in the next movie.
OKAY, YOU'VE MADE SURE YOUR DRIVE IS GOOD, YOU'VE MADE SURE YOUR CONNECTION IS GOOD, AND YOU'VE MADE SURE THAT YOUR MEDIA FILES FOLDER IS GOOD. BUT YOUR MEDIA'S STILL OFFLINE. NOW THERE'S STILL A COUPLE MORE THINGS YOU CAN DO. IN THIS MOVIE, WE'LL EXPLORE THE RELINK COMMAND, WHICH CAN USE TO BRING MEDIA BACK ONLINE, ONCE YOU'VE GONE THROUGH ALL THE OTHER STEPS FIRST. NOW MOST OFTEN, RELINK WORKS IF YOU'VE MOVED OR TRANSCODED YOUR MEDIA, AND YOU NEED TO REESTABLISH A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE CLIPS AND THE MEDIA FILES.
I'm just going to take this clip here, which is THE CLIP THAT'S OFFLINE, AND RIGHT-CLICK AND CHOOSE RELINK. And this is a big dialogue box, and it's too much to cover the whole thing for this course, so I'll just say that WHEN YOU'RE WANTING TO BRING MEDIA BACK ONLINE, IT'S BEST TO BE AS ABSOLUTELY LENIENT AS POSSIBLE. Therefore, we need to uncheck anything that qualifies this relink further. So first, I'm going to make sure that all available drives are selected. And then, I'm going to uncheck this box, Relink only to media from current project. Then, I'm going to come down to this check box here, and uncheck, Match case when comparing source names.
And then I'm going to come down to Relink To, instead of just choosing the video format from the current project only, I'm going to choose Any video format. Unchecking all of those boxes and selecting those options will make your choices as lenient as possible so that when you come down here and say OK, it's basically saying, hey, all I need to do is bring this back online. I don't need to qualify this relink further. Now, before I do hit OK, I just want to mention some other ways that relink can help you out.
Now, as you can see here, I can link to any video format, like I want to do now, but WHAT IF I HAD TWO SETS OF VIDEO FILES, ONE AT HD AND ONE AT SD? MAYBE MY HD'S ON MY MAIN SYSTEM AND MY SD'S ON MY LAPTOP SO THAT I CAN HAVE BETTER PERFORMANCE IN THE FIELD? I'M ABLE TO USE THIS RELINK DIALOGUE BOX TO VERY EASILY GO BACK BETWEEN TWO SETS OF VIDEO FILES. ALSO, DOWN HERE, AS YOU CAN SEE, I HAVE THE ABILITY TO LINK TO SPECIFIC RESOLUTIONS FROM THESE DROP DOWN MENUS (relink method).
So even if you have two different flavors of HD, you can link to the highest quality of HD and the most compressed quality of HD, or a specific resolution. So as you can see here, we have very specific flavors of SD, or different flavors of HD. So we can really burrow in and get very specific here. I'm going to move this back to Highest Quality and just one more thing, as you can see down here I also have the ability to link just certain parts of my file, separating out video, audio and data elements if I like.
So, a lot of options in order to link exactly the way that I want to.
But, in this case we have very lenient choices. I'm all set to go, let's go ahead and say OK. And it worked! We brought on our clip, and we're ready to go. Now, I do have this other clip, which is basically identical to the one that we just relinked. And as you can see, it is at DB 25 resolution. LET'S GO AHEAD AND DO THE SAME EXACT THING, BUT THIS TIME, LET'S TELL MEDIA COMPOSER THAT I WOULD LIKE TO LINK IT TO A SPECIFIC RESOLUTION.
Now, I know that I have this clip at a different SD resolution, at 20 to 1, which is very compressed, but you know, sometimes you do need compressed files, for lynda.com trainings, when I have to get everything under two gigabytes for your exercise file limit. So, I'm just going to do the same thing. Right click and relink. And then I'm going to keep everything the same, except I'm going to choose relink method, and instead of Highest Quality, I'm just going to say Most Compressed. And OK. And as you can see, that's all it took for this to link to the 20 to 1 version of this file, instead of the DV25 version.
SO IT'S VERY EASY TO GO BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN YOUR HD AND YOUR SD, AND ALSO BETWEEN YOUR DIFFERENT FLAVORS OF HD OR SD. SO AS YOU CAN SEE WE BROUGHT OUR MEDIA BACK ONLINE, IN THIS CASE WE LINKED TO A DIFFERENT RESOLUTION. Everything's worked out really great.
As you may remember, THERE ARE THREE TYPES OF SETTINGS IN AVID MEDIA COMPOSER. USER SETTINGS, PROJECT SETTINGS, AND SITE SETTINGS. We were able to see what each of the settings are by looking at this column here. Now, EACH OF THESE SETTINGS CAN BE RESTORED TO THEIR FACTORY DEFAULTS TO REMEDY ANY FINICKY BEHAVIOR OR UNEXPLAINED ERRORS. IN THIS WAY, YOU CAN CONTINUE WORKING ON YOUR PROJECT, BUT CLEAR UP THE BUGS. So, sometimes it's obvious what the problem is and you would go straight after your user setting or straight after your project setting or straight after a site setting.
But you know what? Most of the time it's not and so I RECOMMEND CLEARING ALL THREE OUT AT ONCE AND USUALLY YOU CAN GET BACK UP AND RUNNING THAT WAY. Okay, so let's first talk about HOW TO RESET YOUR USER SETTINGS, THAT'S THE EASIEST ONE. YOU JUST SIMPLY COME DOWN TO YOUR SETTINGS DROP-DOWN AND CHOOSE CREATE USER PROFILE. Now, I actually already made a default user setting. And I can choose that instead. But IF YOU DO NOT HAVE A DEFAULT USER SETTING, THEN YOU'LL WANT TO CREATE ONE YOURSELF.
ALSO, WHAT YOU CAN DO, IS ACTUALLY CREATE A DEFAULT USER SETTING. MAKE ALL OF THE CHANGES REGARDING YOUR INTERFACE, AND YOUR KEYBOARD, AND YOUR TIMELINE, AND ALL OF THAT. AND THEN SAVE IT OUT, AND MAKE SURE THAT IT'S FOR STEAM, AND YOU CAN ALWAYS BRING IT BACK ONLINE. OTHERWISE, WE'RE TOTALLY ZEROED OUT TO FACTORY DEFAULTS, AND WE'LL HAVE TO RE-BUILD IT.
OKAY, SO, I AM BACK ON FACTORY DEFAULT SETTINGS FOR MY USER SETTING. I'M JUST GOING TO BUMP BACK OUT TO THE SELECT PROJECT DIALOGUE BOX, WHERE I'M GOING TO CLEAR OUT MY PROJECT SETTINGS. NOW, THIS IS A LITTLE BIT TRICKIER. WHAT I'M ACTUALLY GOING TO DO IS MAKE A NEW PROJECT IN THE SAME FORMAT AS MY OLD PROJECT, AND THEN COPY MY BINS INTO IT. SO WE'RE JUST BASICALLY TRYING TO ZERO OUT THE PROJECT SETTINGS I'M GOING TO GO INTO NEW PROJECT. I know that my format is 1080 i5994 and I'm just going to call this Swing Dance Default. And I'll say OK. Now the project is created. I'm going to go ahead and quit because I need to copy and paste my bins at the operating system level. Alright, so I'm going to go into the folder where my project lives. And as you see here, here is my old project, and here's the new one. There's nothing in here except for fresh settings, so let's go ahead and climb inside my old project and bring my bins and folders over. So, that's all of this. All I'm doing is Shift+Clicking on the first and the last folder to bring all of that.
We wan't to ignore search data, statistics, trash, and all of my settings, and my project file. So this is just all of the metadata, we are ignoring the settings files. And I'm just going to press Ctrl+C, or Cmd+C on a Mac. And I'm going to come back to my fresh project with the new project settings. And I'm going to paste those bins and folders in here.
OKAY, SO WE'VE REBUILT THE PROJECT SETTINGS. WE'VE REBUILT OUR USER SETTINGS, NOW WE JUST NEED TO GET OUR SIGHT SETTINGS. NOW THE LOCATIONS OF THE SIGHT SETTINGS IS ALWAYS CHANGING WHEN THE OPERATING SYSTEM UPGRADES. SO, WHAT I WOULD RECOMMEND THAT YOU DO IS JUST TYPE SITE SETTINGS IN THE SEARCH BOX, AND WHEN YOU FIND IT, GO AHEAD AND JUST OPEN THAT FILE LOCATION. INSIDE OF HERE ARE FOUR FILES FOR YOU TO DELETE. AGAIN, YOU'LL DELETE THEM, AVID WILL REALIZE THEY'RE NOT THERE, AND THEN MEDIA COMPOSER WILL RECREATE THEM FROM SCRATCH, THEREBY RETURNING THEM TO THEIR FACTORY DEFAULTS.
So, the files in here that you want to eliminate are sight settings, there's both an AVS file and an XML file of that. I'm also going to Ctrl-click or Cmd-click on a Mac on site attributes and MC state. Okay, so we are eliminating the site settings, the site attributes, and the MC state file. I'm just going to move those to the Recycle Bin. They're gone, and now, when I relaunch Media Composer, it's going to remake those site settings. We're going to go into our new, fresh project and we're going to use our new, fresh user setting. Okay, so I'm going to switch my user profile to Default. I'm going to click on External. And when we delete our site settings, everything in this window disappears, so I'm going to have to renavigate to it. I'm going to click on Exercise Files > Avid Projects, and then Swing Dance Default, OK. Okay, so, again, we are zeroed out as far as our settings are concerned, and this should clear out a lot of buggy behavior.
In fact, when you call user support, they'll usually have you clear out all of your settings, and delete your media databases. And that usually clears up most problems.
We've just learned what to do in case your media goes missing, but what about the other half of the equation? What if your project data goes missing? YOU'LL BE GLAD TO KNOW THAT IF ANY OF YOUR PROJECT FILES, WHETHER IT BE MASTER CLIPS, SEQUENCES, OR ENTIRE BINS, BECOMES CORRUPTED OR IF YOU ACCIDENTALLY DELETE SOMETHING CRUCIAL. YOU DON'T HAVE TO PANIC. REMEMBER, AVID AUTO SAVES YOUR PROJECT AT WHATEVER YOU SET YOUR AUTO SAVE INTERVAL, AND, YOU ALSO PROBABLY SAVED YOUR PROJECT ENOUGH A LOT. EVERY TIME AN AUTO SAVE, OR AN EXPLICIT SAVE THAT YOU DO, HAPPENS, A VERSION OF THAT BIN GETS SENT TO WHAT'S CALLED THE AVID ATTIC.
So, let's simulate a 2AM mistake where we think we're going to do a little bit of housekeeping for our sequences bin. And maybe we accidentally delete it. And maybe we accidentally empty the trash. So, we come back in the next day, we'll see that our sequences bin is totally gone. It has everything that we've been working on it in. And we start to panic, but then we remember the attic.
SO I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND MINIMIZE AVID BECAUSE WE WANT TO DO THIS AT AN OPERATING SYSTEM LEVEL. And again, you don't need to remember where the attic is, because you can just search for it. So in Windows, I can just search in this search field, and in the Mac, you can search in the Spotlight, but I'm just going to type in Avid attic. And here it is. I'm going to go ahead and right-click and open folder location. And there's my attic. I'm going to go inside and here are all the projects that I've been working on in this system. So I need to MAKE SURE THAT I GO INTO THE CORRECT PROJECT. SO I KNOW IT'S IN SWING DANCING. AND THEN I WANT TO GO INTO BINS.
Now, here are all of the bins that I've been working on in this project. There are a lot. But I know that the name of the bin that I accidentally deleted is called Sequences. Okay, so I'm just going to go inside there, and as you see, here's all of the times that the sequences bin was saved. The first time was on November 3rd at 2:48 PM. And at the time it was 214 kilobytes. And, we have different sizes, and the date increases, SO I KNOW THAT I HAD MY BIN INTACT TODAY, JUST A LITTLE BIT AGO, AND THIS IS THE VERSION THAT I NEED TO COPY AND PASTE BACK INTO MY PROJECT.
SO, I'M JUST GOING TO CLICK ON THIS BIN, AND PRESS CONTROL+C, OR COMMAND+C ON A MAC. AND THEN I CAN JUST GO BACK INTO MY PROJECT, IN EXERCISE FILES, AVID PROJECTS, AND HERE IT IS, SWING DANCING, AND I CAN JUST PASTE IT INTO MY PROJECT. Okay, one thing you do need to make sure of is that you don't have a version of this bin open, you can't have two versions. Of the same bin open in the application.
Now, I don't have the bin, because I accidentally deleted it, so we should be good to go here. I'm going to just paste. There it is. And on a Windows system, it likes for you to rename this dot avb. . And, you can just go ahead and click Yes to this message and notice that when I typed dot avb, it now looks like a bin file. Now, you normally don't have to do that step on a Mac. Okay, so I've copied and pasted my attic bin into my project.
I'm going to go ahead and go back into Avid, and there it is. So I'll open it up and now I have all of my sequences back. Everything is online and I'm good to go. Believe me, retrieving bins from the attic has saved many an editor on many an occasion. So whether it's to retrieve lost work or simply to track a sequence back to a previous version, you'll certainly find the attic useful in resurrecting project data.