Migrating from Final Cut Pro 7 to Avid Media Composer 5.5 (transcript)

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

01 COMPARING INTERFACE AND APPLICATION BASICS

Exploring the similarities and differences

When you learn to ride a bicycle, or you take your first trip down the ski slope, there comes a moment where if you are going to succeed, you must stop looking all the reasons this endeavor is going to fail and start concentrating only on that which will enable you. I am going to ask you to do the same thing right now with me. We are going to dive straight into Media Composer and start looking around. Now, if you're anything like me, over the course of chapter one your inquisitive mind will cry out, "but why?" or "how come?" or "what's that?" in response to the things that you may see or hear, but I want you to ignore the impulse.

Instead I want you to come along for the ride, just absorb. Confident that the path that you are taking is designed to answer those questions as rapidly and efficiently as possible. By comparing the Media Composer interface and as many basic controls as possible with that of Final Cut Pro, we'll see plenty of similarity between the two environments, plus this first chapter will create common ground for us, upon which we can stand as we take in the differences. One note I should make is though Media Composer will run great on either a Mac or PC, since we are migrating our knowledge from Final Cut Pro, I will focus on Mac commands during this course.

Now I can't know exactly what environment you're using as you go through the course. Some of you may be working on a laptop, others may be working on a workstation, or you might be at a school or facility where there is external hardware attached to the Media Composer workstation such as an inbox, an MXO2 Mini, a Mojo DX or a Nitris DX. Furthermore you may be attached to a fast local storage array or a large shared storage pool. Suffice to say then that as with any audio/video workstation, please power up all external devices before switching on your laptop or workstation, wait for your computer and operating system to power up completely, and wait for all drivers and extensions to finish loading before launching the software.

In my case, I am running Media Composer on a Mac workstation. I don't have any external hardware connected. So I am running in a software-only configuration. As for media, I am using the same course materials that you are and I have them on an external hard drive called Media Drive. Here it is attached by FireWire 800, mounted on my Desktop. Before we launch Media Composer, let's use Final Cut Pro as a launching pad for discussing some fundamental similarities and differences. First, Final Cut Pro can be set to launch directly into the application using the easy setup defaults.

Once inside the application, it's possible to open and create multiple projects directly within the interface, begin work, and then save and name the project afterwards. In addition, user preferences are accessed from the Final Cut Pro menu, but that privilege is always tied to your OS login and thus they just called User Preferences. So turning to Media Composer, we'll launch from the dock just as you would with Final Cut Pro and after a minute or so, you'll arrive at the Select Project dialog.

So here is the first major difference between Media Composer and Final Cut Pro. Before we can even gain access to the software, we need to either choose an existing project to work with or set up a new project name, project location, plus frame rate and format. And then once we enter Media Composer, we'll see that only a single project can be open at any given time. Now don't worry. It's not nearly as strange as it sounds and it's my intention to show you the why behind these differences over the next few chapters, but since you are going to have to use this dialog every time you want to open or create a project, let's make friends with it right now.

At the top of the Select Project dialog, we find the user name displayed. Unlike in Final Cut Pro, multiple user settings could be created under a single OS login. Currently, my user profile has been inherited from my OS logon and maybe that's what yours says too. If, for example, you just downloaded and installed the free Media Composer trial. Or if you are working on a system in a facility or school, then it might say something completely different. Whatever the case, it would be best now if we were to create your own fresh user settings. That way we can know that Media Composer is reset to factory defaults, and that we are not messing with someone else's settings.

We'll be looking at user settings in detail in Chapter 3. So for now let's go ahead and import some user settings which have been supplied with the course materials that you're already copied to the root of your media drive or perhaps to the root of the your Mac hard drive. Now if you don't have access to the course materials, then you may need to check out Chapter 3 where we cover user settings in greater detail. So click on the User Profile dropdown and choose Import User or User Profile. On our media drive in the catalyst_ CONTAINER, we have a folder called 1280_800 because this is the resolution at which these settings were created.

I want you to go ahead and import the settings called lynda. lynda is the user profile that we'll be using. Now of course, you'll probably be working at a different resolution on your computer. You may need to adjust the window positions when we get into the application in the next video. So now here, in the same section of the dialog box, we have the most recent path accessed by Media Composer. The simplest way to adjust this path is by using the radio buttons down here on the right-hand side.

At the moment, I am selected on Private. As you can see, this directs Media Composer to look on the Mac hard drive under Users, under my user name, under Documents and under Avid Projects. If I click on the Browse button here, you could see I am taken directly to that location. At the moment, there's only one project in there called New Project. So when I choose that, you could see that that project is displayed here on the left. If I go to the next radio button, called Shared, you could see that this is in different location, Mac hard drive Users/Shared/AvidMediaComposer/Shared Avid Projects.

If I choose the Browse button, I'll be taken directly to this location. Since there are no projects in this location, you can see there are no projects displayed in the Select Project dialog. Private and Shared work just fine,]. However, since we are going to be using a container model where all of the assets to do with our project are being kept in a single folder, we'll be using the External radio button throughout this course. The External button displays projects in any other locations that have been recently accessed. This is often the choice in a large facility where projects are stored centrally, or if you're in a school, often the faculty will have you store your projects on your own portable hard drive. Having set External with the radio button, now let's go ahead and browse to the location of our Avid projects that we want to open up for the course. I want to go to media drive and again to the catalyst_CONTAINER and you can see in here, we have Catalyst_Avid_Projects. Inside there, we have two projects, catalyst_23976 and catalyst_5994. Let's choose catalyst_5994 and finally we are inside the Media Composer interface. In the next video, we'll start comparing the interface with Final Cut Pro. So in conclusion, notice that only now that we have chosen our user settings and the project we wish to work within, are we allowed into the Media Composer application. Media Composer tends to front-load tasks like this, whereas Final Cut Pro is more flexible about your starting work and then labeling and saving your project data afterwards.

Comparing the interfaces

Okay, let's start up in Final Cut Pro to get our bearings. Looking at the interface, what do we have? Well, up here we have mMain menus for the application. Then we have the browser window. This is of course where we organize all that projects and clips, sequences, bins, and that kind of thing. In Final Cut Pro, we can have multiple different projects open in the browser window at any given time. Within a project tab, we can of course, right-click, create a new bin, and then we can move assets in and out of the bins, like so.

We can also display the contents of a bin by using the disclosure triangle on the left. We can take clips from either the bin or the browser window, drag them, drop them into the viewer for inspection. (Music playing, inaudible dialogue) And then over underneath the canvas we have the same controls again. (Music playing) If we want to do any actual editing then we are going to use the Timeline window, and then over here on the right of the Timeline window, we have the Tool palette and the audio meters.

Throughout the interface, we've got various specialized buttons for accomplishing all sorts of different tasks. Then we have fast menus such as the Timeline pop-up menu and we also have right-click contextual menus as well. When it comes to settings, we are going to go to the Final Cut Pro menu. This is where we are going to access User Preferences, System Settings, and Audio/Video Settings. And then finally, if we want to take control over our interface and keep it all organized, go to the Window menu, choose Arrange, and then go to layouts.

We can choose Standard or Audio Mixing, Color Correction, whatever we want to use. Okay, let's switch over to Media Composer now and contrast the interface. First thing I'd like you to do though is come here to the Project window. Use the disclosure triangle to open up the Chapter-01 folder. Inside there, open up the 01-02 folder and inside of there, there is a bin called clips_and_sequences. Double-click on that and it's going to open up in its own window down here.

Before we go any further, what I'd like you to do is grab one of the GOPRO clips down here. Drag and drop it into the Source viewer. (Vrooom. Engine revving) And then when we return to our bin, we also have a commute sequence. Double-click and that and will load directly into the Record viewer. (Vrooom. Engine revving, music playing) Now we can have a look at the interface and compare and contrast. Up at the top, we have our menu items just like in Final Cut Pro.

As you've seen, the Project window behaves very much like the browser window. This is where we have our folders and bins, clips, and sequences organized. The keyboard shortcut to activate the Project window in Media Composer is Command+9. If we then use Command+S, it'll save everything in the project in one go.

To the right of the Project window, we have the Composer window. This is comprised of two halves, the Source and the Record side. The Composer window can be activated by using the Command+4 shortcut and then we can use the Escape key on the keyboard to toggle backwards and forwards between the Source side and the Record side.

(Vrooom. Engine revving) Command + 0 is the shortcut to make the Timeline window active and as you can see the Timeline window itself is very similar to Final Cut Pro. To the left of the Timeline window, we have a Tool palette just like Final Cut Pro has on the right-hand side. Now the Audio meters are actually up above the Timeline window here at the top and they are actually laid out horizontally in this particular case. There is also a mute button here too.

So not only is the interface recognizable in terms of number and type of windows, but there is a similar approach to accessing the functions too. We've already been using keyboard shortcuts in Media Composer just like in Final Cut Pro. There are also specific Media Composer buttons throughout the interface. The tooltips themselves will prove very useful as you begin to learn and understand what they do. To access Settings in Media Composer, what we are going to do is come over here to the Project window and we are going to click on the Settings tab.

This is where you are going to find a vast majority of project and user settings. So I want you to twin this in your mind with the User, System, and Audio/Video Settings under the FCP menu in Final Cut Pro. After the Settings tab, we have the Effects tab. This is quite similar to Final Cut as well. But where it differs is that we also have the Format tab where we can select to input and output material of different frame sizes. We have the Usage tab, which gives us information about our current editing session, and then we have the Info tab where we have some other tools such as Hardware. In this particular case we are looking at the space available on our system drive and also any attached media drives.

So, instead of the Project window having multiple projects under tabs like in FCP, in Media Composer, there are multiple tabs but of functionality instead. Okay, let's go back to the Bins tab. Another similarity between Final Cut Pro and Media Composer is that there are many context-sensitive commands that can be accomplished by right-clicking in a particular window.

For example, in the Project window if I right-click I get a context-sensitive menu. The same is true if I come to the Composer window. I have a context-sensitive menu here, I have one in the Timeline, and I even have one in the Bin. In fact, I can take it a step further. If I highlight a specific clip, I can get a context-sensitive menu for clips and I can go to Get Info. As you can see, a panel pops open that gives me all sorts of information about that specific clip, such as the video, the audio sample rate, the drive it's on, et cetera, et cetera.

Plus, another similarity is that we have fast menus throughout the interface. Just like the Timeline pop-up in Final Cut Pro, I've got a fast menu here in my Timeline, but I've also got fast menus in other areas of the interface too. Under the Source Record window, in the Project window, and also down here in the Bin.

Another important similarity is that just like in Final Cut where we have layouts, in Media Composer we have toolsets. If I come to the Toolset menu, you can see that I am currently on Source/Record Editing.

This is the equivalent of the standard arrangement in Final Cut Pro. If I choose Color Correction then I am going to be taken to the Color Correction layout. If I choose Effects Editing, same there and so on and so forth. Let's return to the Source/Record Editing toolset. Once you're in an active toolset, if you make changes to the interface and then choose to save that change, the alteration will now become part of the toolset. So, for example, if I wanted to change the size of my Project window here and then I said Toolset > Save Current, that change has now been incorporated.

The good thing about this is that if I do lose or minimize or accidentally move a window out of the why then I can always go back to my toolset, choose Source/Record Editing or whichever toolset I was working in, and everything will be returned exactly the way I set it up. Of course, the big difference to note here is that in the Media Composer interface, we are only viewing a single project at a time. You'll see shortly that this isn't as big a difference as it sounds when it comes to actually editing. So in conclusion, when it comes to the interface you'll be using there are many points of agreement and similarity between Media Composer and FCP and these similarities are really going to help you apply your existing knowledge and get results fast.

Clips, bins, folders, and the Project window

In Final Cut Pro clips can be imported or captured directly into the Project tab. From there we can move clips into bins, and then we can display the contents of a bin by using the disclosure triangle. If we see a clip that looks like a 35 millimeter film strip, we know that that means it's a video file. If we see a clip represented by a speaker icon, then we know that's an audio-only file. And if we see one of these clips here with the letters A, B, C on it, then we know that that represents a graphic file that's been imported. Okay, let's go and look at some similar things in the Media Composer interface.

If you want to follow along, I'm actually in the Chapter 1 folder, inside the 01_03 subfolder. In there is a Bin called _incoming _media. Let's double-click and open that up. As you've seen, bins are nearly identical in the two applications in that they're the containers for clips. Clips are also similar in both applications, since they have the pointers to our actual audio and picture data.

However, in Media Composer, before you can begin importing or capturing clips, you will always need to first create a bin. This is why upon creating a new Avid project the Project window will always by default contain a single new untitled bin. Also, you can see that you can only view the contents of a bin by having that bin open in one of two ways, which I'll show you momentarily. To emulate the way that you work in Final Cut Pro, just create an incoming media bin, then we can link import or capture everything into that bin first. Now we can create a custom set of bins into which we can organize all of the imported material.

In Media Composer, with the Project window active just click on the New Bin button. I'm going to create several new bins. Now I'm going to called them Broll, Interview, Music, Sequences, and GFX. Now you can see that these new bins have been cranked up at the root level, so to keep things organized. I'm going to select them all and then move them into the 01_03 subfolder.

The next thing I'm going to want to do is take the bins themselves and arrange them in my interface, so that I can easily access them. That way I can drag, clips, and sequences between my bins very easily. Okay, before we do that though, let's return to the _incoming_media bin and have a look to see what these different icons actually mean. First off, this icon here with a little audio waveform inside it is indicating that it's an audio-only clip. If I load that into the Source viewer (Music playing) So I could drag this clip from the _incoming_media bin over into the Music bin.

Looks like we've got some more music here and perhaps if we scroll down, ah, yeah, there is another piece of music there. So let's put those all in that bin together, like so. Next, if I'm looking at one of these clips here that looks a film strip, much like in Final Cup Pro, then I'm actually looking at a clip that contains video. Those look like b-roll shots there. So I'm going to select all of the b-roll shots this time together and move those into the Broll bin.

Next, I'm going to load up this clip. (Female speaker: And there's only three things that matter and it's the music, the dance floor, and your partner.) Okay, so these are audio/video clips as well, but looks like they're interview material. So I'm going to move these into the Interview bin. Next, we have this icon here, the T. Let's double-click and see what that is. This is in actural fact a title that was created inside the system using either Media Composer Title tool or Avid Marquee. So I'm going to take this. I'm going to move this into my GFX bin.

These are also graphics, but they're represented by an FX icon. The reason for this is that this effect actually contains media. You can see these are a whole bunch of different graphics that are been imported together with their alpha channel. Let's select these and put these in the GFX bin as well. And then finally, the only thing remaining in the _incoming_media bin is this icon. This is representing a sequence. If I double-click on it, it's going to load into the record site, so I'm going to take this and drop it into my Sequences bin.

Now we've essentially moved all of the contents out of the _incoming_media bin into the various respective categories. If instead of moving the contents from one bin to another, we wanted to copy the contents from one bin to another, we have two different ways to do that in Media Composer. The first way to do this would be to take the clips, highlight them, and then use Command+D to duplicate them. You can see here now that the music clips that we originally moved over are these ones and the copies have Copy.01 next to them. That would be one way of creating a copy. I can have a record of what I originally imported in my _incoming_media bin and also a Music bin for my editor. Now with duplicates, they're essentially independent, and what I mean by that is the following. If I load up the Slow clip here, and let's say I make an in point and an out point and I add a locator. If I come back over here to this bin and I load up this version of Slow, notice it doesn't have the same attributes as the clip that's in this bin.

So now let me get rid of these clips. I'm going to delete them. I'm going to delete any media files; just the master clip reference.

And let's do that again this time, but instead I'm going to select the clips and hold down the Alt key as I drag them to this bin. Now we notice that there is no longer a .new01 next to the name. So if I load the Fast clip here and again do the same thing, maybe make an in point and out point, maybe I make a couple of locator marks during the clip at significant moments.

Now, if I come back to this bin and load up the Fast clip, guess what? It's exactly the same. So hopefully you can see that there is a difference between cloning a clip, where you will actually always be linked to its original parent, and duplicating a clip, where it goes onto have a life of its own. Let me show you more about that. For example, if I come to the Mid clip here, this is a clone of the Mid clip here. So, if I were to change the name of this clip slightly, let's put the 1 at the beginning of this clip here.

Notice that it updates immediately over here in this bin and of course if it was used in the sequence, it would update in the sequences too. So the whole point of the difference between duplication and cloning is duplication gives you a copy that has its own life. And cloning gives you the ability to continue to keep a copy of all of your material in a master bin where you can make adjustments to metadata that will ripple through all of the other bins and sequences in your project. So now I'm going to Alt-clone all of my clips back into the _incoming_media bin.

The only difference is that with sequences. There is no option to clone. So if I Alt+Drag my sequence to this bin, I'm actually going to get a copy instead. Okay, so when we are organizing material like this, it's very useful to have all of our bins opening up in different windows. So we can quickly organize material between the different bins. However, when we working on a single monitor system or perhaps on a laptop, we need another mechanism to help us make the best use of our real estate.

So I'm going to close all of my bins and now I'm going to go to the Settings tab in the Project window and I'm going to come to the Bin setting. Double-click and open that up. Here we want to option to enable something called SuperBin. Now when I go back to the Bins tab, if I single click on my _incoming_media bin, it's going to open up then here but with the words SuperBin in front of it. Now if I single click on another bin, instead of opening up in a separate window, it opens up in the same window and I can open up as many bins as I like into the SuperBin window. To switch between the various bins, I am going to clip on this icon here and now I can access the individual bins by name.

This isn't as quite as elegant as the Tabs view in Final Cup Pro, but it's very similar and it will certainly help you keep organized and keep your desktop layout under control. If I find I still need to move clips between bins while I've got the SuperBin active, I can still go back to an individual Bin, double-click on it, and now it will open up in a separate window and I can continue organizing between the SuperBin and my regular bin.

Remember, Media Composer doesn't allow for objects like clips and sequences at the root level of the Project window. You're always going to need to create a Bin first in order to bring material into your Media Composer project.

Viewing, selecting, navigating, and playing clips

On some level editing is all about the clips. Feeling comfortable with finding, displaying, selecting, playing, and navigating efficiently through clips is what we're focusing on here. In the Final Cut Pro you can right- click inside your Project tab and view your clips and sequences as small, medium, or large icons or as text. Alternatively, you can right-click on top of your column and choose to Show Thumbnail. If we have loaded a number of clips into our Source viewer then we can come to the recent items list here to swap backwards and forwards between those clips.

Next to that there is a Utility menu where we can create things like bars and tones. I will select a black slug. Obviously, we have our play controls under both of the viewers and we know that we can also use JKL-- (Music playing) to play backwards forwards at different speeds, or by holding down the K Key we can move forwards and backwards slowly listening to analog scrub. (Music playing) Let's go and have a look at some similar functionality in Media Composer.

Inside Media Composer I am in the Chapter-1 folder and I am going to open up the 01_04 subfolder. Single click on swingdance_ source to open up the bin. In my bin, I am currently selected on Brief view. This gives me a view of icons, clip names, and some of the columns of data. If I move now to the Frame view, you can see that I can look at my clips in a different way. If I select all of the clips using Command+A, I can then use Command+K to make my clips smaller or Command+ L to make my clips bigger.

I can also use the Fast menu to Fill Window and arrange my clips more neatly. On the Script view, it's a hybrid. I get a column of thumbnails along with columns of data. Whether I am in Frame view or Script view, I can actually play the clips directly in my bin. Highlight the clip and use Spacebar or maybe JKL. (Rustling clothes, background noise) Once I stop, this now becomes the new representative head frame for that clip.

Same here. (Rustling clothes, footsteps, background noise) As you have seen, to load a clip into the Source viewer we can drag and drop a clip or we can double-click on the clip, or if we prefer we can actually multi-select clips and drag and drop all of them into the Source viewer at the same time. If I am viewing multiple clips and I want to swap backwards and forwards between them quickly, if I click down on the clip name above the Source viewer, I have a quick access to all of my recent items.

If I return to the same menu, you can see that there are other things I can do here too, such as Clear Monitor or Clear Menu. I can also go here to Load Filler, which is the same as creating a black slug inside of Final Cut. If I switch back to the video clip, you can see that I also have time code data here above the viewers too. If I click down on the time code data, then I can adjust what's displayed. Am I looking for video time code, audio time code, or am I actually looking for a clip name or a frame count, or even auxiliary time code.

Underneath both viewers there is a scrub bar where we can move backwards and forwards and then below that are basic play commands. Regular Play, Play IN to OUT, step forwards and backwards a single frame at a time, or forwards and backwards ten frames at a time. If I use the Home and End keys, I can move quickly between the beginnings and the ends of my clips. If I have marks on my clips, such as locators for example, then I can also use my fast forward and rewind keys, and these will take me between the beginnings and the ends of my clips, unless I go in and adjust the settings.

So, let's do that right now. Let's go up to the Settings tab and then let's move down to the Composer Settings. Here, I have a fast-forward/rewind tab. And now I can choose to Stop at Locators. I might also choose to Ignore Track Selectors, since this is very useful when working with sequences. Click OK and now when I use my fast forward and rewind keys, they will stop at various places along the way. If I come down here to my bin and I load up interview clip 4, I would like to show you JKL.

It works very similarly to the way that it works in Final Cut Pro. If I hit the L key once, I am going to play back at the regular editing rate. (Inaudible dialogue) If I hit it again, now I am up to 60 frames per second. 90, 150, 240. Media Composer supports smooth playback of up to 16 simultaneous audio tracks, up to a trebling of the frame rate. After that, fast playback is picture only.

You may have also noticed that as I scrub or move through a clip using my mouse or the arrow keys on my keyboard, I'm not hearing any sound at all. In Final Cut Pro, we usually hear a digital scrub as we are moving backwards and forwards. To enable this in Media Composer, engage the Caps Lock key. Now as I move backwards and forwards, you will hear the digital scrub just like in Final Cut. (Inaudible dialogue) So, in conclusion, both Final Cut Pro and Media Composer use clips and bins and both applications also have viewers where you can play back the materials dynamically using JKL or step through it a frame at a time.

There are some minor differences in exactly how certain things work, but overall, the similarities between the two applications is of tremendous benefit to us as we are learning.

Marking clips and using the Timeline window

Unless you're editing with animation or special effects clips, there are probably many extra fines in your source material, compared with what will get used in the final sequence. So being able to confidently and quickly play, understand, and mark up clips for inclusion in the cut is an essential skill for any editor. In FCP the in and out point markers are down here on the recessed panel. When I mark a clip in the source viewer, the duration of the clip marked is displayed in the top left-hand corner.

In Final Cut I can also drag my in and out point markers directly using the cursor and now my duration has updated. If I have a clip with audio, then I can go to the Stereo tab here to look in more detail of my audio waveform. If the level of the clip is too loud or too quiet, I can adjust it directly here. (Wind blowing/white noise) Down in the Timeline area, if I choose the Timeline pop-up window, it's here that I can switch on Audio Waveforms.

I can also go to the Audio Control button, open up my Audio Controls, and it's here where I can solo, mute, and even switch off tracks altogether. And here in the top left of the Timeline window we have the sequence timecode displayed. Okay, back in Media Composer I have got a bin called swingdane_interview. Single click. Let's open that up. Next, let's say the interview one clip here unloaded into the Source viewer.

Now, let's playback and find our end point. (Female speaker: Swing dancing--) (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together, brings you to a simple time where the roles are defined.) Okay. So now we have marked a clip in our Source viewer. The duration of this clip is now displayed here at the top of the Composer window in the center Duration box. One thing that's different here in Media Composer is that I cannot grab my in and out point markers.

Instead, if I want to adjust my out point, I would have to move my Timeline cursor and then use my out point marker again to update. Now you can see that the center Duration is 11 seconds and 24 frames instead. If I want to move quickly between my in and out points, the Q key is go to in and W key is go to out. To remove an in point, I can use the D key. To remove an out point, I can use the F key. Alternatively, if I need to remove both points at the same time, then I can use the G key.

To mark an entire clip, I use this button here, Mark Clip, or else the T key on my keyboard. Now so far, we have been only using the Source viewer to look at and listen to through our clips. However, sometimes when you have a long clip or you need to find something very specific in the audio, we need to be able to look at the audio waveform for the source clip itself. Now in Final Cut, we can do that directly inside the viewer here. In Media Composer we do it a little differently.

Come down to the Timeline window and let's toggle this switch here called the Source/Record in Timeline. What this does is it actually switches the Timeline to now be displaying the contents of the Source viewer, rather than the contents of the Record viewer. Notice if I switch back to showing the contents of the Record viewer, there is nothing there. So, now what we are looking at is the tracks over time for the source clip. If I wanted to see my audio waveforms now, I come to the Fast menu.

I will go to the Audio Data and switch on Waveform. Now we can see the audio waveforms for our clip. I can go ahead and zoom into the clip here, then I can also pan around the clip using my scroll bar. Now to be really clear, I have not edited the source clip into a sequence. I'm simply switching the view of the Timeline window from the record side to the source side, so we are actually looking at the tracks which make up the source clip. Okay, before we move on, I am actually going to go back here into the Timeline Fast menu and I am going to switch off my Audio Data, because I want to show you a different way of displaying waveforms in just a moment.

Now let's switch back to viewing the contents of the record view in the Timeline area. I will load this sequence here called Interview_String_Out. If I play through this-- (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together.) We are listening to both of the audio tracks here, A1 and A2. I have Solo and Mute buttons here that are in the timeline as well. So, if I mute track 1-- (Female speaker: ?brings you to a simple time where...) Now it's just taming the results of track 2. If I mute that as well, now we can't here anything at all.

Equally, if I switch the mutes off, I can solo a track, which by default mutes the other tracks. Notice that an explicit mute is bright orange and an implicit mute is the darker orange color. (Female speaker: One person follows, one?) On the subject of audio, if we're playing back a clip and we find it too loud or too quiet, then what we can do is adjust the source clip audio level. Go to the Tools menu and bring up the Audio Mixer. Now, I can make an adjustment to the audio levels for this clip.

I am going to gang them together like so. And now it's just a level down. By ganging the tracks together I can adjust both at the same time. (Female speaker: One person leads, and there's only three...) [00:05:3.09] I can also of course adjust the pan here, type numerical values in, etcetera, etcetera. Using Alt+Click will return any values back to their default, whether it be 0 level or MID pan. What I would like you to do now is take a look at this Interview_String_Out, then have a go putting it together from scratch using the tools that we've covered so far and these source clips in the bin.

In conclusion, marking clips and using the source view in Media Composer is very similar to marking clips and using the viewer in FCP. The Timeline window in Media Composer can also be used to display the contents of the Source viewer as tracks of media over time, which allows us to view the audio waveform for our source audio clips.

Creating basic sequences

In Final Cut Pro, when we create a new project, notice the blank sequence is automatically created by default. This sequence is created according to two different sets of preferences. First off, under the Final Cut Pro menu, under User Preferences, on the Timeline Options tab, it's here that we get to set the default start timecode, whether or not it's drop frame, and the default number of video and audio tracks which get added to our new blank sequence.

The other set of settings which affect what sort of sequence is created are defined here in the Audio/Video Settings where we can create a new Easy Setup. This is going to determine the frame size, the frame rate, and the codec. Now down on the left-hand side of the Timeline window itself, notice that when a new sequence is first created, we don't just see the sequence tracks represented. We also see some source sidetracks as well. Now when there's no clip loaded in the Source viewer, Final Cut Pro automatically adds a black slug to the Source viewer which is why we see V1, A1, A2, here on the source side.

If I switch now to another project and load a clip, notice now in the source side we have V1, A1, and A2. And we still have V1, A1-A4 on the record side. Where a sequence already exists, we can use Command+0 to bring up the Sequence Settings. For example, we could alter the atart timecode and whether or not it's drop frame. Finally, if I need to create a copy of a sequence, then I'm going to select that sequence and then use the keyboard command Option+D. Now I've created a copy of my fire_dancing sequence.

I'm going to call it fire_dancing_2. And in order to start working on that now, I'd have to double-click to load that fire_dancing_2 version into my current Timeline window. Now I could begin editing on my second version. Let's go and have a look at Media Composer. Media Composer does not create any sequences by default; instead, the first step must be to create a new sequence. And remember, since we already set the project settings including the frame rate ahead of time, this new sequence and any others created here will be fixed to the frame rate of this project.

We'll cover creating sequences at different frame rates later in the course. But notice there is no association between the sequence and a codec in Media Composer. Any usable codec can be mixed with any other in my sequence and most will playback without rendering. So to create a sequence, let's come back over to the project window, make sure you are on the Bins tab, and inside the Chapter 1 folder, inside 01_06, I have a new bin called _sequence. Single-click on that to open it up.

Remember, you'll always need a bin to contain your clips and sequences; they cannot live in the root of the Project window. In the bin, right-click and choose New Sequence. A new sequence is placed in the bin and highlighted ready to rename. Let's call it commute-01. What else has changed? Well, apart from the sequence in my bin, up here above the Record viewer, I've now got the name of the sequence here too. Down in the Timeline area the default number of tracks have been added to this new sequence.

One video track and two audio tracks. If I wanted to change the default number of tracks that are added to a new sequence, right-click in the Timeline window and choose Timeline Settings. On this first tab called Display, there are various settings that I can tweak. Here under Movement During Play, if I switch to Scroll, this will feel a lot more like Final Cut as the Timeline plays back. On the Edit tab, it's here that I can actually change the number of tracks that are added to new sequences.

Alternatively, if I wanted to affect the default start timecode for a new sequence, I need to come over to my Settings tab in the Project window and I'd need to go to the General setting. Double-click on that and it's here that I can change my default start timecode. Also, I can change this from drop frame to non-drop frame by altering this from a semicolon to a colon or vice versa. Now of course, that affects new sequences. What about the current sequence I have created? Well, if I wanted to change the Start Timecode for this sequence, I'd have to come back to the bin and scroll across until I find the Start Timecode column.

Here, I could now type in a new value and the new timecode would be applied to my current sequence instead. Now that we have a blank sequence, let's move on to creating a first pass at the commute montage. If you'd like to see an example of what you might aim for, check out the commute_example sequence from the commute_example bin. Here it is, commute_example, and here is the commute_example sequence. If I load it up, that's what you're trying to aim for.

So let's switch back now to commute-01. Now let's go to our commute_source bin and load up our first clip, GOPRO085. Let's play through and make an in point and out point on the fly. (Vroom. Engine revving) Okay. So we've marked up that clip now. We can see the duration, 13:23, up here in the Composer window.

To make my first edit, I can simply click down on this clip and drag it and drop it into my sequence like so. We've made our first edit. Incidentally, now that we have content loaded into the Source viewer as well as into the Record viewer, notice that we have a record side set of tracks and a source side set of tracks too. Let's load up our next clip, GOPRO088. This time I'm going to use the interface and play. (Vroom. Engine revving, wind blowing) Make an in point here and now I'm going to use the keyboard to advance 3 seconds and 10 frames.

With my Source viewer highlighted and using my number pad, I'm going to type in +3:10. Notice that the Timeline cursor is now jumped forward and if I make an out point here I've now got a duration of 3 seconds and 11 frames. In other words, the frame I was parked on plus the 3 seconds and 10 frames that I jumped forward. I can add this clip to my sequence by holding down, dragging and dropping into the sequence area. But this time I've got a choice. Do I want to drop it before my clip, after my clip, or in the middle of my clip? In this particular case, I'm going to drop it at the end.

Something that can help me be more accurate is by holding down the Command key. As I hold down the Command key now, and if you can even when I'm snapping to points in the timeline, this is very similar to using the N key in Final Cut Pro. If you prefer, you can right-click in the Timeline area, go to Timeline Settings, and you can actually switch on Snap to Edit as a Default option right here. Let's load up the third clip, GOPRO091.

This time I'll use a different method for marking my in points and out points. With my viewer active, I'm going type in a timecode using my number pad. First off, I need to go up here and set my Source Timecode to V1. Now I'm going to type in 00:08:08:08. Notice that the Timeline cursor jumps directly to that timecode value. Now I can make an in point and now I can type another timecode value, and now I can make my out point.

So that's another way to make our in points and out points. I'm going to go ahead and add this to the sequence now too. Again, I'll use Command to snap to the end. Now with the Timeline window still active, let's use the keyboard command, Command+U twice. This will add two new audio tracks. Let's go over to the bin and pick up the audio track called Sadies-Thing. I don't always have to load through the Source viewer. I can drag directly from the bin to the Timeline that way.

Let's add one more clip, GOPRO093. (Vroom. Engine revving) Let's say we want to add that now. I can drag this down onto tracks 1 and 2. There we go! So what I'd like you to do is continue working with this material and the source clips in the commute_source bin. Use the commute_example as a reference if you like. In the next video, I'll show you how to access bins and clips from other projects.

Accessing clips from other projects

Up till now we've been dealing with material all within the same project. What happens when we need to share material between projects, or what happens if we need to access material of a different frame rate? Over here in the 01_06 subfolder, I have the different_frame_rate bin. Single-click to open up that bin. And you can see here that I've got a sequence called SwingDance. Double-click on that, load it into the Record viewer. Let's play it and have a look at it. (Music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together.) Okay, good start, but it looks like we're actually missing a clip from the beginning of the sequence here.

Let's go find a clip, but let's say that clip is in a different project. How do we get to it? What I'm going to do is I'm going to come up here and click on the Project window, Fast menu, and choose Open Bin. Now initially, this is going to open me up in my current project showing me my current folders and current bins within those folders. However, if I want to go to a different project, if I go out of my current project and into another project, then I can look at the bins and folders within that project instead.

In this case, it's a project that's at a different frame rate and here I have a bin called broll_23976. Let's go ahead and open that up. Now what's happened is that we've opened the bin from the other project inside our current project. If I want to start using the clips now, I simply drag them, drop them into the Source viewer like any other clip, and play them back. (Male speaker: 24 frames a second, Take 1.) (Male speaker 2: Okay and go ahead.) That will do me.

So I've marked myself a clip up now and I'd like to add it to this Timeline. I'm going to drag and drop down into the Timeline area. I know from this yellow arrow here that when I let go of this, what's going to happen is it's going to actually ripple material down my Timeline and throw some things out of sync. So I'm going to use Command+Z to undo that and I want to show you something in the Timeline window itself. Right-click and go to Timeline Settings. Notice here that the Default Segment tool is set to Insert. Let's change it to Overwrite.

That's more useful when we're editing within a sequence that already exists. This time when I drag the clip down, notice I get a red arrow. And if I drag this and snap it to the head of my sequence, this time because I'm in Overwrite mode, I'm not going to ripple any other clips out of sync down my Timeline. (Music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together, brings you to a simple time.) So that was pretty easy. Let's have a look at this clip though, because it looks a bit different than some of the other clips in this sequence.

Notice first of all that the frame rate is displayed and we've got this green dot. That indicates that Media Composer has taken material of a different frame rate and applied a real time time- warp effect to it, so that it plays back correctly in this project. Of course, the material could just be from a different project at the same frame rate. Nevertheless, we'd use the same approach to get material from any project into our current project. Let's say we're really happy where we've gotten to with our sequence and we'd like to save a copy and continue working.

To do that, I'm going to highlight the sequence in my bin and use Command+D to duplicate the sequence. Now I'm going to label the new sequence SwingDance-02 and I'm going to have to double-click on that in order to load that sequence into my Record viewer for further editing. The original version of SwingDance can stay in the bin for safekeeping. One further thing I'd like to point out is just like on the source side, on the record side we also have access to a Timecode menu where I can choose timecode from source video tracks, source audio tracks.

I can change through a frame count, and so on. In the first chapter here, we've gone through some various different methods for getting us up and running in Media Composer and starting to learn the interface. In the next chapter, we'll look at media, projects, and levels of organization.

02 UNDERSTANDING MEDIA, PROJECTS AND LEVELS OF ORGANIZATION

Project structure, formats, frame rates, and the Format tab

Now we are going to switch gears and dive into the area of project data, sometimes referred to as metadata. To set this topic in motion, we will be creating a new project. Before we do that though, let's refresh some concepts about how the hierarchy of projects, bins, and clips work for an editor. Film or videos are made up of a certain number of frames per second, but having to edit with individual frames would be hugely cumbersome. As such, we use clips to keep frames in meaningful collections and then we use bins to keep clips in meaningful collections, and ultimately projects help us keep all of that in a meaningful collection.

The idea behind any of these organizational structures is to allow the editor to organize and access material from any project on the system and then use those clips or sequences in any project or sequence they are currently working on. The engineering teams behind Final Cut Pro and Media Composer took different approaches to solving this need. In Final Cut Pro, the browser can open multiple projects alongside other projects. I can also go ahead and pull off one of my projects and then move assets between projects, like so.

This makes moving material between different projects very easy indeed. If we go to the Audio/Video Settings in Final Cut Pro and then we move to the Sequence Presets, we are presented with a huge number of different choices about how we might set up new sequences that we create. If I wanted to create a DV Sequence then I might choose DV NTSC, or if I wanted to credit 720 HD project then I might choose DVCPRO HD.

If I am working with 1080 material, then I might choose to work with Apple ProRes at 1920x1080, for example. If I return to the Summary dialog, it's actually here that I can Create an Easy Setup and I WOULD SAY THAT CREDITING AN EASY SETUP IN FINAL CUT PRO IS MOST SIMILAR TO CREATING A NEW PROJECT IN MEDIA COMPOSER, SINCE THAT'S WHERE ALL THE CHOICE IS ABOUT FRAME SIZE AND FRAME RATE NEED TO BE MADE AND IT'S WHAT SETS THE STANDARD FOR ALL NEW SEQUENCES THAT ARE CREATED. ONE VERY IMPORTANT DIFFERENCE TO NOTE HOWEVER IS THAT IN FINAL CUT PRO, WE PAY MUCH MORE ATTENTION TO CODEC, WHEREAS IN MEDIA COMPOSER WE ARE GOING TO PAYING MUCH MORE ATTENTION TO FRAME RATE.

Here in the catalyst_5994 project inside the 02_01 subfolder is bin called hierarchy. Single click to open it up. In Media Composer we are not able to open up projects alongside each other and move bins and clips that way, but as we saw in Chapter 1, if we need to access material from other projects, we can use the Open Bin command from the project Fast menu. A helpful way to think of this might be to see the Media Composer Project window as the browser and project windows combined and then mentally adjust to accessing other media and clips via the Open Bin command.

Media Composer places a big emphasis on the bin as a way of exchanging data, whereas Final Cut Pro relies on the project in that role. We will return to this difference in emphasis on project versus bin when we cover backing up project data later. But for now, let's get into some project basics. In order to create a new project, we need to return to the Project Selection window. Before we do that, let's just contextualize a few things about how Media Composer handles different frame sizes and frame rates.

When we go to the Project Selection dialog and choose a new project, we will be presented with a list of project types and I have some graphics which represent the size and shape of each format, as compared with the HD 1080 frame size. The first group of projects we see presented off a material shot from standard definition cameras in North America, parts of South America, Japan, and South Korea. The second group of projects is for material shot on standard definition cameras in Europe, Africa, Australia, parts of Asia and the UK.

The third group is for material shot on 720 cameras worldwide and then the final group is for material shot on HD 1080 cameras worldwide. If I switch to Script view in the bin, you can see each of these graphics represents an increase in frame size from SD, NTSC, and PAL up to HD 720 frame sizes, and then finally to HD 1080 frame sizes. As part of the project creation dialog, we will also have to decide on the frame rate of the projects we are creating.

Here I have some graphics which represent the frame rates, indicating where and how they're used in the world. Just think of it this way. CREATE THE PROJECT TYPE THAT BEST SERVES THE MASTER YOU FINALLY NEED TO DELIVER.

FOR EXAMPLE, CHOSE 23.976 OR 24.00 FRAMES PER SECOND FOR FILM PROJECTS OR ANYTHING GOING DIRECTLY TO PROGRESSIVE FORMATS SUCH AS WEB OR BLU-RAY DVD.

You can use 25p for progressive HD out of Europe, Africa, Australia or parts of Asia and the UK. 25i and 50i for interlaced TV and video out of the same region.

Choose 29.97 or 30p for progressive HD out of North America, parts of South America, Japan, and South Korea. 30i or 59.94i for interlaced TV or video out of that same region.

NOW IF YOU HAVE A PROJECT THAT HAS MULTIPLE SOURCES OF DIFFERENT FRAME RATES, THEN CREATE A SEPARATE PROJECT FOR EACH FRAME RATE AND INGEST ALL OF THE MATERIAL NATIVELY INTO THE APPROPRIATE PROJECT TYPE. Essentially, you'll be creating a pod of Avid projects to get all the material into your system. Then after the pod of projects, we will pick the project that is the best frame rate for the master deliverable and do our editing in that project, pulling in all of the various frame rates via the Open Bin dialog.

The only exception to this logic would be when you have multiple frame rate deliverables too, i.e. you're delivering international versions. In this case, hopefully you have shot the bulk of your material at 23.976, as mastering in this project type would allow for the best and mathematically easiest standards conversions. Another way to think of it is that you can pretty much always add fields, but taking them out can be a whole something else. So we are trying to contextualize the idea that we want to work in the project type, i.e. the frame rate and resolution, which will serve the greatest number of deliverables.

So how do we create a project? Well, first, we need to close the project window to return to the Select Project dialog. So the first thing I would like to call out is where I am pointed to. You can see the path here and we can see that I am selected on External and so I am still pointing to the same place that we accessed our course materials from earlier. This is where we are going to create our new example project now. Make sure you pointed to this location.

Now let's move to the New Project button and in the New Project dialog the first thing we need to do is give our project a name. You simply must do this now. You cannot change the name of an Avid project later on. Okay,with the name set, now let's have a look at Format dropdown. We can see the different frame sizes we covered earlier. Here are the NTSC frame sizes, these are the PAL frame sizes, and then we have our 720 and then 1080 and you can see that each one is split into different frame rates. If I wanted to create 1080p/23.976 project, I would choose this setting right here.

Then there is also a Raster Dimension dropdown. You don't need to worry about this too much because we can always change this later on. Basically, what I have got here is full raster or thin raster. Choose OK and now that new project is available in the list of other projects in the location that we specified. Now, we can go ahead and open that new project up. I should point out that 23.976 is the most common form of 24p available on most affordable HD cameras out there. It's often referred to as 24p, but it's really 23.976.

So now I am in my new project. Obviously, there is nothing in here yet. Really all I wanted to do is come in here and have a look at the Format tab. HERE UNDER THE FORMAT TAB I CAN NOW CHANGE THE FRAME SIZE FROM 1080 TO 720 TO NTSC. SO THIS IS WHAT ALLOWS ME TO INPUT AND OUTPUT MATERIALS AT DIFFERENT FRAME SIZE AT THIS FRAME RATE.

Let's go ahead and close this project now and create another new project. This time example_5994 and I am going to choose 1080i/59.94. There are more raster choices available, but again we will look at those once we get into the project so select OK and now that the project is in our list, click OK to launch into that project. Same thing again. If I come to the Format tab, you can see that I can switch my project between different frame sizes, depending upon what I need to ingest for output.

THE RASTER DIMENSION IS REALLY AN EFFICIENCY THING. Basically, if I am working with a lot of material that is 1440x1080 wide, i.e. XDCAM HD, HDV or AVC intra 50, then this Raster dimension will give the best performance for real-time effects. I could switch to 1280x1080 and this would be the best raster to work out for DVCPro HD material. The full raster, 1920x1080, will also support Standard, which means a baseband capture, or AVC intro 100, XDCAM HD 50 or XDCAM EX.

Okay, let's go ahead and close out of this project too now and return back to the Select Project dialog. So now what we have seen is that WE CAN CREATE PROJECTS AT DIFFERENT FRAME RATES AND THEN WITHIN THE PROJECT ITSELF USING THE FORMAT DROPDOWN WE CAN CHANGE THE FRAME SIZE OF THE MATERIAL THAT WE ARE GOING TO BRING IN, OUTPUT, OR RENDER. So that's really it. That's the way to create a pod of projects inside of Avid Media Composer, bringing the different frame rates, and then using the Open Bin dialog that we looked at earlier, we can now access that material in whichever project we choose to master in.

I think I should point out that 5994 is also sometimes referred to as 60i for short. That's fine, but just don't get it mixed up with 60p, which is a higher-end progressive format running at 60 frames per second. That was a lot of information. Let's take a moment to understand what just happened. Media Composer simply asked us to give it the project location, name, and information up-front and we saw that that Format tab inside Media Composer allows us to switch the frame size being imported, exported, or displayed.

That really isn't that different to FCP because in Final Cut, we are still required to make the same selections for the audio or video settings. It's just that we provide the information and enter it in a different way.

Comparing backup structure

Both Media Composer and Final Cut Pro are both engineered to perform auto-saves as well as explicit saves and to allow for easily backing up the results of the work done in your project. Once I've saved my FCP project, the software is able to begin auto-saving my work in the background, according to the rules set under the General Settings tab accessed from the User Preferences. Here under Autosave Vault we can specify how often and how many copies we keep. To manually back up our FCP project, we would need to exit the software, browse to the location where we saved our project, and then copy that file to a safe external location.

IN MEDIA COMPOSER, THE AUTOSAVE VAULT IS CALLED THE ATTIC AND THE SETTINGS CAN BE FOUND AS WITH MOST SETTINGS UNDER THE SETTINGS TAB OF THE PROJECT WINDOW. When you go to the Bin Settings, double-click. You might remember we came here to enable the SuperBin earlier in the course. Up above that area, we have the ability to change our Auto-Save Interval, maybe I'll make that 5 minutes, and also the maximum number of bins in a project's attic as well as the maximum versions of a bin in the attic.

So with that running in the background, if there should be a computer malfunction or a power failure we can feel confident and we can always go back in time to retrieve a bin with a good recent copy of our work. Now in addition to the protection offered by auto-save, if you've just spent a lot of time coming it with your masterpiece, there is no harm in using the explicit save to protect your investment of time and energy. In Final Cut Pro the command to perform an explicit save is Command+S. This saves your project.

IN MEDIA COMPOSER, THE FASTEST WAY TO EXPLICITLY SAVE THE ENTIRE PROJECT IS TO USE THE FOLLOWING KEYSTROKES: COMMAND+9 TO HIGHLIGHT THE PROJECT WINDOW AND COMMAND+S TO SAVE EVERYTHING INSIDE. Notice that in Media Composer if something in a bin changes, for example, let's say I duplicate one of these clips, notice that we now get an asterisk before the bin name. If I now explicitly save, notice that the asterisk goes away. So that's a quick way to know whether there is something in your bin that currently needs saving.

Further to auto-save and explicit save there is a third type of save incorporated into both applications. When I exit either FCP or Media Composer, the system will do a full save of my project at that point too. Saving your bins and projects regularly is a good first step. However, all of that project information is stored in one or two folders on your system. If something happened to your system drive, you might lose all of your work. Therefore, it's common practice to back up all project data to another device or a server location at the end of every day or week depending on the amount of work passing through your system.

In order to perform a manual backup, you'll need to exit your project and exit Media Composer. Before we do exit though, I'm going to make a change over here in the Music bin. Let's go back to the Bins tab. You can see I am in the 02_ 02 subfolder and I've got the music_attic_example bin opened. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take this audio_sequence here and I'm going to accidentally delete it, like so. Okay, it's gone. We can see the change there, I might even save it, and it's absolutely gone from that bin right now.

Let's go ahead and exit Media Composer. Remember, if we close the Project window, we'll exit to the Select Project dialog. We don't want to do that this time. What we'd like to do is exit the application altogether. Now we've exited Media Composer. On your desktop I'd like you to create a new folder called avid_project_backups. Next, at the operating system level, navigate to the location of your Avid project. In our case, we know that we're on the media drive. We know that we're inside the catalyst_CONTAINER and inside the catalyst_Avid_Projects there are the projects that we've been working with, including the two examples we made earlier in this chapter.

So now if I wanted to do a full backup of my catalyst_5994 project I would simply need to copy this item, move to my backup location, and paste the item. Now, ideally this would be on a thumb drive or an external network resource or somewhere other than your computer. We're just really going through the process here so you can see what we're doing. So what we've just covered is best practice when all is going well.

But what if something goes wrong? What then? For example, let's say at the end of my editing session I had accidentally deleted a sequence like I did in the Music bin. How would I get it back? Again, with either Media Composer or Final Cut, the application needs to be shutdown and next we're going to browse to the location of the Avid Attic. So I've brought up here the path to the Avid Attic on a Mac system. You can see that I am on a MAC HARD DRIVE. UNDER USERS, UNDER SHARED, UNDER AVIDMEDIACOMPOSER, WE FIND THE ATTIC ITSELF. Underneath the Attic we then have a representation of each project that we're currently working with. If we scroll over a bit further, we can see inside catalyst_5994 I have Bins and inside my Bins I can now find my music_attic_ example bin.

If we go inside of here and we switch to Detail view, we can actually get to see the times at which things were saved. So what I need to do is dial back in time slightly. Now, these numbers, by the way, are really just to indicate what sequence things were saved in. Once it reaches the maximum number of bins that you've specified, it will roll back over to number 1. So you need to make sure you definitely check the time of the Attic file that you're restoring. To do this, I'm going to roll back in time a little bit.

I'm going to go back to 11:40 here and I'm going to copy this item. Let me close this location and now I'm going to paste this item onto my desktop. NEXT, I'M GOING TO MAKE TWO CHANGES TO THE FILE NAME. THE FIRST ONE IS I'M GOING TO CHANGE THE EXTENSION FROM .7 TO .AVB. I'M ALSO GOING TO CHANGE THE NAME ITSELF, SO I DON'T GET CONFUSED WHEN A GET BACK INSIDE MEDIA COMPOSER. INSTEAD OF MUSIC_ATTIC_EXAMPLE I'M JUST GOING TO CALL IT MUSIC_RECOVERED. ALL RIGHT! NOW LET'S GO BACK INTO MEDIA COMPOSER AND BRING THIS RECOVERED FILE INTO OUR PROJECT.

I'm going to go ahead and go back into the catalyst_5994 project. Now I'm going to close my music_attic_ example bin and I'm going to go ahead and create a new bin called Recovery. I'm going to place that alongside that material in the 02_02 subfolder and now I'm going to use the Open Bin command to go and browse to my desktop, because it's on my desktop that I'm going to find the music_Recovered bin. Choose Open and now I'm reading this bin directly off of the desktop.

So you can see that in the Recovered version of my bin I have the audio_sequence. So I'm going to actually take everything, move it over from the Recovered bin into my Recovery bin, and now I'm going to close this one. Now, why did I do that? Well, remember this is external to our project, so I don't want to be relying on this. This bin here is inside my project structure and so that's why I want to move all of the assets out of the Attic version into my current version. Now we can close that and we could even go to the desktop and get rid of that Avid bin folder on the desktop now, because everything is safe and secure back inside my project.

SO IN THIS PROCESS WE WERE ABLE TO SIMULATE THE ACCIDENTAL DELETION OF A SEQUENCE AND THE RESTORATION OF THAT ASSET FROM THE AVID ATTIC. Overall, the procedures for saving, backing up, and restoring are quite similar when we compare FCP with Media Composer. However, despite the similarities, there is a fundamental difference at the heart of how things are auto-saved in Media Composer when compared to FCP. Remember, at the start of Chapter 2 we were talking about Final Cut Pro, placing emphasis on the project, and Media Composer placing the emphasis on the bin. Here we see that same theme extended, because FCP is designed to auto-save projects whereas Media Composer is designed to auto-save bins. In practice, what this means is that if I have a problem with the sequence in a bin like in the previous example, then in Media Composer I could simply restore the auto-save backup of that specific bin, leaving any other work I did in the project alone. In other words, I just dial that one bin back in time to before I accidentally deleted my important sequence.

The rest of my project is still up-to-date. So in conclusion, both FCP and Media Composer use an auto-saving mechanism. In FCP, projects are backed up in the Autosave Vault; in Media Composer bins are backed up to the Attic. Setting auto-save is of course is a good start. However, remember it's always a good idea to manually back up your project data to a thumb drive or external location at the end of everyday or every week.

Organizing media and project assets

Organizational structure is what enables you to fly. A pianist knows where every key is and has practiced hitting it countless times before performing. As an editor, your notes are unique, new, and ever-changing. Knowing what you have, where to find it, and how to protect it are essential skills for students and professionals alike. Part of working with Final Cut or Media Composer is setting up your processes so they flow effortlessly. This way when you're editing, you can stay calm and in the moment and concentrate on your subject matter instead of stressing over a file location.

To facilitate this, here is a three- point strategy that I use regardless of whether I'm working in Final Cut or Media Composer. FIRST OFF, PROTECT MEDIA AND PROTECT DATA. SECOND, ORGANIZE MEDIA AND THE PROJECT DATA INTO A SINGLE PLACE WITH A STANDARDIZED STRUCTURE. AND THIRD, BE ABLE TO BACK UP ARCHIVE AND EASILY RESTORE YOUR PROJECT AND MEDIA. When it comes time to begin editing, I'll have every scrap of material from the shoot available and I'll know just where to find it.

There is nothing mysterious or difficult about managing media and project assets. I'm going to take you through the method that I use right now. Even if you have your own method I think the comparisons and concepts covered will be useful. This method will work well for students, news and journalism crews, or indeed anyone who needs their materials to be stored in a project-centric, portable, and secure manner. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to hide Media Composer for a moment and go back to the desktop, because on the desktop we can access our media drive where we have all of our assets.

Let's open that up and have a look at the structure. Here I have the catalyst_CONTAINER and you can see that inside that I have various folders, some for projects, for outputs, for source camera files, for source graphics, and so on. Up at the top I have another folder called catalyst_Avid_MediaFiles. This is where I would store my actual Avid MediaFiles that are currently on the root of my hard drive when I'm finished working with this project. That way when I select this folder later on, it would contain absolutely everything that I need to back up or archive my project.

One thing I'd like to point out is that Avid projects, as we've seen, are frame rate specific. However, the container structure here is frame rate agnostic. What I mean by that is if we come to the catalyst Source Camera folder, for example, you can see that I've separated my assets according to that frame rate. So here are the assets which are at 59.94 and here are the assets which are at 23.976. I would also separate on the outputs side too.

I don't want to mix up interlaced with progressive outputs. Now, I'd like to make a point here. This little structure is really the engine of your project. This is where you are placing the seeds and organizing material and those organizational strategies will flow through your entire workflow. I like to get this right, right from the beginning of my project. I suggest that you think about how you can organize your assets in a similar way to facilitate a smoother workflow for yourself.

ANOTHER THING I'D LIKE TO POINT OUT IS THAT WHEN WE'RE RECEIVING SOURCE FILES IT'S ALWAYS BEST PRACTICE TO USE A FILE TRANSFER APPLICATION. In this case, I would suggest using ShotPut Pro. What this does is it allows you to browse out to the location of incoming media and then specify where you would like to put that incoming media. The advantage of using an application like ShotPut Pro over just dragging and dropping files on the desktop level is that ShotPut Pro will do a CRC checksum and look at your source file and the destination file and compare them. If an error occurs during copying, it will let you know, unlike the OS, which can sometimes drop packets and not even mention it to you.

OKAY, FINALLY I'D LIKE TO GO BACK TO THE MEDIA DRIVE AND JUST CALL OUT THE FACT THAT THE AVID MEDIAFILES FOLDER IS THE MANAGED MEDIA LOCATION. IF I CHANGE THE NAME OF THIS FOLDER OR IF I MOVE ITS LOCATION, THEN MY MEDIA INSIDE AVID WILL GO OFFLINE. With FCP the managed media location is the scratch disk and the same would be true if I moved it or renamed it then I would lose the links between my clips in my project and the actual media that I'm trying to reference.

In conclusion then, even if you work in a different way from what I've just outlined, I hope the concepts we covered were useful. Certainly, it's highly recommended to have a predictable location for all the source media and project files used on any production and a strategy for backing up or ultimately archiving your projects. Certainly, if we're only going to rely on a spinning disk such as a FireWire or USB drive, then we could be headed for trouble. These drives are guaranteed to fail at some point or another.

So you want to have to think about how you might either back up the results of all of your work and media to a second drive that you could leave on the shelf or perhaps explore other alternatives for archiving your media such as LTO-5 or DLT.

Bringing media into the project

In the early part of Chapter 2, we looked at creating projects and project management. They we are going to compare how Media Composer and Final Cut are designed to access and handle media. In video, film, web, and TV production, there are various different types of media to be dealt with. With Media Composer and Final Cut, there are two or three main ways to get that material into the system and ready for editing. Now tape based media are things like D5, HDCam SR, DVCPRO HD, HDV, DigiBeta, and so on. This material is captured into Final Cut or Media Composer from a VTR or a live feed.

The next category is what we would call file-based media. This tends to be from modern cameras such as XDCAM, P2, AF-100, 5D, 7D, RED or Arri Alexa. And the material tends to be linked to by both applications and then transcoded at some point in the project's lifecycle.

And now our third category is multimedia files. Digital stills, QuickTime movies, digital audio files. IN FINAL CUT PRO, WE LINK TO THESE FILE TYPES USING THE IMPORT COMMAND; IN MEDIA COMPOSER, WE TRANSCODE THEM. Let's look at each category in a little bit more detail.

FIRST OFF, TAPE BASED MEDIA. With either Final Cut or Media Composer, tape based media is created by reading information over a video cable, i.e. base band or a FireWire cable, and then writing a version of that data as a new file onto the system's media drive. In Avid, this is done as an MXF file. You can actually write different types of file, but MXF is really the preferred format for Avid to use. In Final Cut this is really QuickTime. ProRes is based on QuickTime and it's really the most useful codec to be using in a Final Cut environment.

During the capturing process, both applications need to be able to write the information generated to a specified location on a hard drive. That place in Final Cut Pro is the Scratch Capture folder. That place in Media Composer is the Avid MediaFiles folder, which always needs to be on the root of your media drive.

NOW FILE BASED MEDIA. With this approach but FINAL CUT AND MEDIA COMPOSER CAN LINK TO MEDIA FROM POPULAR FILE-BASED CAMERAS. Linking to the media means that the file that you point to upon import is actually the file you reference in the bin or your sequence. Nothing new is written to your scratch disk or the Avid MediaFiles location. Regardless of the source files location, if the file is recognized then Media Composer or Final Cut will pull the data from the source file and display it real time through the interface as clips or sequences.

There is no process of reading the file and then writing a new file to manage media files location. Instead we look at that file through the software interface. In Final Cut Pro this is what we get when we import a file. In Media Composer, this is what we get when we AMA link to a file and we will cover that in detail in Chapter 4. One thing I should note here is that when you're linking to material then you need to make sure that material is also placed on a relatively fast drive. I would like to therefore put that media inside the container folder for my project and I make sure that the container folder is always sitting on the fastest drive available to my system. Otherwise performance will suffer.

OKAY, LET'S TALK ABOUT MULTIMEDIA FILES. This is the third option for working with more general multimedia files and confusingly for us in Media Composer this process is referred to as import. But as you'll see in Media Composer importing means something completely different from importing in Final Cut Pro.

With these more general multimedia files, all those file types which are not AMA linkable in Media Composer, we can access them through the Import command and have them transcoded in a single pass. In this process, media is created by reading the contents of the source file and then transcoding it and writing a description of that data as a new file on the system's media drive. In Media Composer this version of the data is created as an MXF file, just as it would be if it were a captured file, and it will inherit most if not all of the metadata available in the source file.

And since these MXF versions of your material can be created at very high quality, the same level of quality used when capturing from tape provided you follow the right steps, you can rely on the MXF media to be the new master for your editing and final output. Media Composer writes this information to the Avid MediaFiles folder on the root of your media drive. In Final Cut Pro, the best counterpart to this process would be when you have files that FCP can't use in either log and transfer or via import.

In this case, we take the files, let's say from the Canon 7D, transcode them first using Compressor into a file format that FCP can handle, and then go ahead and import them. So as you know it from Final Cut, this process can take a quit a while depending on the source file's codec. How much it's compressed, the speed of your machine, the amount of RAM you have got, etc. In Media Composer the happy exception to this are certain common file types such as QuickTime movies, which when encoded to the Avid DNxHD codec can be imported at rightly accelerated speed.

IN POST-PRODUCTION WITH MEDIA COMPOSER, AT THE BEGINNING OF YOUR PROJECT ONE OF THE FIRST FORMAT RELATED QUESTIONS TO ASK IS, WILL MY WORKFLOW BE LINKING TO FILES OR WILL I WRITE NEW FILES TO MY MANAGED MEDIA FILES FOLDER? We ask this question because there are pros and cons to both. With linking to original media files, called import in FCP and AMA linking in Media Composer, the pro is that I have instant access to my media. The con is since the media might be in a codec that is not optimized for editing, for example, Long GOP, performance with different file types can vary greatly, from quite snappy and easy to edit with to wading through quicksand with spinning beach balls.

Whether that you are importing multimedia files or tape-based capture, I am going to write new MXF file to my Avid MediaFiles folder. Pro: once I am in editing I will have a seamless experience, variables are minimized, and I have the stability to accommodate a client driven session. The con is it's a front-loaded task where time is spent importing before editing can even begin. Note, you'll so need the room on your media storage to accommodate the MXF versions of your files.

This is a good thing. Having a full backup of your media is essential anyway, whether the backup takes the form of a duplicate of the original file or in this case a duplicate it by virtue if being an Avid MXF file as well now. Obviously, with capturing, there is no choice. You'll be writing new media to a managed media location both in FCP or in Media Composer regardless. In practice of course, a hybrid approach of both linking and creating new MXF media is most usual. And the mix will be dictated largely by budget or time considerations.

One difference to note between Final Cut and Media Composer regarding codecs is that while both applications can import or capture multiple codecs, when it comes time to mixing those different codecs in a sequence, FCP tends to require more rendering. With Media Composer, you can expect a sequence containing multiple codecs to play back a greater variety of those files without rendering being necessary. In conclusion, we've talked about the methods or approaches of getting material into the Media Composer environment and since we know that either capture or import in Media Composer creates a new media file, which is written to the Avid MediaFiles folder, let's now turn our attention to where that media is directed upon creation and at what resolution.

Understanding media resolutions and locations

IN FINAL CUT PRO, WE SET THE SCRATCH DISK LOCATION; IN MEDIA COMPOSER, WE USE THE MEDIA CREATION SETTINGS. In both cases, we're setting up rules ahead of time for where to send media when it's imported, captured, or generated. Under the Final Cut Pro menu, we have the System Settings. It's here that we can specify when media is sent, when it's captured or when it's rendered. The same place in Media Composer is called the MEDIA CREATION SETTINGS. We can access it two ways. We can either go to our Settings tab in the project window and scroll down and find Media Creation that way. There it is. Or alternatively, I could go to the Tools menu and drop down to Media Creation this way instead. And you could see Command+5 is the keyboard shortcut to bring this dialog up. SO JUST LIKE WHEN I CREATE A PROJECT IN FINAL CUT, I SHOULD ALWAYS FIRST GO TO MY SCRATCH DISK LOCATION AND CHECK THE INTEGRITY OF THAT, THE SAME IS TRUE WITH MEDIA COMPOSER.

WHEN I CREATE A PROJECT IN MEDIA COMPOSER, I WANT TO COME TO THE MEDIA CREATION SETTINGS AND CHECK THAT EVERYTHING IS GOING TO THE RIGHT PLACE AND AT THE RIGHT RESOLUTION. Let's start on the Drive Filtering & Indexing tab. Basically this is telling the system hey, don't record any media to my system drive or my launch drive or my network drives based on resolution. Of course, if you are using your Mac internal hard drive as your media drive in this particular case, you want to leave these unchecked. Otherwise your media will go offline.

WITH MANY OF THE REST OF THE TABS, THE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS TO NOTE ARE THE VIDEO RESOLUTION AND THE VIDEO DRIVE. Here in the Capture tab, we're specifying that media would go to the Macintosh hard drive. I want to switch this to my media drive so that I get better performance. This switch here is really just saying whether or not the audio and the video files are sent to the same location. This can be useful if you have a specific audio workflow that requires the audio files to be put in a different place. I'm going to leave them all being sent to the media drive. We'll come back to the Video Resolution in just a moment.

Let's first look at Titles. This is for media generated inside the system through either the Media Composer Title tool or Avid Marquee. Import, this specifies where media is written to when we import multimedia files. Mixdown & Transcode, this is telling us where the media will go if we choose to mixdown a whole sequence of that timeline into an individual clip or perhaps transcode material from one frame right to another. Then we have a separate tab for Motion Effects and a separate tab for Renders. And over here we have Media Type and you can see that's set to MXF.

NOW LET'S GO BACK TO THE RENDER TAB FOR A MOMENT AND HAVE A LOOK AT THE VIDEO RESOLUTION DROPDOWN. You can see here that you have choices between Avid's own DNxHD codec, which is pretty much the equivalent of Final Cut Pro's ProRes codec, or we can choose camera manufacturer codecs such as Panasonic's AVC-Intra or Panasonic's DVCPro HD, or Sony's XDCAM EX 35 megabits per second, or Sony XDCAM Optical at 50 megabits per second.

These two other choices here are for uncompressed HD media or uncompressed HD media at 10 bit. The uncompressed options will preserve the maximum amount of data, making the quality of the copy almost indistinguishable from the original, but it will also generate huge files. As we choose resolution then, on the one hand we need to preserve the quality of the original media, whether that be a file or type source. And then on the other hand, if we use too much information to store our images, we may end up spending too much money on storage, waste time on longer transfer times, and be unable to play back the material smoothly without investing in faster storage.

TO HELP US UNDERSTAND THIS MORE CLEARLY, LET'S GO TO THE AVID STORAGE CALCULATOR ONLINE. Here with the Avid Storage Calculator, we can go ahead and choose a project type. Let's go to our project type here, 1080i/59.94. Then I can choose a resolution. Let's go for Avid DNxHD 145. Let's type in 10 minutes worth of footage. You can see right away that gives us the storage requirement of 10 gigabytes. Avid DNxHD 145 is pretty much the equivalent to ProRes 422.

This time let's choose Avid DNxHD 220, and we can see with the same amount of material we'd now need an extra 5 gigabytes to store that. This is pretty much the equivalent to ProRes HQ. Let's go a little further. Let's choose DVCPRO HD 100. We can see that it has a significantly smaller storage requirement. Let's keep looking through. 1:1 8-bit HD. This is going to be big. You can see that it will cost us 71 gigabytes of space if we were to capture at 1:1 8-bit HD.

Likewise, if we were to go to 10-bit, that goes up to a whopping 83 gigabytes for 10 minutes worth of footage. SO YOU CAN SEE THAT CHOOSING THE CORRECT RESOLUTION TO SUPPORT THE QUALITY OF YOUR FILE AND THE ENVIRONMENT THAT YOU'RE GOING TO BE EDITING IN IS VERY IMPORTANT INDEED.

Let's go back over to Media Composer and explore this a little further. Let's go back to the Media Creation dialog for a moment. I want to point out a couple of things. I've been using Render to explain what these different resolutions are going to do for us.

The same choices are going to be available in Import and of course in Mixdown & Transcode. The only difference would be the Capture tab. If we go in here, we're going to have a reduced set unless we have hardware attached to our system. If we have hardware attached to our system that can ingest baseband media over a video cable, then we would see the same range of resolutions here. In this case, because I'm working on a software only system, I'm only being given the choices that are available to me through a FireWire based capture.

Next thing, let's cancel out of here. What I'd like to do is go to the Format tab. You can see there we're at 1080i/59.94, 1920x1080. Let's switch this down now to 720. The reason I've done that is because this is going to affect what we see under the Media Creation aettings. You see here now I'm getting a different set of resolutions that are smaller in size because of course the 720 frame is smaller in size.

If I now switch to my format over to 30i NTSC, in other words, an SD resolution and we go back to the Media Creation dialog, you're going to see now that we're presented with a whole different set of resolutions. One thing I'd like to point out is that you've probably noticed that in the HD dialogs, most stuff is represented with a number indicating the megabits per second. When we come to SD media though, Avid is representing things as a ratio. In other words, 2:1 is much less compressed, let's say, than 10:1. So 10:1, for example, would be a proxy resolution whereas 2:1 or maybe 1:1 or 1:1 10-bit would be our online finishing resolution.

SO YOU CAN SEE THAT IT'S IMPORTANT THAT WHEN YOU'RE FIRST SETTING UP YOUR PROJECT, IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE MOVING BETWEEN DIFFERENT FRAME SIZES, YOU NEED TO COME AND SET THE MEDIA CREATION SETTINGS FOR EVERY FRAME SIZE THAT YOU'RE GOING TO BE WORKING WITH, WHETHER IT'S CAPTURING, WHETHER IT'S RENDERING, OR WHETHER IT'S MIXDOWNS AND TRANSCODES.

Final point here, the Media Creation dialog, that's all about sending media to the managed media files location, the Avid MediaFiles folder on the root of your hard drive. I said at the beginning of this segment that you really don't want to delete those files manually using the operating system. You need to use the tools inside of Media Composer. So how do we do that? Let's highlight this clip here. Let's just load it so we can prove that it's in fact online. Let's highlight this clip here and hit the Delete key on the keyboard.

You can see I've got an interesting choice here. Delete the effect clip or Delete the 3 associated media files. I'm going to reverse this. I'm going to delete the media only but leave the effect clip online. That way I could re-import it later at a different resolution. And you could see underneath, I've got the resolutions that we're going to delete displayed. Click OK and then we have a confirmation dialog and now that clip is gone offline. We still have the clip in our bin and as I say, we could re-import that now if we wanted to from the original file.

But this is one way of deleting media inside of Media Composer and it's far better to do it this way because Media Composer has databases which are scanning the contents of that managed media file location. So deletions through the software itself will keep everything up to date and everything moving smoothly.

IN CONCLUSION, BOTH FCP AND MEDIA COMPOSER HAVE MANAGED MEDIA FILE LOCATIONS. IN FCP, IT'S THE SCRATCH DISK; IN MEDIA COMPOSER, IT'S THE AVID MEDIAFILES FOLDER.

WHEN WRITING FILES TO THE MANAGED MEDIA FILES LOCATION, WE'LL NEED TO SPECIFY THE RESOLUTION OF THE NEW FILES CREATED. WHEN LINKING TO A FILE, THE RESOLUTION IS ACTUALLY DETERMINED BY THE SOURCE FILE. THIS IS DIFFERENT TO LINKING TO MEDIA BECAUSE WHEN WE LINK TO MEDIA USING AMA, THE RESOLUTION OF THE FILE IS ACTUALLY SPECIFIED BY THE SOURCE FILE, SINCE NO NEW MEDIA IS BEING WRITTEN TO THE MANAGED MEDIA FILES LOCATION.

03 TAKING CONTROL OF MEDIA COMPOSER

Exploring site, project, and user settings

For those following along, I am back in the catalyst_5994 project. We know by this stage that when we want to adjust settings in Media Composer the best place to start is in the project window itself, under the Settings tab. Now in Final Cut Pro, there are three main types of settings: Audio-Video settings, System settings and user preferences, all available under the FCP menu. Here in Media Composer, I am going to expand out my project window a little bit here, so we can see more clearly that are also three types of settings. There are User settings, Project settings and Site settings.

If I scroll up the project window, you can see that in some cases there are more than one option for a setting, and these may even be labeled individually like so in the central column here. If I scroll up a bit further, you can see there a lot of different Export settings. If we want to filter this list, we can actually click at the top here and filter the list by looking at only Export settings, for example, or maybe only Import settings or All settings.

FIRST OFF, PROJECT SETTINGS ARE SPECIFIC TO THE ACTUAL PROJECT THAT YOU ARE WORKING ON. CHANGING THESE WON'T AFFECT OTHER PROJECTS YOU MAY CREATE OR OPEN. The Project settings are also the same, regardless of which user is selected, and indeed which Media Composer station the project is currently loaded on to. Some examples of Project settings are Audio Project. Let's double-click and go in there. Here on the Main tab, we can set up fundamentals, like Sample Rate, which could be set to either 48, 44.1, or 32.

If you have external hardware connected to your system, you can also take this up to 96 kHz. And then we have Sample Bit Depth, either 16 or 24. ON THE INPUT TAB, WE CAN ADJUST THE INPUT SOURCE. AGAIN, SINCE I AM ON A SOFTWARE-ONLY SYSTEM, WE CAN ONLY AFFECT THE INPUTS WHICH ARE DIRECTLY BUILT INTO THE MACHINE THAT I AM ON, OR AFFECT FIREWIRE SIGNALS. On the Output tab, I have got the choice of going out Mono or Stereo. If I had additional hardware connected, I could also choose to go out direct.

On the Hardware tab, we could also set the sync for any external hardware or choose Internal Reference. On Effects, we can actually come in here and bypass all of the effects that we may have added to our audio tracks and clips in the timeline-- let's say, for example, if we wanted to do a clean layoff for somebody else to go ahead and do an audio mix on a different system. Some of these same controls could be found in FCP under the FCP menu, User Preferences and Audio Outputs. Others can be found in the Audio-Video Settings, under Sequence Presets.

IF WE MOVE DOWN THE LIST TO THE GENERAL SETTINGS AND BRING THOSE UP, WE WILL SEE THAT WE WENT HERE EARLIER TO TALK ABOUT SETTING THE DEFAULT START TIME CODE FOR ANY SEQUENCES THAT WE CREATE.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF A PROJECT SETTING IS MEDIA CREATION, WHICH WE ALSO COVERED. THAT'S WHY IT'S SO IMPORTANT THAT WHEN YOU CREATE A NEW PROJECT, YOU IMMEDIATELY COME INTO THE MEDIA CREATION SETTINGS AND MAKE THEM CORRECT FOR THAT SPECIFIC PROJECT THAT YOU ARE WORKING ON.

And then the next category is Site settings. SITE SETTINGS ARE SYSTEM BASED AND SO REMAIN SET, REGARDLESS OF WHICH USER OR PROJECT IS ACTIVE ON A PARTICULAR SYSTEM. Site Settings are really only a minority of the settings, and are mostly to do with things like machine control and talking to servers. Some examples of Site settings are Deck Configuration, for example. If I go up to the Ds and bring up Deck Configuration, this is where I would specify the make and model of machine that I'm using to capture from, or lay off to.

Another example of Site settings would be Interplay Server. And as you can see, in cases without the necessary components or infrastructure, these settings remain either grayed out, or somewhat meaningless.

So let's move on to third category, which is User settings. AN EXAMPLE OF USER SETTINGS MIGHT BE RENDER, for example. Under the Render Settings, we can set the quality of Effect Rendering to High, Medium, or Low and the same for Time Warps versus Motion Effects. This same control in FCP is found under the FCP menu, User Preferences, Render Control tab.

ANOTHER EXAMPLE IS GRID. THIS ALLOWS US TO CONTROL THE ONSCREEN GRID DISPLAY FOR THINGS LIKE SAFE ACTION, SAFE TITLE, AND HERE WE CAN ALSO SELECT VARIOUS SCALE MODES.

Another User Setting would be COMPOSER. And we visited this setting before now when we set the behavior for the Fast Forward and Rewind buttons in our interface, but we also have settings here for things like MultiCam behavior, Editing behavior, and Window behavior. And it's here that I would switch on and off this second row of buttons underneath both of the viewers.

And of course, we also have the Bin settings. The Bin settings is where we set up our Super Bin and also the Auto-Save Intervals that we looked at in the last chapter.

Now, I want to show you a really easy way to manage these settings. First, we will switch back to display just the Export settings. As you can see, there are a number of really handy pre-made settings here, like settings to make outputs for Pro Tools, setting material out to Sorenson Squeeze, or to a QuickTime movie, or even a QuickTime Reference.

If we open up the QuickTime Reference settings by double-clicking on it, we have got all of the different parameters laid out here for us. Let's say I wanted to create an RGB version of these settings. So the way to do that would be to come over here to the QuickTime Reference Setting, then use Command+D to duplicate the setting. Give this a name that's meaningful RGB, and now go into those settings, switch, and that should be good. So that's one way to manage our settings directly within the Settings tab of the Media Composer project window. Now, I am going to right-click at the top, choose to see All Settings again, so I can see everything back in context.

Before we wrap up the topic, there is another aspect to the relationship between Site settings and the other two settings categories that you want to be able to use. Come to the Special menu and open up the Site Settings window. Now we can drag either User or Project settings that we want to keep into the Site Setting window. By doing this, we make these settings, these Project and User settings, part of the Site settings on this particular machine.

In turn, that means if you're running a facility, you can more easily manage workflow across multiple editors and multiple machines because you can make items such as Capture Resolution, Default Start Time Code, Bin, and Timeline views common across all users and projects. Having said that, I use this feature very much like a project template, even when working by myself. So, in conclusion, just like in FCP, there are three main categories of settings inside of Avid Media Composer: User settings, Project settings, and site Settings.

Customizing user settings and keyboard layout

Command+3, Command+3, Command+3. I said it three times because I want you to remember Command+3. This is the keystroke that brings up the Command palette in Media Composer, and once we have the Command palette open, there are three ways to use it--and it's very similar to the button list found under the Tools menu in FCP. First though, let's go to the 03_02 subfolder. Inside there we have bin called customizing_MC. A single click will open that up. Now load one of the GOPRO clips into the Source viewer and double-click on the sequence called roadtrip_stress_test.

Now, I am going to use that keyboard shortcut, Command+3, and there we have the Command palette. Before we start having fun with this, let me draw your attention to the bottom panel here. As I said, there are three ways to use the Command palette, Button to Button Reassignment, Menu to Button Reassignment, and Active Palette. Let's start with Active Palette. This makes the entire Command palette the hugest and most comprehensive toolbar you've ever seen.

Here on the Move tab, we can now use the buttons to manipulate the software, step forwards or backwards or single frame at time, or ten frames at a time, go to start, go to end, fast-forward, and rewind. On the Play tab, there is a tool over here called Video Quality menu that we haven't discussed yet. You'll find it also mirrored down here at the bottom of the timeline area. The Video Quality menu allows us to playback material at different levels of quality.

You can see that if I toggle the Video Quality menu here in the Command palette, it's also toggling at the bottom of the Timeline there too. You can see that the Video Quality menu has three modes: yellow, half yellow/ half green, and full green. On systems that have hardware attached, you may also have a full-green 10-bit mode as well. Now cycling through these doesn't of course affect the actual quality of my video. What it does is it allows Media Composer to scale down the resolution if I'm having a tough time playing back multiple layers of real-time effects.

Let me show you what I mean. Down here in the timeline if I bring this back and I play through this stack of real-time effects, we will probably see some frames drop as we go through. Yeah, there you go. It's stuttering. It's finding hard to play back full quality through that stack of effects. And when I stop, notice that I get these marks down in the timeline here, indicating that the system is dropping frames and unable to playback things smoothly. Of course, I could render these effects and they would play back just fine, but what if I'm in an iterative stage of effects creation, I am going in, tweaking, coming back out, reviewing, going back in, tweaking.

In that case, rendering effects is just going to fill up my media drive too quickly. What I can do instead is come to the Video Quality menu and drop it down to yellow mode, which takes the resolution down to a 16th of its normal size. Now, you can see the system has absolutely no problem playing back all of the effects in real time. I can make sure that everything is working correctly in terms of timing and pacing, and then I can render the effects, and you can see there's no marking now down in the timeline indicating any stress on the system.

I could try and take that up to maybe half yellow/half green mode, which is quarter res instead. I actually work like this most of the time. It's done a pretty good job. It might be dropping a frame here or there, but I actually like this. This is a good midrange. It's not as low res as yellow and it also gives me some of the flexibility of being able to play back more streams in real time. So that was an example of using the Command palette as the active palette. They let's look at Button to Button Reassignment.

Here under my Source viewer is the button for Match Frame. If I go to the Other tab, you can see that I've also got a button for Reverse Match Frame. If I wanted to add it to the interface here, now that I am in Button to Button Reassignment, all I need to do is drag it down and drop it in a blank space. Now, I have Match Frame and I have Reverse Match Frame, and if I wanted to remove a button, I could take the blank button and wipe over the top of whatever I like in my interface to get rid of it.

And then there's the ability for menu-to-button reassignment. In this particular case, what you must do is first come to the button that you want to reassign in your interface. I am going to click on this far-left button at the top of the timeline window here. Now, I am going to go up to the toolset menu and choose Source/Record Editing, and you could see there is no icon for Source/Record Editing, so the abbreviation is put on the button instead, SE. Let's do that again. Let's highlight a button, go to the Toolset menu, and let's keep mapping these so we have our toolsets mapped to the buttons in the top corner of our timeline.

Now I am going to choose Effects Editing, and then finally, I am going to choose Color Correction. So, we have looked at Active palette, Button to Button Reassignment, and Menu to Button Reassignment. There is another way to use the Command palette though, and that's to adjust our keyboard settings. So from the Settings menu, I am going to move the Command palette down here for a moment, I am going to pull up our Keyboard settings. Double-click to open that up, and now you can see that I can actually map buttons from the Command palette directly to the keyboard itself.

Of course I'd need to be in Button to Button mode to do that. What I am going to do is I am going to highlight the keyboard, hold down the Shift, and you can see that on the shifted version of my keyboard buttons, 1 through 4 are blank. What I am going to do this time is I am actually going to map buttons for my interface here directly to the buttons on my keyboard. I am holding down Shift, so this option will only be available when I am shifted, and there we go. So, now I will be able to very quickly access my toolsets, either from buttons in the interface or from the shifted version of my keyboard.

Let's go ahead and close the Keyboard settings. Let's go ahead and close the Command palette and back to the Bins tab. So as you can see, Media Composer is highly customizable. You can set it up to work how you like, or even set up special settings for certain projects. Incidentally, if you're interested, you might look around on the web, there are many people who have created FCP keyboards to map to an Avid Media Composer, and vice versa. They are fun to try out, but I heartily recommend creating your own settings from scratch when you get the hang of it.

Using toolsets and workspaces

Earlier we had some limited exposure to the toolsets. Here we will look at them in greater detail. I will also introduce you to workspaces. Before we get into workspaces and toolsets though, I want to point out that one of the most primary settings that affects the entire Media Composer interface is the resolution that your system is set to display, and of course, the number of monitors you have. In this case, I'm working on a single-monitor system, and the display is deliberately set to a very low monitor resolution so that you can clearly see all of the buttons and details.

For editing however, this wouldn't work for me. I'd need to set the monitor resolution higher, so that I see more picture area. Of course, not everybody has the luxury of two-monitor setups, so you can certainly improve the user experience by taking the display to a maximum comfortable resolution where you'll get more UI bang for your buck. Plus, on laptops and other single- monitor systems, you know that you can use the Super Bin to help keep things as efficient as possible. In FCP, through the Windows menu, we can use the Arrange submenu to access various application layouts for common tasks, such as editing, audio mixing, or color correction.

Most, if not all, of the same functionality which you're used to in FCP, is here in Media Composer too. You've seen that from the Toolsets menu, I can choose the different layouts. Of course, now that we have our buttons mapped, I can just simply click here to access Audio Editing, to access Effects Editing, to access the Color Correction Layout, or return to Source/ Record Editing, which is the equivalent of the standard arrangement in Final Cut Pro. Let's return to Audio Editing for a moment. When I'm selected on a workspace, I can actually start to make changes to my interface and have those update inside of the toolset itself.

For example, maybe since this is my audio mixing layout, I'd like to collapse my Composer window into a single monitor like so, so I can concentrate on what I'm mixing. Now that I've done that, I've ended up with a little bit more real estate here. Now that I've done that, let's go up to the Toolset menu and Save Current. Now whenever I switch away and then come back to Effects Editing, you can see that that change in the size and shape of the window has been recorded. But this functionality doesn't just extend to the size and the shape of the windows, it also extends to the tools that are available as well.

Let's go up to the Tools menu, and let's add the Audio EQ window to our display as well. Let's reposition that up here. So now I've got my Audio Mixer window, my Audio tool, and my Audio EQ tool as part of this toolset, as long as I go back to the Toolset menu and Save Current. You might like to spend some time now going through the various different toolsets, arranging them how you like to work, and for the size and shape of your particular display. One thing that I really like about the way that Final Cut Pro handles layouts is that you can import and export custom window layouts with a customized name.

As you can see here, Media Composer, under the Toolset menu, has only given us access to these predefined and pre-named toolsets. So what to do if I want to create a custom toolset? Luckily, inside of Media Composer, we also have another set of layout-management tools. If we come here to the Settings menu and we scroll all the way down to the bottom, to Workspace, we have something else that we can use. If I activate Workspace, what's happened now is we're no longer using the toolsets.

We're actually working with this particular setting called Workspace. Let's move over the Composer window like so. Let's maximize it as big as we can get it in this particular resolution. There we go. I'd like to also make my Timeline a bit deeper, so let's do that. If I double-click on the workspace itself, you've got a choice of Continually Update This Workspace or Manually Update This Workspace. I'm going to choose Manually Update The Workspace and Save Workspace Now.

If I switch back to Source/Record Editing or Audio Editing or Effects Editing or Color Correction, they're all still there the way they were. But if I go back to my Workspace setting, you can see that that also has now been saved as a layout. The great thing about this is that as we know from managing settings earlier in the chapter, we can highlight a setting and we can duplicate a setting, and then we can give that setting a custom name. For example, I could come here and I could type in 'settings', and that could become a new workspace.

Let's activate it, and let's choose what we'd like to see. In this particular case for settings, I'd like to shrink down my Composer window like so, And then I'm going to bring up the Command palette and put that underneath. And now I'm going to double-click on the Workspace Settings and Save the Workspace Now. If I want to manipulate settings in the future, I'm just going to come back to my Settings workspace, open it up, and my Command palette will be there ready to go.

While we're on the Command palette, let's go here to the More tab. Over here on the More tab, you can see that I've got buttons which represent eight different workspaces. This means that with eight different workspaces and my toolsets, I can create up to 14 different layouts for my Media Composer application. One thing to bear in mind here is that if we map buttons called W1, W2, W3 to our interface, or our keyboard, we need to be able to know which one number one is over here.

The way to do that is to actually come here and give our settings a number before the name. So if I call that one 01 settings and maybe this one is 02editing, now because of the order in which they appear here in the Settings tab, that will mean that we now know that W1 maps to settings and W2 maps to editing. And of course, I could go ahead and map these to my keyboard, alongside my toolsets. Okay, I'm going to go back to Source/ Record Editing, make sure I'm back on the Bins tab, and in the next video, we'll look at customizing the contents of both the Timeline window and the Bin window.

Customizing the Bin and Timeline views

So far, we've been looking at ways to manage the main windows in the Media Composer environment. Now let's dive in a little bit more and look at how to actually customize the Timeline view and also the Bin view. I have a Bin called example_clips_sequences. Single-click on that. It opens up in the SuperBin. Let's load up the sequence and one of our clips here, so that we've got some material for context as we look through the interface. So the first thing we're going to look at is the Bin. At the moment, I'm on the Brief tab.

We've also looked at Frame view and Script view in the course so far. Let's go to Text view. Here what I'd like to point out is that we can have multiple different columns of textual data. From the bottom of the Bin, I can use this dropdown here to access some of the pre-made layouts-- for example, for Capture and for Format. And in many cases I'm now going to be able to see all of the columns, so what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to take my Bin and drag it out, so I can see more detail of the columns that are available.

Let's go to Media Tool. You can see here I can see all sorts of stuff from the creation date, the duration of the clip, Mark IN, Mark OUT, even the video type. If I wanted to customize this display, I could take the Video column and drag it back, so now it's next to the Name column. Notice at that point the name down here becomes italicized, telling us that it needs to be saved if we want to keep this. So I could click down, Save As, and now give it a name.

Let's call it logging. I could also add a custom column if I wanted to. In this space, I could type in the word quality. And now maybe as I go through my clips in my Bin, I could assign a quality symbol--maybe an asterisk: one for good, two for even better, three for outstanding, and so on. Again, I would need to come down here and save my new setting if I wanted to keep that.

I'll call this logging_quality. So that's one way to start to customize the contents of your Bin. Over here in the Timeline view, I could do a similar thing. At the moment, I have a setting called Untitled, so what I'm going to do is start to modify this and then give it a meaningful name. The first thing I'd like to do is turn off my audio tracks--whichever tracks are active are going to be affected. Now what I'd like to do is take those video tracks there and minimize them as much as possible, because I'm going to create a setting for audio editing.

To do that, I'm going to hold down the Command key and use the K key to collapse my video tracks. Now that I've done that, I'm going to swipe over them all like so and now use Command+L to make my audio tracks bigger. In addition, I'm going to come down here to the Timeline Fast menu, go to Audio Data, and choose Waveform. Now if I want to save that, come back down to the dropdown, Save As, and I'm going to call this Audio Editing.

Now perhaps I'd like to create a setting for color correction. Let's collapse down the audio tracks this time. Command+K for collapse, reverse my selection again, and Command+L to make my video tracks larger. Let's go ahead and now Save As, Color Correction. So now if I need to move between different settings, I can come down here and switch between them very easily indeed.

However, I'd like to show you one more little bit of functionality that'll make your life a lot easier. To take this to the next level, what I'm going to do is I'm going to come to my Toolset menu and I'm going to go to Color Correction, and then I'm going to go back into the Toolset menu and I'm going to say Link Current To, and I can link to any named settings. There we go. Let's type it in, Color Correction.

So now I can go ahead and link this toolset to a named setting that I've already created. If there are any settings that are called Color Correction for the timeline, Media Composer will now bring these up when I select this toolset. Click OK. Now, I'm going to go to Audio Editing, and I'm going to go the Toolset menu again and say Link Current To, choose to Link to Named Settings, and type in Audio Editing.

Now that that's done, what's going to happen if I move back to Color Correction, watch what happens to the timeline. The timeline now switches to the Color Correction preset. And if I switch back to Audio Editing, the timeline follows and switches to the Audio Editing preset. So that's how to link the customized Timeline view to your toolset in Media Composer.

Creating a custom tool palette

As we finish up our chapter on settings, I'd like to show you a tip that can be very useful as you're learning Media Composer. It's absolutely optional, so feel free to just watch and disregard what I'm saying if you like, but I heartily recommend using this approach if you're going to start to learn all the icons and what they mean in Media Composer and get comfortable using them. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure that I'm in Source/Record Editing mode. Now I'm going to resize my Timeline window a little bit. Notice that I don't want to obscure the Keyframe button there at the bottom of the window, so I'm going to drop it just about there--and we can get a little bit more space out.

Now I'm going to move the Timeline window down a little bit. That's good. We're going to go to the Fast menu at the bottom of the Composer window, click and hold down and drag out the Tool palette that's inside. Reposition the Tool palette a little bit and then drag it out until we get a couple of strips of Tool buttons that we can use to now map many of the commands that we're going to be looking at and using throughout the rest of this course. We're going to bring up the Command palette.

Let's put the Command palette down near our Tool palette there, and we can more easily map the buttons that we need from the Command palette to the Tool palette. Make sure that you're in Button to Button Reassignment. So, here we go! I'm going to be darting around the different palettes and creating a custom tool palette to help us with our learning. The first place I'd like to go is the Other tab. From here I'd like to map Toggle Source/Record mode. I'm just going to drag and drop this over the top of any existing icons that happen to be on the Tool palette.

Toggle Source/Record in timeline. This button is toggling between the Source and Record viewers, and this button here is toggling the view in the timeline from either the Record viewer to the Source viewer. From the same tab, I'd also like to map Match Frame and Reverse Match Frame, Find Bin and Find Frame. Now from the Move tab, Step Forwards and Backwards one field at a time, and also Go to Previous and Go to Next Locator.

From the Play tab, Play Loop, Play IN to OUT, Edit Review, and Play to OUT. Then from the Edit tab, Segment Mode Overwrite, Segment Mode Splice-in, Add Edit, Fit to Fill, Replace Edit, Overwrite Edit, Splice Edit, Lift, and Extract.

From the Smart Tools tab, I'm going to add the Smart Tool Toggle and the Link Selection Toggle. Back on the Edit tab, I'm going to add Top and Tail. Then I'm going to move to the Trim tab. I'm going to add the Extend button, Slip Left, Slip Right, Trim A Side, Trim B Side, and Trim A and B sides.

Then I'm going to return to the Smart Tool tab and I'm going to add Overwrite Trim and Ripple Trim. Now, I'm going to go to the Effects tab. I'm going to add Add Keyframe, Quick Transition, Render Effect, and Remove Effect. I'm also going to add the Grid Tool and the Title Tool. Now back on the Other tab, I'd like to add Transition Corner Display.

From the More tab, I'm going to add the Red, Yellow, Green, and Pink Locators. And now from the Multi-Cam tab, I'm going to add Quad Split, Nine Split, Swap Camera Bank, Previous in Group, and Next in Group. Now, I want to close the Command palette, go back to my Toolset menu and Save Current. The next time I come back to Source/Record Editing mode, my Tool palette will be there with all of the tools that we're going to be using throughout the rest of the course.

04 LINKING, IMPORTING AND MANAGING MEDIA

Linking to multimedia files using Avid Media Access (AMA)

In Final Cut Pro, when we import a media asset, a reference to the asset is placed in the project or bin, and is linked to the original media file wherever that file may be located. It could be on the desktop, on a network resource, on a card, or on a drive. This is a really excellent mechanism for short, turnaround projects since there is no time spent on copying or transcoding the file and it's available for immediate playback, editing, and output. The equivalent mechanism in Avid is known as AMA, Avid Media Access.

AMA allows Media Composer to instantly link to media from popular file-based cameras, as well as a subset of current popular multimedia files. When we link like this, the resolution of the media is determined by the original file, so there's no need to set a resolution. However, before starting any media operation, it's always a good idea to go ahead and check the status of your Format tab. Make sure that your project is either in 1080, 720, or SD. To use Avid Media Access, make sure you go to avid.com/ama and download the appropriate AMA plug-ins for your camera or workflow.

With linking to original media files like this, the pro is that I have instant access to my media. The con is since the media may be in a codec that's not optimized for editing, such as long GOP, performance with different file types can vary greatly, from quite snappy and easy to edit with to very heavy and leaden. Let's load up some media from two popular file-based cameras. First off, I am going to come down here to my bin. As you can see in the catalyst_5994 project and the AMA bin is open and active.

So with the bin active, I am going to go up to my File menu, and now I am going to choose LINK TO AMA VOLUME. The reason for this is that when popular file-based cameras produce their media, they produce it in a card structure and in that case, we want to use the AMA Volume command. Let's go ahead to our Media Drive, to the catalyst_CONTAINER, and to our source camera material, and then inside the 23976 folder, I have a P2 card called P2_hummingbirds_01.

Since this is a full P2 card structure here, I can select the parent folder. If there was more than one card, then I would select the folder that contains all the cards. Now I'll go ahead and choose, and we can see instantly, this yellow clip popped up in the bin. That's my AMA-linked P2 media there. Double-click and we can play back. (video playing) Let's do another example. With the bin active, let's return to the File menu.

We are going to Link to AMA Volume, because we are going to be looking at a card structure. This time what I would like to do is back up to my source camera folder, and I am going to be looking in the 5994 source folder this time. I am going to choose 7D_swingdance. Inside here, I have the full card structure for a Canon 7D. I am going to select the parent folder again and choose. The clip is loaded into my bin. It's highlighted bright yellow, and that's to distinguish AMA-linked clips from those clips which are in the Managed Media folder.

Again, we can load the clip up and play back. (video playing) (inaudible speech) Now, obviously, we are using a full copy of the entire camera card contents that's been transferred to the catalyst container on our media drive. We could do the same thing if we had the actual cards mounted on our system. Once we bring material like this into the bin--let me just go ahead and make the bin a little bit bigger here-- you can see that there is all sorts of metadata that comes in alongside that, such as the original file path, the manufacturer, the serial number of the camera, the model name of the camera, et cetera, et cetera.

Another way to quickly gain access to this information will be to right-click on the clip in the bin and say Get Info, and you can see there, we get a panel which gives us all of that information in a quick and easy manageable box.

Okay, HERE IS A DIFFERENT EXAMPLE, THIS TIME WITH MEDIA FROM A GOPRO CAMERA, which presents the contents more like regular multimedia files. In other words, there is no special card structure supporting these files. And when I say multimedia file I mean that that file could have come from a camera, as in this case, but it may also have been output from another piece of software, such as After Effects or even Final Cut Pro.

With the bin active, I am going to go up to the File menu and this time I am going to CHOOSE LINK TO AMA FILE(S). THIS IS BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HAVE A CARD STRUCTURE LIKE THE VOLUMES THAT WE MOUNT. Instead, we are just going to be linking to AMA files. Click there. This time I'm looking into the catalyst_SRC_5994 and inside there, we have GPR_firedance_01. Now I could select an individual file if I wanted to, or all of them. Let's choose all of them and open.

All into the bin there, and highlight one of them, load it into the Source viewer, (video playing) and there it is, ready to play back, mark up, and begin editing with.

So now, we have seen AMA in action. Let's get into more specifics on the list of media types that you can link to using AMA. First, there is the MXF AMA plug-in. This provides direct access to media from a range of devices for manufacturers such as Canon, Omneon, Panasonic, and Sony.

THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT AMA PLUG-IN, AND IT'S REQUIRED FOR ACCESSING MEDIA FROM MANY OF THE POPULAR CAMERAS AND MEDIA FILE TYPES OUT THERE TODAY. Note that there are two main forms of MXF: Op-Atom and Op1a. Media Composer can AMA to both types, but under the hood, Media Composer is using MXF Op-Atom. This is because Op-Atom allows for separate video and audio tracks, whereas Op1a requires the entire media object to be placed within a single container.

OP-ATOM IS THEREFORE VERY USEFUL IN POST-PRODUCTION SINCE AUDIO AND VIDEO FILES OFTEN NEED TO GO TO DIFFERENT PLACES, AND THROUGH DIFFERENT PROCESSES.

Then there is the QuickTime AMA plug-in. This provides direct access to QuickTime media using the animation codec, the H264 codec, the Apple ProRes codec, or Avid codecs. The QuickTime AMA plug-in supports media credit by devices such as the AJA Ki Pro, Canon EOS 5D and 7D, the Flip Video HD camera, and so on.

Then we have the Canon XF AMA plug-in, providing direct access to media from Canon's XF300 and 305 file-based cameras. The GFCAM AMA plug-in provides direct access to media from Ikegami's HDS-V10 file-based camera and accessories. The P2 AMA plug-in provides direct access to media from Panasonic's P2 file-based cameras and accessories, both AVC-Intra and DVCPRO HD.

The RED plug-in provides access to media from RED file-based cameras. RED media is stored on RED flash or a RED drive or else delivered on some other more generic portable media. You can link to specific RD3 files on the volume or link to the entire volume. Then we have the XDCAM, XDCAM EX AMA plug-in, and this provides direct access to media from a range of Sony sources. First, it provides access to media from XDCAM HD cameras.

XDCAM HD is the optical version of XDCAM recording to disk. It also provides access to media from Sony's XDCAM EX cameras and JVC cameras running in the EX mode. Plus, there is also support for Sony's HDCAM SR Lite media in MXF format, both at 422 and 444 quality. So now we've seen how to use AMA and we've covered what camera formats and file types are currently compatible with AMA architecture. THE NEXT ASPECT OF THE WORKFLOW THAT WE NEED TO LOOK AT ARE THE AMA SETTINGS.

Now, ideally we would have taken care of our settings before we started AMA into media, but first, we really needed to cover how to AMA to stuff and what sort of files could be AMAed to. Now let's GO TO THE PROJECT WINDOW AND TO THE SETTINGS TAB, and the very first setting in the list here is AMA. So let's bring up the AMA Settings. Now the first tab I would like you to go to is the Volume Mounting tab and here, this is the primary setting to AMA. If this isn't on then AMA is not enabled on your system.

Underneath that we have the option for When mounting previously mounted volumes, do not check for modifications to the drive. Now, this is really only going to affect drives that were previously mounted on your system and that you had to remount on the system while you were in the Media Composer application. If the switch is off, which is the default, then the drive will simply mount up and the previously recognized clips will be displayed. If the switch is on then the drive will be rescanned and then any files will re-link and any new file will also be added.

SO IT'S SIMPLY AN EFFICIENCY THING. IF NOTHING HAS CHANGED, LEAVE THIS OFF AND THE CLIPS WILL LINK TO THEIR SOURCE FILES MORE QUICKLY. I should also note that every time you re-launch Media Composer, a full scan takes place anyway. So this efficiency only matters if you're mounting and un-mounting devices during your editing session. Then the final item on this tab is a link to the Avid web resource, where you can check for additional AMA plug-in files that you may need to address certain types of media on your system. AMA is designed this way because manufacturers can quickly credit new plug-in that you can download and add to the AMA library when new cameras and formats come onto the market.

After downloading and installing the plug-in file and then re-launching the software, Media Composer will be able to instantly link to new camera formats without any need to update the main Media Composer software. So before you begin a new project, it's always a good idea to check to see if you have all the latest AMA plug-ins on your system. I'll show you how to do that in just a moment.

But for now, let's go to the NEXT TAB, WHICH IS QUALITY. This is a nice and simple way for us to determine what we want to do if there are more than one resolution of media on the disk, card, or on the drive supplied.

THE COMMON USAGE OF THIS FEATURE IS THAT WITH THOSE CAMERAS THAT DO SHOOT PROXY IMAGES, THEN THE PROXY MEDIA CAN BE INGESTED FIRST BY CHOOSING THE MOST COMPRESSED. AND THEN LATER, ONCE MOST OF THE EDITING IS DONE, THE EDITOR CAN RE-LINK TO THE HIGHER-QUALITY VERSION OF THE MEDIA, THUS SAVING A GREAT DEAL OF DISK SPACE AND PROCESSING POWER DURING THE OFFLINE PROCESS. Audio should always be set to the Highest Quality. Taking a temporary hit on picture quality during the offline saves a lot of disk space, but not so much with audio-- best to just have the full quality sound to start with.

THEN FINALLY, THE BINS TAB. THIS IS DESCRIBING THE BEHAVIOR WHEN LINKING. Here at the top, we can choose the active bin, which is what we've been using so far. OR YOU CAN CHOOSE TO CREATE A NEW BIN FOR THE IMPORT. IF WE ARE CREATING A NEW BIN THEN WE WILL NEED TO KNOW HOW TO NAME THE BIN BY DEFAULT. Do we use the standard Media Composer bin-naming convention or base the bin on the volume name or specify a bin name, and that's what these choices are about here.

THEN BELOW THAT, DO WE WANT TO DISPLAY THE HEADFRAME AS SPECIFIED BY THE CAMERA OR THE HEADFRAME SPECIFIED BY MEDIA COMPOSER? All right then, let's go ahead and accept those settings and go back to the Bins tab in the project window.

Earlier, I talked about checking which AMA codecs are currently installed on your machine. IF YOU ARE UNSURE WHICH AMA CODECS ARE CURRENTLY LOADED, YOU CAN FIND OUT BY USING A TOOL THAT WE HAVEN'T USED JUST YET. IT'S CALLED THE CONSOLE. From the Tools menu, let's select the Console. It's also Command+6 is the keyboard shortcut, and we get this box up here, like so. Now I'm going to type a command in the Command Entry box right here. AMA_ListPlug-ins and hit the Return key on your keyboard. The list of AMA plug-ins installed on your system are now displayed up here, including the version number. If you want to keep the information handy then the Console Fast menu allows us to save the information out as a text file. Okay, let's close the Console,

AND THE FINAL THING I WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT IS EVEN WITH THE CORRECT AMA PLUG-INS INSTALLED, THERE ARE ALSO MANUFACTURER'S DRIVERS THAT MAY NEED TO BE INSTALLED TOO, AS THESE ALLOW FOR FILE FORMATS OR CODECS OR DEVICES TO BE RECOGNIZED BY YOUR MEDIA COMPOSER SYSTEM.

For Panasonic, go to panasonic.com/business/provideo/support. For RED, go to red.com/support and for Sony, go to pro.sony.com/bbsc/ssr/micro-xdcam.

NOW TO BE CLEAR, AMA LINKING IS BOTH SIMILAR AND DISSIMILAR TO IMPORT IN FCP. It's similar in the sense that when we link to AMA media in Media Composer, we get a media access to the file and the resolution of the file is dependent on the source material, but AMA linking in Media Composer is dissimilar to import in FCP because AMA linking works with the main file-based cameras on the market. In FCP, that is dealt with using the login transfer functionality, not import.

Of course, the other alternative in Final Cut Pro will be to take the file and run it through a compressor to create an FCP-friendly file format and then import the new friendly file. As covered in Chapter 2, the most similar operation to this in Media Composer is called Import, in that a new version of the file is created before editing can begin.

SO IN SUMMARY, JUST LIKE IN FINAL CUT PRO, MEDIA COMPOSER CAN LINK DIRECTLY TO YOUR MEDIA ASSETS USING THE AMA PLUG-IN ARCHITECTURE.

BEFORE YOU BEGIN WORK WITH AMA-LINKABLE FILES, HOWEVER, YOU'LL WANT TO CHECK YOUR AMA SETTINGS AND ENSURE THAT YOU HAVE THE LATEST AMA PLUG-INS DOWNLOADED AND INSTALLED ON YOUR SYSTEM. UNLIKE IMPORT IN FINAL CUT PRO, AMA IN MEDIA COMPOSER IS USED TO ADDRESS MOST OF THE MAIN FILE-BASED CAMERA FORMATS ON THE MARKET TODAY.

Importing video, audio, and graphics

IN MEDIA COMPOSER, IF WE NEED TO WORK WITH MULTIMEDIA FILES THAT ARE NOT SUPPORTED FOR IMMEDIATE LINKING VIA AMA THEN WE WILL NEED TO INSTEAD IMPORT THE MEDIA. Examples of media types that we might want to import to Media Composer will be things like graphic files-- we can import a full variety, such as TIFF, JPEG, and layered Photoshop documents-- Audio--MP3, AIFF and WAV--HDV. Some HDV cameras shoot a file as well as to tape, producing M2T files, and then we have AVCHD, which produces MTS files, OMFI for audio sequences coming from an audio application. AAF, which reads complex sequences from various applications--it's really a modern version of an EDL. MXF, Media Composer can AMA-link to most MXF media, but there is also the option to import it too. And then there is Windows Media for Windows-based systems only, and QuickTime. Again, we have the choice to either AMA to H.264 animation ProRes and Avid Codecs, but we can also import those files as well.

SO REMEMBER, IN MEDIA COMPOSER IMPORT MEANS SOMETHING VERY DIFFERENT TO WHAT IT MEANS IN FCP. In Media Composer then, import refers to the process of reading from a source file and then either a) writing new native MXF copy to the managed media file location-- for example, we will not be importing sequential TIFF files into a combined MXF clip--or b) copying the essence of a file to the managed media file location whilst rewrapping. So this might be, for example, importing QuickTime to MXF. Now THE ADVANTAGE OF THIS IS that once I am editing, I will have a seamless experience. All the variables are minimized, I have the stability to accommodate a client- driven session, and processes like rendering or output will take a known amount of time. The disadvantage is that it's a frontloaded task where we have to spend time importing before editing can actually begin. Now, this is both similar and dissimilar to log and transfer in FCP. It's similar in the sense that when we import in Media Composer composer, we specify resolution for the new, or rewrapped, file, and when we log and transfer in FCP, we have the gear icon, which gives us access to the menu where we specify the resolution of the new version of the file that's created.

An import in Media Composer is also similar to log and transfer in FCP in that the process take some time depending on multiple factors, such as the density of the original codec in use, the frame size, the computing power, the speed of the drive, et cetera. On the other hand import in Media Composer is dissimilar to log and transfer in that there is no preview of the file inside of Media Composer, meaning there is way to mark in and out on your footage, and thus the entire file will need to be imported before any decisions can be made.

TO INITIATE AN IMPORT IN MEDIA COMPOSER, THE FIRST THING WE WANT TO PAY ATTENTION TO IS THE STATUS OF OUR FORMAT TAB. I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT WE ARE INDEED IMPORTING AT HD RESOLUTION AT 1080, IF THAT'S WHAT WE'RE WORKING AT, OR 720 OR SD. So since my source file is indeed at 1080, I am going to leave the Project Type set at 1080, like so. In the 04_02 folder,

I have got the Import Bin open, and I want to make sure that bin is active. Now I can't go to the File menu and import directly from here. It's just above the choices for AMA linking. Alternatively, another way that I prefer is to just right-click in the bin and go to the Import dialog. Back on the Media drive, inside the catalyst_CONTAINER folder is a MP4 directory. Click on that, and inside you will find a file called hummingbirds. Before we go ahead and bring that in, let's just check a couple of things. First off, what resolution are we bringing the file in at? In this particular case, I am going to choose XDCAM HD50Mbits per second, and then the other important choice is, where are we importing it to? At the moment, I am pointing at the Macintosh hard disk. That's not where I want my media to go. I want my media to go to the Media Drive, so let's make sure that is selected. Now, with the Resolution and the Destination selected and the source file ready to go, click Open.

Now the file's into my bin. I can double-click on the file and play it back. (video playing) One of the benefits of importing to a managed-media file location like this is that the original file could now be moved to archive or even deleted, but the Avid MXF version of that file will remain safe in the Avid Media files folder on the root of the Media Drive.

Deleting the original would only really make sense if the source file was never needed again, for example if you have already imported that clip at the highest Avid resolution required for finishing the project.

NOW LET'S GO TO THE IMPORT PROCESS AGAIN, BUT THIS TIME WITH SOME GRAPHIC FILES, and we will pay attention to some other important details of the process as it applies to images specifically. I am going to come to my target bin, right-click, and Import. This time, back on the Media Drive, inside catalyst source graphics.

Now the first thing I would like to talk about is out target drive. We mentioned in the previous example that we want to make sure that we are importing to the correct drive, but you are probably wondering why is it that the drive is specified, but there is no file path? And the reason for that is that Media Composer is going to import the material and automatically place it in the Avid MediaFiles folder on the root of the Media Drive. That way we don't need to specify the path, just the drive.

I am going to check my Resolution. This time I'm to bring the material in at XDCAM EX35Mbits per second, which is low resolution for graphics, but there is a good reason for that, which we'll cover a bit later. As we saw earlier in the course, we can actually predefine the media location and the resolutions using the media-creation settings. However, we always get a chance to override those settings here in the Import dialog. In Final Cut Pro, the best equivalent to the choice about resolution is to be found in Log and Transfer window, where you can set the resolution, for example Apple Intermediate Codec or a version of ProRes.

Items are added to the queue, and then the essence of the files is copied as it is rewrapped into an FCP-compatible file. The second detail of this process that I would like to call out is through the Options dialog. So click on Options, and let's look in detail at the import settings for images. The first choice is for media that's already the correct size for the current format. The second choice is for media that's very close to the correct size, but may need some cropping or padding for DV scanline differences.

The third choice is for any custom resolutions that we wish to preserve, and the fourth choice is for media that's incorrectly sized for the current format, in which case the system will resize it to fit the format raster. If you choose number one in error, you will most likely see a distorted version of your import. Here we are talking about the system adjusting for the difference between DV and standard NTSC. On the third option we might want to use this, for example, when importing an SD- sized image into an HD project.

This way the image is displayed as it was, without being blown up all the way to HD. And then the fourth option allows Media Composer to scour the image up or down to fit the currently selected format of the project. The image will maintain its aspect ratio though. So it may import with either black side bars or a letterbox, depending on where it's coming from and where it's going to. My advice would be for you to spend some time experimenting with this dialog and using two or three known files, until you have it down.

It won't take long. Since we are going to be importing a collection of different-sized files, I am going to choose option three, Do not resize small images. In the top-right area we have Field Ordering in File. We can use Ordered for current format, for example, Even or Low ordered for NTSC, Odd or Upper ordered for HD1080i. This is the default option. If the file is odd ordered and you are importing it into an even-ordered format, then choose the next option down, Odd (Upper Field First) ordered.

If the file is even ordered and you are importing it into an odd-ordered format, then choose the bottom choice. Even (Lower Field First) ordered. You might be importing NTSC into a 1080i HD project. We are going to leave it on Ordered for current format. Beneath the Field Ordering Options, we have the Alpha Channel support. If you are not expecting an alpha channel or if you wish to disregard the alpha channel information in the file we are importing, then choose Ignore.

Doing this will cause the file to import as audio/video only, and it will show up as a regular clip in your bin. The next choice up is Do not invert, black=opaque. Select this option to import the image using the existing alpha channel information. However, in Media Composer, you are going to want to top choice, Invert on Import, white=opaque. This reverses the black-and-white elements of the Alpha Channel, because Media Composer uses a white background, a black foreground, and a gray transparency blend between the two.

So we are going to leave it on Invert on import. Moving to the left, we have File Pixel to Video Mapping. If you are importing files that use RGB graphic levels, for example material that's been output from say Adobe Photoshop or After Effects, then choose Computer RGB (0-255). The RGB color values are re-mapped to either 601 color in SD or 709 color in HD. If you are doing a high-resolution import that use RGB graphic levels and also contain gradients or other sensitive information then choose the next option, Computer RGB, dither image colors.

Again, the RGB values are mapped in the same way, but with dithering to help those gradients and fine details out. And then finally, 601 SD or 709 HD, and this is of course is for importing files that use the video color space. We will leave that set to Computer RGB, and then finally, underneath here, we have Frame Import Duration. So, for importing a still frame, how long is it going to be? Let's change this from 3 seconds to 30 seconds, like so.

If I had sequential files, like a whole bunch of TIFF files or JPEG files that are numbered, then if I choose this option here, Media Composer will take all of the files in the correct order and make a single new clip out of them. So, we've settled our options. Let's click OK and begin the import process. I can select a single file or all of the files in one go and choose Open.

This process is very much like adding to the queue in FCP log and transfer. Each clip is being converted sequentially. Now that the files have imported, let's come over here to the Import bin and choose the Script view. Scrolling through now, we can see that some of the files have filled up the frame and others haven't. That's because we specified that the import would not resize smaller images. Here, for example, I have got 720 inside an HD frame size.

Here I have got 601 PAL inside a 1080 HD frame size, and so on, until of course we get to 1080 itself, a full raster, and will be filling the full 1920x1080 frame size. Notice also that each of these files has been created with a perfect circle in the center. This tells us straight away there was no distortion as we imported these files into Media Composer, and by way, the hole itself is where the transparency is. That's where the alpha channel is cutting out a hole that we could use to show other material through from a layer below.

It is important to note that Media Composer can also import multilayered Photoshop documents. When imported, they produce multiple files, depending on the number of layers in the document. Before we move, what I would like you to do is to move back to Text view in the bin, multi-select all of the graphics that we just imported, and let's just drag and drop them all into the timeline to create a very quick sequence. Let's give the sequence a name. Let's call it GRAPHICS. Save All, and we will return to this sequence later on.

Okay, so we have looked at importing video, we've looked at importing graphics. To finish up this section, let's look at importing audio. From the bin, I am going to right-click, choose Import, from the Media Drive, from the catalyst_ CONTAINER, to catalyst_SRC_Music. Inside the giantbluemusic folder are two files. We already have this one in our system, so let's chose the other one there, Cyclodrone. I am going to want to check to make absolutely sure that I'm importing to the right location.

We are going to the Options, but this time to the Audio tab. The first choice here converts source sample rate to project sample rate. This is going to make sure that everything coming in is going to conform to the 48 kHz or the 96 kHz that we've set up ahead of time. Same here for converting the source sample bit depth. Now this is a cool option. I really like this. If we have some material that we know is all going to come in fairly hot, like a CD for example, or some other audio files that have very high audio levels, we can specify to bring all of those types of files in at a reduced level.

We can also center pan monophonic clips and auto detect groups of monophonic broadcast wave files. Up in the top right-hand corner, we have Multichannel Audio. If we click Edit here, we can actually bring the first two channels together, the second two channels together, and so on and so forth. I am going to leave mine separated, so it will come in as dual mono tracks. Click OK. With everything set, let's choose OK, and open the file. It's written to Avid Media file folder, and here it is now in the bin, ready for playback.

Okay, so there we go. We have imported video, audio, and graphics now to the managed-media location, the Avid Media files on the root of our Media Drive.

Deleting clips and using the Media tool

After encouraging you to create a bunch of HD media, it would be remiss of me if I would were not also to cover how to delete media. So let's go back to the graphics we imported at XDcam 35 Megabits per second into import bin earlier. Select just the graphics themselves, not the sequence. Hit the Delete key on your keyboard. Now you've got two choices. Do you want to delete the master clips themselves, which are the objects in the bin, or do we want to delete the media files associated with them? These are the media files that take up most of the space and are stored on the Media Drive.

That's actually what I want to do. I want to delete just the media associated with them. Click OK. Confirm. Now the media has gone. If I take one of these clips here from the bin, and load it into the Source viewer, you can see it's displaying Media Offline, and the sequence that we made from those clips is also offline. Now, if I were to also go ahead and repeat the Delete command with those clips, you can see now I only have a single choice. The media is already gone, so the only choice left would be to delete the actual clips, the master clips, out of the bin.

I don't want you to do this. I just want you to know that if we did go ahead and do this then there would be no record of those clips left anymore, unless of course I wanted to go back to the attic and dig out our archived copies. Okay, so leave them alone for now because we are going to come back and use them a bit later when we look at offline-to-online workflows. So that's basic deletion. There is nothing much more to it.

However, I want to show you a different method for deleting, using what's called the Media tool. Up to the Tools menu and choose the Media tool. Now the first display is asking us what we would like to interrogate. In this particular case, we are using the Media Drive, but I could multi-select across multiple drives if I needed to search across multiple drives. And then on this side, it's asking me do I want to look for media that's only associated with the current project, or do I want to look across multiple projects? With just the Media Drive selected, and the catalyst_5994 project selected and just Master Clip selected down here, choose OK.

Now the Media tool is populated into this window. It looks very, very much like a bin; however, don't make the mistake of thinking it as a bin. First off, it's not represented here in the project window. It's just a snapshot of what current media files exist on your storage. The Media tool is designed to manage media only within the Avid Media Files folder on the root of your media drives. That means AMA-linked media is not seen by the Media tool and thus AMA media has to be managed through different tools, such as Link to AMA files and the Unmount command.

Here we're looking at the managed media files, and we have a lot more control than with the standard Deletion dialog. Let's browse down. I'm looking for the hummingbirds clip that we imported earlier. We could look by creation date, but since there is not very much media in this project, I think we can find it by eye. There it is. With the clip selected, if I now choose Delete from the keyboard, notice that the Delete dialog we get is considerably more complete. I can selectively choose to delete the video, just the audio, depending on what I need to do with the file.

In this particular case, I am going to delete all three of the tracks. Choose OK, confirm, and now the clip is gone. It disappears from the Media tool, but if I needed to keep a clip reference in my bin, I could simply mark the entire clip and then click here to try to subclip and bring it back into my bin, and now I have an offline representation of the master clip in my bin here. So as you can see, you can use the Media tool to selectively remove tracks. So if you accidentally captured audio with picture, or vice versa, then you could strip out the media that you didn't need on a clip after the fact.

So now we've seen how to get material into the system and we've also seen how to purge material from the system as well. In the next video, we'll start to look at some other aspects of media management.

Consolidating

Knowing how to get clips into your project and how to delete media is only one part of the skillset that you'll need to master in order to manage your media properly. So here we are going to look at how to accomplish various different media- management tasks that are useful throughout the life cycle of a Media Composer project. First, at the input stage, when using AMA-linkable media from popular file- based cameras or multimedia files, you'll have the choice of editing with the AMA-linked clips or creating a copy of those clips to work with.

If we go back to the 04_01 subfolder and open up the AMA bin, we have our hummingbirds clip that we AMAed to earlier, the P2 material. You can tell that it's an AMA-linked clip because when it's unselected in the bin, it's bright yellow. So with AMA-linked media, if I right- click on the clip, I get two very important choices in the menu here: Consolidates/Transcode. Choose that choice and up comes the dialog box. Consolidates creates a copy of the file in the Avid Media Files folder specified. It is literally copying the original DVCPRO HD video and Audio MXF clips from the card structure and placing them in the Avid Media Files folder. No rewrapping or conversion of the file takes place. It's simply a copy. But why might you want to consolidate when you've accessed the media already via AMA? Let's cancel out of here while we consider that for a moment. One good reason might be that you are on a very tight deadline. You have accessed your P2 material on a card reader using AMA, and you now want to quickly view what you shot and then make a copy of just the selects that you need to edit on your laptop.

To do this, I would screen each clip, make the select that I wanted and move on to the next clip. In this case, I am not going to bother bringing the material at the head of the clip or at the tail of the clip. I'm just interested in this section here between the In and Out marks. What I am going to do now is click up here next to the name of the clip in the Source viewer, hold down, and I am going to create a subclip and drop it into my bin. Now this clip only represents the material between the In point and the Out point. Now if I right-click on the subclip and choose the Consolidate/Transcode dialog, I will be consolidating just the portion of the clip that I need, not the entire thing. I can specify Handle length, but if I'm absolutely confident, maybe I will just drop that down to 10 frames. Next, we need to choose the target drive, so I am going to choose the Media Drive and I am also going to choose to convert the audio at the same time, and I will choose Consolidate.

So it's going to consolidate both the video and the two audio tracks, and now in our bin we get a new clip. It's a subclip, but appended by .new.01. If I stretch the bin out, we can see here that it's still the same format as the original AMA-linked material, but instead of being linked to the volume that we mounted, it's now linked to the media drive that we imported to. You are probably thinking, "Well, you have two copies of the same material online right now," and you'd be absolutely right.

So the first thing we do after doing a Consolidate is that we are going to now unmount the original AMA material. Here is the original subclip that we're looking at off of our card location. Now I am going to go back up to the File menu and I am going to choose Unmount. You can see that we have got a couple of different paths here. Let's have a look to see which one we're interested in. Oh, there it is, P2 hummingbirds. Select that, choose Unmount, and now, predictably, that media has gone offline. However, if we go to our consolidated version of the media, it of course is still online.

So someone could begin editing on the laptop straight away, while another crew member takes back the card to the camera for wiping and continued shooting.

The Unmount command is the opposite of using the Link to AMA command, which in turn is very similar to that Add Volume command in the FCP Log and Transfer window. So in this case AMA provided the instant preview and selection method, and then Consolidate played the role of the file transfer utility, moving the selected media from the camera cards to the managed media folder. The clips in the bin are still the same resolution; there are just fewer of them. And each clip has just the material we need, without extraneous heads and tails. Very similar to FCP Log and Transfer, specifically for those resolutions which FCP has to handle natively.

For example, DVCPRO HD would be one format where FCP is on unable to transcode to ProRes currently, so you would have no choice but to transfer it as DVCPRO HD, and that's very similar to what we've just done here.

Transcoding

TRANSCODING IN MEDIA COMPOSER MEANS EXACTLY THE SAME AS CONSOLIDATE, WITH THE EXCEPTION THAT YOU ARE ALSO CHANGING THE CODEC OR RESOLUTION OR FRAME SIZE OF THE CLIP, NOT JUST MOVING IT, BUT CHANGING IT TOO. In Final Cut Pro, if I have material that I would like to convert to a different, more FCP-friendly or offline-edit- phase friendly file format, then I might choose to use the Media Manager to recompress to a new file type or use Compressor to transcode the original source file to a new file type and then import the new transcoded files.

Transcode in Media Composer creates a new MXF version of the AMA file in the Avid Media Files folder, by either rewrapping, demuxing or else changing the format, codec, or resolution of the file. So it's very similar to Consolidate, except that the media is not just copied, but altered or optimized in some way during the process. You can choose to just change the audio codec, the video codec, or both. The new MXF file could be an Avid DNxHD resolution file or maybe a Sony XDCAM HD file or a Panasonic AVC-Intra or DVCPRO HD file or an Avid SD or DV resolution file.

Here in the AMA bin we have the material that we AMA-linked to earlier on. First, I'm going to tidy up a little bit. These were the two clips that we created through our Consolidate in the previous video. I'm just going to move those out of this bin up into the Consolidate bin and close that guy. We don't need it open right now. Now in this bin here, we have this movie, MVI_9982. This is the clip that we AMA-linked to from the Canon 7D Camera.

So again, if I return to the bin, right-click on the clip, and choose the Consolidate/Transcode dialog, this time of course, I'm going to be looking at Transcode. Check that the media destination is correct, and then we can go over to this side to set the Target Video Resolution. I could, for example, just choose DNxHD 145, so I would be trading the H.264 camera codec for an online-quality editing codec at 145 megabits per second. Now that might seem like a strange efficiency on paper, since I will be trading up to a bigger file on disk. However, even though H.264 is a great quality codec, I know from experience that I will get better editing and effects performance out of DNxHD 145. That said, I want to show you how to do an offline-to-online workflow in the final part of this chapter. So we're going to simulate that by bringing in the media at low resolution, editing it, and then relinking the sequence to the full-res camera files.

As such, at this stage we should choose a low-bit-rate resolution. As I'm looking here, maybe will choose, I don't know, XDCAM EX35 Mbits/second. That seems pretty good. You can see it's only going to need 90 MB for that particular file. Let's go ahead and also convert the audio and transcode. As soon as the transcode is complete, a new clip is deposited in the bin with an affix, .new.01. If I load this clip, now I'm looking at my XDCAM EX35 Mbits/second version.

(clip playing) (inaudible speech) If I expand the bin out, we'll be able to see the difference. The new version I just created is on my Media Drive, and the version that I was reading it from, the AMA-linked file, is a volume mounted here. That reminds me yet again that I'm going to want to unmount that in just a second. But notice here as well, we can see the change that occurred. The original file DVCPRO HD, the new file XDCAM EX35 Mbits/second.

Let's go ahead and unmount that volume now. We go to the File menu remember, and we want to go to the Unmount command. And across here, we can see that we have the 7D material, so I'd like to go ahead and unmount that now. The original clip in the bin has now gone offline, but our transcoded version is still online, and to keep things nice and tidy, what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the transcoded version, drag it, and drop it in the Transcode bin for safekeeping.

You've probably noticed that in Media Composer we do need to go through this additional step of unmounting the original set of clips following transcode, whereas in FCP it's not really necessary, as the Log and Transfer Window will unmount the clips automatically once they have been encoded.

Okay, so now let's examine the 'why' behind these decisions to transcode more closely. After all, if we've already accessed the media via AMA, why would we want to transcode? One reason is that the media that you have AMA-linked to might be a highly optimized camera codec.

Camera codecs are great for--you guessed it, cameras, because they allow huge amounts of information to be compressed down into tiny portable files. When it comes to editing in post- production however, codecs need to be designed more for quick access, playback, and durability under effects and color correction. If your machine is screaming fast and your footage is only 35 Mbits per second then you'll get much better performance than someone on an older laptop trying to play back ProRes 4:4:4. So you're going to have to figure out what your system can handle, and go with that.

Another good reason is that you're performing an offline-to-online workflow to help out because you don't have enough storage space or maybe you don't have enough system bandwidth to edit with your camera original files. We'll look at the offline-to-online workflow in more detail in the final part of Chapter 4. SO CODEC PERFORMANCE OR OFFLINE-TO-ONLINE WORKFLOWS ARE GOOD REASONS WHY YOU MIGHT WANT TO TRANSCODE.

Another good reason to transcode might be that you already have a bunch of material in one single format in codec, but you also have some other material in a different format in codec. Having it all in a single codec can make life a lot easier.

So let's return to our AMA bin and look at one more example. I'm going to choose this clip here, GOPRO500, that we AMA-linked to earlier on. Before we go to transcode this file though, I'm going to go to the Format tab and I'm going to change the Raster Dimension from 1920x1080 to 1440x1080. When I come back to the clip, right-click, and go to Transcode dialog, I'm going to get some different codec options available to me. Now I can choose XDCAM HD 17.5 Mbits/ second and save even more storage space on the clips that I'm transcoding. I'm going to transcode the audio as well and choose Transcode. Again, I've created a new clip. This time it's called GOPRO500.new.01, and this new clip is now an XDCAM HD 17.5 Mbits/second. TO KEEP THINGS TIDY, I'M GOING TO DO THE SAME THING AGAIN. I'M GOING TO TAKE MY CLIP THAT I HAVE TRANSCODED AND PUT IT IN MY TRANSCODE BIN.

One more note on the Raster Dimension dropdown. As you've seen, this allows for different codecs and bit rates to be selected depending upon which Raster option is selected here. Remember, 1080 HD can be represented as full raster 1920x1080, medium raster 1440x1080, and thin raster, 1280x1080. When we select these during regular editing, it also helps optimize playback and real-time effects performance.

If I have a predominance of material that falls into these categories, such as XDCAM HD, HDV, and AVC-Intra 50, then by selecting this Raster Dimension dropdown whilst I'm editing, I'll get much better performance out of my system.

One final note on codecs. Let's come back down to the Transcode bin here. Load up this sequence called multiple_codecs. At the end of the sequence I'm going to drag and drop both of the clips that we've just transcoded.

Now if I zoom back out, we can see not only the clips that we just created, but a bunch of other clips here in this sequence. What I'd like you to do is come down to the Fast menu and choose Clip Text and switch on Clip Resolutions. Now, we might need to adjust the size of our video track a little bit to see these clip resolutions, so with the track highlighted in the timeline, what we want to do is use Command+L to make our video track a little bit bigger.

Now if we zoom in, you can see that we've a whole range of different types of camera codecs and bit rates in this timeline, and Media Composer is going to play them all back in real time, for the most part. This is a big difference between Media Composer and Final Cut Pro. Media Composer is obviously very fussy about frame rate, but once you get all the material into your project, you're going to have a much more fluid editing experience. So again, in FCP your Timeline settings incorporate an actual codec. In Media Composer, we're far more interested in the frame size and the raster dimension. Okay, in the next video, we'll look at how to wrap all this up into an offline-to-online workflow.

Managing an offline to online workflow (with AMA and batch importing)

Taking what we've learned about AMA linking, importing, and media management to a new level, we're going to simulate offline-to-online workflows for both some AMA-linked media and for some imported media. If you've worked in the Media Manager inside FCP, then what I'm about the cover should be fairly familiar. Offline-to-online workflows can be desirable for many different reasons. One reason may be that you just don't have enough storage space or the system bandwidth to bring all of your project media online at full resolution at the same time.

One way to achieve an offline-to-online workflow with AMA-linked media then is to first link to it, make any metadata adjustments you wish--such as adding a disk label and renaming clips--and then transcode the AMA clips to smaller, more compressed resolutions for offline editing. In order to simulate an offline-to- online workflow, let's go back to the 04_05 subfolder, and inside the Transcode bin, we have the two clips that we transcoded earlier. Let's make selections from these clips as if we were actually editing. There we go! An In point an Out point, and then let's look at the next clip.

(clip playing) Okay. So we just created two clips there and marked them up in the Source viewer. And now what I'm going to do is I'm going to switch over to my offline_to_online Bin. Right-click, create a New Sequence called offline_online. You can see I have a blank sequence down in the Timeline area, and I'm going to take this clip, drop it into the sequence, and then I'm going to go back to our other clip, go down to GOPRO500.new.01, because we want the transcoded version, edit that into my sequence, and now we've got a couple of different clips, both of them at offline resolution.

I'm just going to do one quick thing here. I'm going to come up to our Tool palette, into the area that we carved out for effects manipulation, and then click on the Quick Transition button. All I'm going to do here in the Quick Transition dialog is choose to add a dissolve centered on the cut for 6 frames. Choose Add, and now we've added the dissolve and an audio fade to our transition point. (clip playing) There we go! So now let's pretend that we're zooming forward in time and this is the picture lock. This is the final result of all our work. And now what we'd like to do is link this sequence back to the high-res original camera media that it came from in the first place. To do that, I'm going to come back over to my Bin area, return to my transcode bin, select my two transcoded versions of my clips, hit the Delete key on my keyboard, and delete the four associated media files. Choose OK and Delete. I left the original clips in the Bin there and if I go to Script view then they of course are offline, just like the sequence itself is now also offline.

This is pretty much the state you'd be in if say you've done your offline at home with the proxy material and now you'd email your bin to the online facility and turned out with a bunch of drives in a big cardboard box. You'd open up your bin, load up your sequence, which would be offline like this, and because you as the editor and the data wrangler and the PA on set and a whole bunch of other good folks did their jobs correctly, we know exactly where to find the original source file. With the sequence in a bin, use the AMA dialog to point back to the parent directory that you know contains your AMA media.

With the Bin highlighted, File > Link to AMA Volume, back on the Media Drive, in the catalyst_CONTAINER, inside the catalyst_SRC_Camera folder, we have the catalyst_SRC_5994, and in there, we have the 7D material. You can see that that's now come back online in our bin. Let's also right-click in the bin and Link to AMA File(s), and let's choose GOPRO500 and make sure that that's online as well. Great! NOW WHAT I'M GOING TO DO IS I'M GOING TO TAKE THESE TWO CLIPS AND DRAG THEM AND DROP THEM INTO THE OFFLINE_TO_ONLINE BIN.

In the offline_to_online bin, I now have my two original AMA-linked files and my offline_online sequence. If I select them all and now right-click, I can choose to Relink. I can look across all available drives. I'm going to uncheck Relink only to media from the current project, which will widen the net of my search, and I'm going to allow relinking or importing of AMA clips by Source File name.

And I'm going to uncheck Match case when comparing tape and source file names-- that's for a tape-based workflow. Next, I'm going to say choose Any HD video format, Highest Quality and create a new sequence, a new copy sequence. Click OK. Now you can see a new sequence has been created in my bin. There's the original offline_online. Here's the new one offline_online.relinked.01. If I load that up into my Record viewer, I pressed O, there's my media with the Dissolve, and there's the second clip. So now we've gotten rid of our offline media and relinked the results of our work to the pristine camera original files.

Now after relinking, there are then three different options open to you in terms of producing a master. First, you could take the sequence and create a QuickTime Reference and render out a final master in a third-party app. This doesn't work for every single codec, but where it does, it makes for a killer-fast workflow. Second, you could take the sequence and consolidate just the media needed for the sequence, perhaps with some small handles to the Avid MediaFiles folder. Or finally, you could transcode the sequence to a new resolution for finishing and final output.

OKAY, SO THAT WAS OFFLINE-TO- ONLINE WORKFLOW FOR AMA-LINKABLE MEDIA. NOW LET'S TURN TO THE SAME UP-RES WORKFLOW, BUT WITH THE IMPORTED MEDIA INSTEAD. In Chapter 04 part 2, we imported some graphics at XDCAM HD35 megabits resolution and created a sequence called graphics. Let's go back there now, 04_02, import.

Here's our graphic sequence right here. The sequence is offline, as are the source graphics in the bin here. Let's go back to Text view and select just the source graphics themselves. Now, from the Clip menu, choose Batch Import, offline clips only, and now we get a list of all of the different clips that we're choosing to batch import, along with their last known import file location.

If this location is still the same, leave it like that, and now choose Video Resolution. Now at the moment, I'm still looking at the choices available through the medium raster in the Format tab. I'm going to cancel out of this, go back to the Format tab, and choose Full 1920x1080, so I can have the full-resolution codecs available. With the clips still selected in the bin, return to the Clip menu, choose Batch Import, Offline only, and this time I could choose AVC-Intra 100, or if you have a more powerful system, choose DNxHD 220 10-bit (DNxHD X).

We're going to go to the Media Drive and Import. Now our graphics are all live in the bin and our sequence here has refreshed. And in fact, if we zoom in, we can now see the new resolution of our sequence, DNxHD 220 10-bit. Unlike the first example, where the up-res sequence was still linked to AMA media, this sequence is now linked to Avid MXF media in the Avid MediaFiles folder.

That means there are no caveats about output. We can choose whatever output mechanism we would like, including outputting to tape. So, rest assured, if you do need to do an offline-to-online workflow using baseband signals instead, no problem. You could either capture the material at a lower resolution in HD and then recapture at full resolution later on, or you could even capture a down- converted, anamorphic version of your HD master, edit at SD, and then flip your Format tab up to HD and then recapture.

So, in summary, whether you're using AMA-linked files, imported clips, or even clips captured from tape, there is a standard procedure in place for allowing offline-to-online workflows in Media Composer. Knowing which workflow options, codecs, and formats can facilitate the most efficient path for your production, will save time, money, and stress.

05 ORGANIZING, VIEWING, LOGGING AND SEARCHING

Customizing bin layouts, columns, and tools

As we have seen, Media Composer is a bin-centric application. A lot of functionality and capability is built into the Bin window. Let us now, therefore, Jedi of the bin become. Back in Chapter 1 we looked at some very basic bin functionality. Let's quickly review. The name of the bin is at the top. In this case, it's called recap, and the asterisk means that something has changed in the bin since it was last saved. If I save now, the asterisk goes away. The Brief tab gives us a rudimentary set of columns, which is helpful when we are capturing or maybe sorting media.

You can see we have got Name, we have got the clip icon, we have got Start time code, Duration, the Tracks and whether or not any of the tracks are offline. We also talked about Script view where we have a thumbnail and columns of data combined. Remember, we can update the head frame of a clip by playing it directly in the bin, (audio playing) and that works for sequences too. We also looked at Frame view, which allows us to organize clips in a storyboard fashion.

We looked at the fact that we could select all of the clips and then use Command+L to make the thumbnails bigger. And then we can use the Bin Fast menu to Fill Window, which sorts our clips neatly. Now we are going to focus more deeply on Text view. What I am going to do is I am going to close my Tool palette here, and I am going to reposition my bin so that we can look at the columns of data in more detail. Now unlike the other views that we have just looked at, Text view is fully customizable, and you can save multiple versions by name for specific tasks.

Down here at the bottom, we have a standard set of views. For example, I could choose Statistics, but if I wanted to start creating a custom view, I could begin perhaps by reordering some of the columns here. For example, maybe I am interested in what video format I'm working with and less interested in the tracks themselves. Maybe I'm interested in the media drive that things are on and perhaps the creation date. Now if the columns start to get a little bit squirrely, use Command+T to tidy them up.

Now if I like what I've done, I could come down to the dropdown and choose Save As, and let's give this a name, media. But perhaps there is more customization I'd like to do. Maybe these columns in this view that aren't really that necessary for what I want to do. So in that case, what I would do is I would select those columns and then right-click and choose Hide Columns. Likewise, I could also add additional columns. If I wanted to add the offline column that we saw earlier in the Brief view, I could come back down to the Fast menu and choose Columns this way, or I can right-click in the bin and choose columns this way.

Now I'm getting an alphanumeric list of all of the different standard column views that we can present inside the Media Composer bin. Up here is Offline. Let's choose that, and while we are here, I'd like to add a couple of other additional columns. I have got Reformat here that I'd like to add on, Source File, and then up a little way to Image Aspect Ratio. Choose OK and all of the new columns are now added to the Bin view. I am going to come down here and choose Save As and replace the media view with the new one that we have just created.

Up here, back in the 05_01 subfolder, I have a bin called firedance. What I would like to do is show you through some other bin procedures that are more relevant perhaps to AMA-linkable media. Let's return to the Chapter 4 folder and in the 04_01 subfolder, we have our bin, AMA. Inside there, we have a number of fire dancing clips. These are GoPro clips here. Let's go back to Text view and select all of them. Now what I am going to do is I'd like to make a copy of these clips and put it in the firedance bin there in the 05_01 subfolder.

What I am going to do is I'm going to hold down the Alt key so that we actually clone these clips into the firedance bin. Now in the firedance bin, we have a clone of just the material that we would like to work with. First thing I would like to do is I'd like to dial up that media view that we just created. Now, I'd like to add a custom column. I am going to move these columns over a little bit to create a space. Now I am going to click up here with my cursor.

You can see it just about blinking away there. I am going to type in Original_Clipname. Command+T to tidy up my columns, and now we can see our Original_Clipname column right there. What I am going to do is duplicate this entire Name column into this Original_Clipname column. I am going to select this entire column and then use Command+D. The system is now saying to me, where would you like it to go? So, I find my custom column that I want to transfer the data into and click OK, and you could see that now I've duplicated this column of data into this custom column here.

Now what I could do is I could go through and start to give each one of these clips a more descriptive name. I could choose to type individually firedance-, and then I could describe the particular instrument being used. A faster way to do this though will be to use Command+A to select all the clips in the bin and then hover your cursor over the column, right-click, and Set Name for Selected Clips.

Type in 'firedance-' and then leave it like that. The system is now going to ripple through that entire column of data and give everything the name firedance-. And now what I can do as the editor is very quickly go through and figure out what I want to append to that name to make it meaningful. In this case, it would be poi. It would be hoop, on to the next clip, and so on. We have always got our Original_ Clipname here should we need to trace anything back to the drive that it came from.

Maybe I would like to add another custom column too, this time for quality. I am going to move this column out of the way, give ourselves plenty of room here and then type the word Quality. There we go. Now I could go through my clips and give them a ranking perhaps. I am going to give this clip a single asterisk. That's not bad. Maybe I will give that a two star and then maybe I will give--oh yeah that one is pretty, so let's give that one a three star.

Instead of typing in every single time I want to add an entry, if I am on to the next clip up and I look at it and I decide oh, I really like that one, what I could do is hold down my Alt Key on my keyboard and now I could choose from any of the values that I've already entered into that column. Let's go to the next one. Okay, I like that one too. I am going to give that a two. So you can see this can really speed things up when you start to use all of the bin tools together. And then the poi, the poi I think I like, some good shadows and stuff in that.

So I am going to give that a two as well. There we go. So you can see that we can really start to add some rich data to support the editing process directly here in the bin. Here is a cool trick. Let's say, for example, I wanted to select all of the best material in the bin. I would select one of them, and then I could hold Command and multi-select any of the other three-star clips in my bin. Then let's say we realize actually it was everything else we wanted to select in the bin. In that case, just come to the Fast menu and you can choose Reverse Selection.

That's very, very handy if you've just spent a long time selecting a whole bunch of clips in your bin and you realize oh, oops! It was everything else that I wanted, not these things. Just like in Final Cut Pro, I can do alphanumeric sorts on all of these columns. So if I wanted to sort the name alphanumerically, or I wanted to sort the original Start time code of the clips, I can choose whatever I like. One of the things I really like is the fact that we can combine columns of data in that kind of sort.

Let's say I wanted to sort based primarily on Quality-- I am going to drag that to the left- hand side now--and then I wanted to sort name alphanumerically within that. In that case, I would select both columns, but because Quality is on the left, it's going to lead. So now we get everything one and then alphanumeric within that and everything in the Quality category two alphanumerically within that, and so on. A couple of final tools and tips and tricks for you.

First, modify a clip. Take a clip, right-click on it and choose the Modify command. In the Modify dialog, we have all sorts of power over the clip. We could set a new time code by field, and we can also set the Disk Label. This is helpful in file-based workflows because it gives us the same kind of reference that a tape name gives us in a tape-based workflow. I could call this gopro001. It's going to ask me if I am sure, and if we go here to our columns, I am going to make sure that Disk Label is on.

And now, of course, this particular clip in the bin is labeled as coming from the gopro001 disk. If all of these clips came from the same disk, I would give them all the same Disk label, and that's going to help me in my Media Management as I progress through the project. Another useful tool, with this clip highlighted, I am going to right-click and choose Lock Bin Selection, and then we can use the Bin Fast menu, Choose Columns, display the lock, and now you can see, this clip in the bin has the Lock icon next to it.

That means that I can't delete this clip. I could also apply this to sequences too, so that's very useful if you have just finished your cut and you'd like to lock it in the bin. Of course, I can unlock it by right- clicking and choosing Unlock Bin Selection. So we now have control over the bin, its display, and the objects contained within. Customizing bin layouts, adding and using custom columns are everyday useful tools that will help you stay organized.

Creating subclips and subsequences

Subclipping allows us to alter the duration of a clip, or else adjust the tracks which comprise that clip. The new subclip created is not duplicating any media, nor is it causing deletion of any media or tracks. It's a new independent clip, which may be shorter and/or have fewer tracks than its parent. I am in the project catalyst_5994 in the 05_02 subfolder, and I've opened up the bin called master_clips.

Subclipping allows us to break up an entire tape or clip's worth of media into manageable chunks. As an example, I have interview clip four here. Let's move through the interview clip and see if we can identify some subclips. (Interviewer: As you age, is this going to be something you're going to keep doing until the day you die?) (Interviewee: It's funny, when I started swing dancing I was doing it for myself.) Okay, so maybe that's a little clip there that we like, a sound bite that we like.

So what I am going to do is I am going to come over here to my subclips_subsequences bin and now I am going to click up here to the left of INT_04 there, which is the name of my clip. Hold down and drag and drop, and now I have my first INT_04 subclip. Let's see what else we can find, maybe further down here. (Interviewee: Okay. (Interviewer: All right. Play.) (Interviewee: Swing dancing is bigger now around the world than it ever was. It's bigger now than it was (Interviewee: when it first came out in the '40s. It's held out for a longer duration. The actual swing era was) (Interviewee: so short and so quick. The second coming of swing has lasted longer.) Okay, so I've got another little subclip there as well.

Repeat the process: click down and drag to the bin. And of course, I could repeat doing this through all of my material until I'd really firmed up exactly which clips or which portions of which clips I'd like to work with when I start editing. One thing I'd like to make very clear is if I load one of these clips back into the Source viewer, you can see that now it really is just that subclip that we'd selected. (Interviewee: It's funny, when I started swing dancing I was doing it for myself.) However, if I add this clip into a sequence, as we'll do later on, you'll see that I can still access the material before and after.

The handles haven't disappeared. They are just not being displayed to us when we're using the subclip. The subclip has a smaller thinner icon compared to a regular clip. So that was an example to use subclipping to get rid of extraneous material quickly to the material that we want to use. Let's look at a different example. Let's choose the master_clips bin again and this time, let's take one of our Broll clips. Play it back. Okay that one is fine. Let's choose another one. Let's play this one back.

(Male speaker: Yeah, eh Tom?) Okay, in this particular case, we've got a clip that has some extraneous audio on it. So we've got some onset audio that we don't need while we are editing. So what I am going to do is I am going to mark the entire length of the clip, but this time down in the timeline area, I am going to disengage A1 and A2. Now that I've switched off the audio tracks, I am going to switch back over to my subclips_subsequences bin, and this time when I click onto the icon and drag to the bin, I haven't created a subclip that's any shorter-- it's still 16 seconds long-- but I have removed the audio tracks.

So that's two different ways to make subclips from master clips. Why do we call them master clips in Media Composer? Well, this is because they are the parent object. If I go back to the master_clips bin, these are the parent objects to the subclips that we've created. That means there is a relationship between a subclip and a master clip. For example, here I am parked on the subclip. We can tell that because we have the skinny little icon, the fact that it says Sub.02 for the name, and also there is no audio on this particular clip.

What if I now wanted to get back to the original clip? Maybe the director says to me, "There's some notes from set that I need to hear." Okay, no problem. What we are going to do is use the Match Frame button, click on that, and now we've matched-framed back to the original clip. You can see that it's no longer appended by Sub.02 and if I play it back, there is indeed the audio with the clip there. (video playing) So that's using Match Frame to find the original clip from a subclip.

Another tool that we have is called Find Bin. Now that I have the master clip loaded here, if I wanted to quickly locate the bin that the master clip resides in, I would come down here and use the Find Bin button. The bin is opened up and the clip that we are on is highlighted inside. Now I am going to show a different example. What I'd like to do is actually show you how to create subsequences. Back in the master_clips bin, I am going to load up the SwingDance sequence.

Let's say that we have some Broll sections here that we'd like to lift out to use in a short promo about the piece itself. What I could do is I could zoom into my timeline here, make sure that I am getting everything, and then I could make an in point and then an out point. I'll hold down Command, so I can snap to the points here, like so. And now I've accurately selected these two clips here that also have their color corrections and also a Transition effect on them.

If I wanted to now copy this out as a subsequence, how would I do that? Well, it's exactly the same. What I am going to do is swap back over to my subclips_subsequence bin, and this time I'm going to click over the Record viewer, hold down, drag and drop into my bin area. And you can see that now I have a subsequence. It's got a sequence icon, and it's called SwingDance_sequence.Sub.01. The great thing about this is this can be loaded into a Source viewer and used as a source like any other clip.

Let's keep going down the timeline. Let's do another example. I am going to use Command to snap there, make an in point, and let's zoom out just a little bit, and maybe I'd like to copy everything there, including the material that's on video track 3. If I want to do that, then I am going to have to also select video track 3, and now we have this whole block highlighted here. Now again, I'm going to click down, drag, drop, and now I've got another subsequence in my bin, subsequence.02. If I load that, I can look at it in the Record viewer, and I could also load it into the Source viewer too if I want to add it into a different sequence.

Let's have a look at that right now. If I did decide to take this material and add it into a new sequence, what would it look like? Well, let's clear the monitor, so that we have no sequence loaded into the Record viewer. Now I am going to mark this entire subsequence here, and I'm going to edit it into this Timeline area. I am being asked, which bin would you like to create the new sequence in? Well, we are in subclips_ subsequences, so let's choose that one. You can see that the default for Media Composer is that we'll add in the subsequence as the discrete clips as they were in the original timeline.

Now we can do that in Final Cut Pro, but we'd have to hold down Command as we added the subsequence to our new sequence. That would allow the clips to show up as discrete clips. Otherwise, in Final Cut Pro the default behavior would've been to put this whole section of clips here into a container and added it to the new timeline in that fashion. By the way, some of you may be thinking "Well, wasn't this clip on the top when you copied it from your original location?" and you're absolutely right.

I actually have my tracks patched the wrong way around here. If I wanted to redo that, I'd undo. Now I could patch V2 down on to V1, and V3 will create its own new track. There we go. That's the right way around, very good. And I'd have to be monitoring up here in order to be able to see that clip up there on V2. So that's using subsequencing, but there is another way to move material around between different sequences in Media Composer.

We don't have to create a subsequence, in other words. We could just copy a number of clips to the clipboard. What I'd like to do is go back to my main SwingDance sequence here. Now I am going to move further down the timeline, and we're going to select another set of clips. I am going to select from there to, oh, let's just say the end of that clip there-- one, two, three, four, four different clips. So I can use Command+C to copy that material, and now I can switch back to my untitled sequence that we're working on and I could go ahead, paste that material into my timeline.

Notice that the material was overwritten. See, what's happening is I'm pasting it over top of the material that was already there. What is governing that behavior? Well, let's undo it once more. If I right-click and in the Timeline settings, this Default Segment tool option, that's what's governing the behavior. You see that it's on Segment Overwrite. If I would have switched that to Segment Insert, now when I copy and paste between sequences like so, I am actually going to move the material further down the timeline by rippling it.

Subclips and subsequences allow you to create a new customized source that can be labeled and kept in the bin for editing. Match Frame and Find Bin allow us to make use of the relationship between master clips and subclips. However, I should point out there is no relationship like that between sequences and subsequences. In the next video, we'll look at organizing our material using locaters.

Using locators for organizing, logging, and editing

Locators are a powerful tool for anyone who uses Media Composer as they can assist at every stage of production, from grouping, to story notes, to editing and effects creation. In Final Cut Pro we can use a marker to label or identify specific frames in a clip or sequence. Markers could be used for making comments, syncing multi-groups, and making subclips. One difference is that where in FCP you have specific types of markers--the pink markers are clip markers and the green markers are sequence marker--in Media Composer locators don't have a type, so any locater can be placed on either a clip or a sequence and there could be multiple different colors which can be changed at anytime.

If you're used to the FCP colors for markers then maybe you should just stick with them and choose different colored locators on the basis of their function for you. Back in the project window, under Chapter 5, under 05_03, we have a bin called locators. It's open down here, and in there I've got some interview clips. Let's load up interview clip number two (INT_02). Now let's consider behavior. In Final Cut Pro when I have a clip or sequence active, I can use the N key to add a marker.

If I want to bring up the Edit Marker window then I would use the N key a second time, and then I could make a notation. In Media Composer, there is a similar provision. I am going to play into this clip and use locators to mark the beginnings and ends of some sound bites. Here we go. (Female speaker: My great-grandmother.) So my great-grandmother. So I am going to add locator using the Add Locator button and as you see, the Locator window pops up. Here we can choose the color of the locator and add text if we want, 'my great grandmother.' There we go. Let's keep playing through.

(Female speaker: My great-grandmother owned a clothing store in the '30s, '40s, and '50s (Female speaker: across the street from the phone company in Los Angeles.) Okay, let's add another locator there. In this case, because it's the end locator, I'll leave it red, and I don't really want to add any text. But let's say I want to prevent the Locator pop-up from coming up each time I add a locator like this. How do I do that? What I am going to do is I am going to go to the Tools menu, and we are going to choose the Locator tool.

You can see the two locators that we've already added to this sequence are already there. In fact, if I double-click on one of them, I'll be taken straight back there; double-click on the other, straight back to that one. How do we disable the pop-up? We come here to the Fast menu in the Locator tool and Disable Locator Popup when Adding. Now as we move through-- (Female speaker: And she kept a lot of it because she was a wee bit of--) Let's add another locator there. Notice the pop-up didn't come up this time.

(Female speaker: She was a wee bit of a hoarder.) 'She is a wee bit of a hoarder,' so maybe that's the bite that we'd like. So this time what I can do is just come over here to the Locator window and right-click and change the color to green. And if I'd like to add a comment to that then I could come over here, click in the Comment column, and type in, 'she was a wee bit of a hoarder.' There we go. There are a couple of different ways there to use the locators, either with the pop-up and just let it come up and add the data as you go along or use the Fast menu to disable the Locator pop-up.

Incidentally, if I want to move frame accurately between these locators here, I can use my Fast-forward and Rewind buttons to move and step between them cleanly. Of course, we'll have needed to customize the Fast-forward and Rewind buttons to stop at locators, but once this is done, we can very quickly move backwards and forwards. Now I'd like to show you a different example. I am going to close the Locator window, and this time we're going to be looking at adding locators to a sequence. So here in the locators bin, I'd like you to load up the music sequence.

You can see that we've already got some locators here in the sequence on the A1 track. Let's just expand those tracks a little bit, so we can see them a bit more clearly, great. There is nothing stopping me from adding a locator to a timecode track, for example, so I could add maybe a pink locator to the timecode track down there. I've turned the Locator pop-up back on, by the way. I could also add a locator to a blank track even if I wanted to mark in everywhere I want to add a clip later on.

If I make sure that track is active, click on my yellow locator there, there we go. So now we've added locator marks to the timecode track and to the video 1 track. If I'd like to move between these locators, we've already seen that we can use the Fast-forward and Rewind keys, but there is also Go to Next Locator and Go to Previous Locator buttons as well, which are available in our Tool palette that we mapped, but are also available from the Command palette. If I want to delete a locator then when I am parked on it, if I enter, exit, and hit Delete, it will go away.

Alternatively, if you do have the Locators tool up, you can just click on the item and hit Delete on your keyboard and it will be removed. In this particular case, what I'd like to do is tap out the beat using locator markers onto this audio clip here. I could tap out the beat onto the timecode track or onto the video one track, but that wouldn't really make that much sense since if we then moved to track afterward, then my beat markers would now no longer match up.

The first thing we are going to have to do though is add these Locator buttons to our Keyboard settings. Over to the Settings menu, let's pull up the Keyboard and position that, and then let's pull up the Command palette and position that, and now what I'd like to do is map button to button. I am going to add the red locator to F5, green, pink, and yellow.

And while I am here, there is a really powerful button I'd like to draw your attention to on the Edit tab called Mark Locators. Let's put that up here on the F13 key. Close those. Come back down to the Timeline. So if I play back the sequence now, I can use those newly mapped Locator buttons to tap out the beat on the fly. (music playing) There we go and as soon as we stop, we get an update of the locators we have added to the timeline, and this might allow us to get our cuts on the beat more quickly and more accurately.

Now let's return to interview clip number two in the Source viewer and use the other keyboard shortcut that we just mapped to our keyboard, Mark Locators to F13. If I hit the key now, you can see that it's marked the space from this locator through to this locator. Wherever I am parked essentially, if I was parked here then the button would have marked this range instead. But this is what I was looking for. I wanted to mark the subclip from my in point through to my out point. Let's go ahead and clear the monitor here and take this clip and drop it into the Timeline window, like so.

Because there was no sequence in there, I'm being asked, well where would you like to create a new sequence? I'd like to create a new sequence in the locators bin. I'd like to call this locators. Let's return back up to interview clip number two, park here, F13. That's a good clip, so we'll add that one onto the end of our sequence. Let's go to interview clip number one. There are couple of other areas marked here, so let's add the in and out points to those, and let's come here to the end of the timeline and let's use the Splice-in button this time to add that clip into the sequence.

Same here again, and use the Splice-in button again to add it on to the end. So we are started to build up a little bit of a rough cut. If we've already gone ahead and actually added notations to these clips then one little extra thing I'd like to show you is that we can actually print or export that locator data, and it's going to help us with a paper edit or a rough cut. Back up to the Tools menu, to the Locators tool, and here you can see that I've got not only the red and green locators, but also the comments for those two.

I could come here now to the Fast menu and I could choose to Print Locators or Export Locators. Export All, or just the Selected--let's say All, and now Media Composer is asking to save that as a text file on the Desktop. Let's save and let's hide Media Composer for a moment, and there on the desktop on my locators, and there it is, by time code in the sequence with our comments. So if we were sharing our work with someone and they wanted to give us comments, this might be one way to go about doing it.

Let's go back to Media Composer and I'd like to show you another way of working with locators. You can see here that I've got numerous different green locators in my sequence. I've also got red locators in the sequence. Just for good measure, let's go ahead and add some pink locators to the sequence too. If I wanted to, I could come down here to the Fast menu and choose Show Locators, and then I could show by color. For example, I could show none of the locators, all of them, or in this case I could switch off the display of the green locators.

Let's go back in, Show Locators, and Show All again so they come back. Additionally, if your production is going to finish audio in Pro Tools, then there is the ability to send this locator information out with the sequence information when we send it along the change to Pro Tools for the audio mix. Okay, in summary, locators can be used for logging, for audio mixed notes, going to Pro Tools, for editing, for lining clips up, marking section of a clip or sequence, or even being part of a paper-editing process.

Being able to use them gives you a great deal of more power when dealing with large or complex projects.

Searching using metadata and PhraseFind

We've learned about many different methods for reading or inputting metadata into Media Composer. Now with the Find function we are going to use a powerful tool to search through all that useful and helpful information to find what we need, rapidly and precisely. Find in Media Composer is similar to Find in FCP. Indeed both tools can be bought up using the same shortcut, Command+F. Now, before I bring up the Find tool, in this particular case I'm going to close my Tool palette because that's going to get over the top of the Find interface, and I don't want it to interfere with what we're doing.

Now that's done. Command+F will bring up the Find tool. Let's have a look at the interface. You can see at the top we can enter text for searching. Then below that we've got three main tabs: searching in clips and sequences, searching in script text if you're using script sync and then Timeline and Monitors. Down at the bottom here, we have two green buttons. The first green button is the Bin Index, and what this is indicating is that all of the bin metadata has been indexed and it's ready to be searched.

Over here, I've got a PhraseFind Index that is also complete because it's full green. If I just added a lot of material to my system then these may be gray or half gray, indicating that they're still indexing. I should point out that PhraseFind is a paid-for plug-in that you need to add to the system if you want to use it, whereas the Bin Index comes for free with Media Composer. That said, now let's use the Timeline and Monitors tab here. I'm going to type in 'hoarder.' I know that she says 'hoarder' somewhere in her clip and I'd like to find it.

I'm going to click on the Source viewer and then click Find, and you can see the timeline cursor jumped directly to 'she was a wee bit of a holder.' So that's how that works with the Source viewer. What about the record side? Let's go into a search, this time for swing. Click on the record side, make that active, and find. Okay, when I started swing dancing, what if we hit Find again? swingdance brings you together. So you get the idea that this will cycle us through all instances in this particular sequence.

So now let's switch back to the Clips and Sequences tab. Let's say we wanted to search for '***,' knowing that we have some b-roll clips that match that criteria somewhere in our project. Any Column, all Bins in Project. Of course, I could roll down to specific columns if I wanted to. I could Current Bin or Scripts in Project or Bins and Scripts in Project. Let's just choose Bin in Project, and now let's choose Find. There we go.

So you can see that inside the Return we have the clips that match that criteria and if I double-click one of these, it's going to load up into the Source viewer. Let's do that once more. Let's type in here 'commute' and Find. Again, returning all of the objects which match that criteria, in this case titles and also sequences. If I double-click on one of these, it's going to load the item into the Source viewer.

This is one of the few times that double-clicking on a sequence will load it into the Source viewer in Media Composer. So to be clear, those are all metadata searches. We're looking across the columns of data, in our bins and the text, in our clips, and looking for metadata that matches the search criteria--and that comes for free with Media Composer. If you purchase the additional plug-in PhraseFind, you can do searches across the audio in your project as well. PhraseFind literally listens phonetically to all of the audio that's been loaded into your project and indexes it in the background.

When the index process is complete, the light turns green and that means we can now search for audio phonetically across the project. Let's go ahead and type in 'swingdance' and now instead of using Find, I'm going to choose PhraseFind. Now you can see that we've returned a whole number of different results and they are sorted by the score. The higher the score number, the more accurate, or the more confident the system is that this contains the information we're looking for.

Let's double-click on this item here. (Female speaker: swing dance) Swing dance, it was spot on. This is how to use PhraseFind, a very, very powerful tool that's actually going to allow you to search your clips very quickly for a specific phrase or word or comment. Obviously, this is kind of tool is going to speed up the workflow for things like documentary and reality TV in a huge way. Because instead of having to sit there listening for a phrase and then finding it and marking it up, the editor can just find it very quickly using the power of the PhraseFind plug-in.

And I'm going to go back to source record editing to bring back up my Tool palette. So in summary, Find is a very powerful tool allowing you the flexibility to find clips based upon everything from camera metadata, manually entered metadata, script text, and the phonetic indexing of the audio content in your project.

06 UNDERSTANDING THE BASICS OF EDITING

Getting tracks into the timeline

We have only been exposed to the Timeline window and dealt with sequences in various different parts of the course. Here, we'll consolidate what we know and bring all of those aspects together as we study the timeline, its tools and functionality in detail. Now I'm in same project, catalyst_5994. Inside the 06_01 subfolder, we have a bin called swingdance. One thing I would just like to quickly point out: the tool palette here that we've been using as a learning aid, occasionally it might change shape.

If it does that, than you might find that the buttons themselves get out of order. If that happens, just simply grab on the corner again, pull it back to the same length that it was originally, and there you have it-- you're back to the original tool palette the way that we set it up. Now in this chapter, we'll be covering topics that will make heavier usage of those editing buttons that we did map to this custom tool palette. And as a reminder, we placed the editing tools here between the playback tools on the left-hand side and the trim tools on the right-hand side.

So this is all of the editing tools that we are going to be dealing with in this chapter. But of course, those same tools are also mirrored in other places in the interface, for example the Smart palette that we'll be looking at. One other adjustment we need to make, earlier in the course we switched the default start timecode of new sequences to 10 hours as an example, which is probably fine for anyone working in the UK. But now I'm going to switch back to the default start timecode of one hour. To do that, we need to go to the Settings tab in our project window, go down to our General settings, and here is the default start timecode.

I want to change that to one hour, the semicolons indicating drop frame, and we're all set. Now we know several ways to create a new sequence from scratch. I could simple drag a click from my bin or my Source viewer directly into the blank timeline area down here, or I could I go to the Clip menu and choose New Sequence. In this case, I want to right-click in the bin and choose New Sequence from here. I'm going to call this new sequence SwingDance.

We can see the new sequence name up here over the Record viewer, and we can see that the sequence itself has the default number of tracks: one video track and two audio tracks. First ensure that your Smart Palette tools are all deactivated like they are here. Then let's go to the Interview_ 02 clip in my bin, drag it, and drop it into the Timeline area. Now as we did that, I don't know if you noticed, but I had a yellow arrow. Let's just redo it. I'll undo, go back, drag it over, and you can see that yellow arrow there.

I want you to pay attention to that. What's your system set to? Mine is currently set to insert record by default. If you right-click on the Timeline Settings, here on the Edit tab, Segment Insert is my current default, and that's what gives me that yellow arrow to allow me to insert clips into my timeline as I'm working. So that was one example of quickly adding some material to the timeline using drag-and-drop, which we'll be covering in much more detail in the next video.

Here what I would like to do is now add a sequence. SwingDance_Start, I'm going to drop it into my Source viewer here, and you could see down in the timeline area straight away, we have far more tracks in this source timeline than we do in our current record timeline. In fact, if I go down and I toggle the view, we can see that there's music, sound effects, and other clips, including the Broll in our sequence here. Now, one really important thing I need to point out is that when a clip or sequence is on the source side and we're looking at it with a bright green toggle on here, we can't edit this content--we can only edit content which is on the record side.

So with that clear now, let's go ahead and add this SwingDance_Start sequence onto the head of the SwingDance sequence that we have on the record side. To do this, I'm going to move my timeline cursor back to the beginning of the clip-- that's where I'd like to add this sequence--and instead of dragging and dropping, I'm going to use one of these arrows here. I'm going to use a splicing arrow. Now notice what happened this time. The sequence was inserted at the head of my current sequence, so now it's in front of clip Interview_02, but also my record-side sequence automatically added the correct number of tracks to accept what was coming from the source side sequence here.

So just a little note here: to do the same thing in Final Cut Pro we would hold down Command and hit F10, or hold down Command and then drag to the Canvas viewer, and then we'd get a non-containerized edit. So we could see all the clips just like we could see them here in Media Composer. In Media Composer, this is the default behavior, but as you know, in Final Cut Pro the default behavior is actually to containerize the extracted subsequence when added to a different sequence.

So instead of seeing these individual clips down here, we would see a containerized clip in Final Cut Pro. A different way to use a section of one sequence in a different or new sequence with Final Cut Pro is to use copy and paste. We can do the same thing with Media Composer. Let's say I wanted to select interview_01 and interview_02. So what am I going to do is I'm actually going to deselect all the tracks apart from V1, A1 and A2.

Now if I use Command+C for Copy, move to end of my timeline, remove my marks, and then use Command+V, I get a duplicate of interview_01 and interview_02 down here at the end of my timeline. Let's just don't do that because we don't want those. But that's one example of copying and pasting in Media Composer. A more versatile way to do the same thing--let's reselect our Interview_01 click and our Interview_02 clip here-- would be to use this icon here, which is Copy to Clipboard.

Now the reason that this is more versatile--let me show you, let me unselect my in and out points here--is that now I can go to my source side and I can say show the clipboard contents. When we do this, we get the ability to also re-patch our tracks as well. So now if I wanted to go ahead and add this material into my timeline, I could do so on different tracks instead. So copying and pasting will put material on the same track, and adding to clipboard gives us the versatility to re-patch our tracks.

So that was some basic timeline behavior. Let's return now to our exploration of the essential timeline tools and features.

Touring the Timeline window

Let's return now to our exploration of the essential timeline tools and features. Coming back down to the bottom of the timeline area and to the right of the Source Record toggle that we've been using, we have the Video Quality menu. We already know that this helps the system play back demanding codecs or more complex sequences with real-time effects. As a reminder, best performance is the yellow mode, and this is showing us 1/16th of the resolution of the images, and this gives us maximum performance with the softest picture quality.

If we click on it and we go up to half yellow/ half green mode, we are now in draft quality. That's using a quarter resolution and again gives us increased performance. If I click again and I go up to full quality, now I am looking at the full quality of the images, which is how I'm going to be wanting to work as I get towards finishing my project. And on systems that have hardware attached, in some cases there is an additional mode, which is green with the number 10 inside. This is full quality at 10-bit mode, and as I say, is available with various different hardware configurations.

Continuing with our tool, these two buttons here are Step In and Step Out, and they are used for entering into effects nests, which we'll be covering later. Next to that, we have our dropdown for the timeline and we've already dealt with this extensively in Chapter 3, and then of course we have our Scale and our Pan bar here, so if I zoom in then I can pan around in the timeline. I can also use Command+Right Bracket to zoom in or zoom out.

In addition, I can use Command+N to generate this special cursor, and then I can do a custom zoom over a particular part of the timeline that I am interested in. Finally, there is actually, down here to the left of the Source Record toggle, is a button called Focus. If I zoom all the way back out, you can see that the Focus button will actually take me back into a pre-zoomed level. If I click it again, it'll take me back out to a full view of the timeline. Moving to the left of that, we have the Timeline Fast menu, which we've already started to explore in some detail.

Above that, we actually have the Timeline palette. The first section here is all about the different modes that are available in Media Composer. So we've got Source/Record mode, we've got Trim mode, we've got Effects mode, and we've got Color Correction mode. We've also got a handy button to allow us to quickly open the Motion Effect Editor as well. If, by the way, you accidentally click on a mode button, for example Trim mode like that, and you get these pink rollers, you are not sure what to do, don't worry--just click back on Source/Record mode button and they will go away, and now you are back to regular editing.

Above that, we have the Smart palette. This contains tools for editing directly in the Timeline. We have Segment Select tools for Overwrite mode, for Ripple mode. We have Trim tools for Overwrite Trim and Ripple Trim, and then we've also got a Transition Manipulation tool. This allows us to change the length and position of effects. We will be using this in conjunction with this button down at the bottom, which is called the Keyframe button. At the top of the Timeline palette, we have the Link Selection toggle.

If this is on then when I select a clip in my timeline--let's activate the red selection arrow--then I'll also grab the audio with my clip at the same time. If the Link Selection toggle is off and I grab a clip then I am moving just the segment that I grabbed; in this case, now the video and audio are out of sync with each other. Then above that we have our Master Sequence Timecode Reader. Next to this, we have the black Disclosure triangle that allows us to open the Track Control panel.

If I open the Track Control panel now, we have less sequence real estate, but we have more control options. We can switch on or off individual waveforms, but only if the global waveforms are switched off. So let's go down to the Fast menu, let's go to Audio Data, and switch off global waveforms. Now you can see that I can individually active and deactivate waveforms on my tracks. These buttons here are the on/off buttons for the tracks themselves.

So I can actually switch off a track completely and then re-enable the track. Incidentally, Media Composer can monitor up to 16 tracks of audio in real time, given the proper system resources. Now if the system resources aren't available then you can guarantee playback of two of the most important tracks, and they are the ones that are going to have this black line around the On/Off button. If I use Option+Click then I can change which two tracks are guaranteed for playback.

Here in the center between the On/Off buttons and the Audio Waveform buttons, we have this Keyframe button. If I click on that, you can see that I can go in and switch on various different modes for audio editing. If I take my tracks, select them all, and then use Command+L to make them a little bit bigger, you could see that underneath this area, we also have five buckets. These buckets are available for real-time audio effects, and we'll be covering that in Chapter 8.

If I close the Track panel, we're just looking at the tracks themselves, and obviously, this big button here, that's the activeness of the track itself. On the far right, we've got the monitor. So at the moment, I am looking at video on V2. If I switch that off altogether, I am not going to see anything, so I need to have at least one video monitor on on one of my tracks. Below that, on the audio tracks, I've got the ability to either solo a track, which is going to turn this color track green and light orange is going to be applied to the other tracks to indicate they are muted, or of course I can mute this track and that's going to be a bright orange color instead. And I can mute or solo different combinations of tracks if that's what I need to do.

And then finally, in between the track activeness, on the monitor strip, we have another strip, and if I engage these buttons here, they look like a forward slash. These are called Sync Locks and we'll be covering these in Chapter 7. In the timeline area itself--let me just shrink these tracks back down a little bit-- we've got the clip representations and there is information available on the clips themselves, and we've got our video tracks--these are the sort of green- colored clips here and our audio tracks which are the blue-colored clips here.

And then we also have our timecode track, which is represented at the bottom of the sequence and then also at the top of the sequence. For those of you who like to separate your audio and video tracks, you can do so by holding down Option and then selecting the timecode track, and now you can drag it and drop it up there between video and audio, like so. We've already used Command+L to make tracks larger and Command+K to make tracks smaller. I want to remind you that you can also use a different keyboard combination to make the audio waveforms within the tracks bigger and smaller as well.

Option+Command+L will make the waveforms bigger, and Option+Command+K will make the waveforms smaller. I am not changing the volume, I'm just changing the way that I am looking at the audio. Now, let's look at the toolbar at the top of the Timeline menu here. Now this may vary in the amount of buttons it can show depending upon your screen resolution, plus we also remapped some of these buttons earlier because the first four buttons here are duplicated in other parts of the display.

Remember, we mapped Source/Record Editing, Audio Editing, Effects Editing, and Color Correction to these first four buttons. Next to that, we have the Quick Transition button, the Render button, the Collapse Effect button, and the Remove Effect button, and then we also have our Mark IN buttons here as well. Next to that, we have the audio meters themselves. We can mute the audio, directly there, and then as we play back-- (Female speaker: When I was--) we'll obviously see our audio levels in here as well. And then finally, moving over to the right, we have a button that says 1394.

If you're on a system that has some hardware attached, you might see something different in there. It might say DNA, or it might not be present at all if your system isn't capable of ejecting its hardware to work in DV mode. Essentially, what's going to happen on a system that has the choice is you can toggle backwards and forwards between 1394 and the hardware attached. What this does is it means that your system is moving from the mode where it's going to be using external hardware to do a baseband input or output to moving to not using the hardware and instead using FireWire for its input and output.

On a system such as this one where there is no hardware attached, I don't have the choice. I am going to be stuck in 1394 mode, unless I add some hardware to my system. So we've gone through all of the timeline tools and functionality in some fair detail there. I think we're ready to dive in and start doing some editing.

So in the earlier part of this chapter, we were dragging and dropping clips into the timeline. What affected the way the clips got added into timeline was that Timeline settings, and that's because we had our Smart tools switched off, like they are currently. Right-clicking in the timeline, in the Timeline settings, my default Segment tool earlier in the chapter was Segment Insert. I am now going to switch it to Segment Overwrite because I find that far more convenient when I start to use my Smart tools to have this as the default in the background if the Smart tools get turned off. So, click OK.

And then the other thing I am going to do is I am actually just going to remove this material that we added as an example on the end of our sequence. I am just going to use the Extract button there, and now we just have the first part of our sequence followed by interview clip 2. This time, I'm going to start using my Smart tools to be more precise in the way that I add my clips to the sequence. So right now, if I grab the Interview_03 clip and drag it over to the sequence, without the Smart tools active, you can see that I am defaulting to the red Segment Overwrite mode.

If I wanted to now override that, I'd activate Segment (Extract/Splice-in), now drag my clip over, and you can see I get the yellow arrow this time. Now as I drag down my timeline, you can see I've got free-form positioning, but if I hold down the Command key, now I can snap to important points in the timeline; for example, the head of this clip, or maybe I could snap to the timeline cursor itself or maybe snap to the very end of the timeline.

Incidentally, if I were to hold down the Option key as well then now I am actually able to snap to the tail of my clip to important points in the timeline. Now I am snapping the tail of my clip to the timeline cursor or the tail of my clip to the head of Interview_02, for example. Let's release Option, go back to just snapping with Command, which is snapping the head of my clip, and now let go at the end of the sequence, and Interview_03 is added on, appended to the timeline.

Now one other thing I should point out, when we're moving clips around in the sequence, when we grab them and move them left or right, or up and down, we can use the Motion Mode Indicator to tell us what we're doing and show us some more accuracy. You can see down here there is a Motion Mode Indicator. It's actually blank at the moment, but if I were have picked the clip back up again and use a constrain button like Command, you can see that I'm actually given an indicator that tells me if I'm snapping to the head, in this case. If I hold down Option, you can see it's now pointing to the left, so it's indicating the tail. Or if I use Shift+Command at the same time, then it's actually constraining vertically instead.

So that's how to use the Motion Mode Indicator to show us what we're doing in the timeline. Let's say I wanted to add some Broll clips to my sequence. Over here in the 06_02 subfolder, I have a Broll bin. If I this time switch to Segment Overwrite mode and grab my little clip 1947 here and bring it over into the timeline, I am going to use Command to snap it to the timeline cursor in this particular case. Now I've got a Broll clip in my sequence.

Let's go and get another clip, 9988. This time I am going to drag the clip over into the sequence, and I want to drag and drop immediately after the other Broll clip that I just added. However, this time you've probably seen that I've got audio associated with this clip as well and by default, it wants to add itself onto A1 and A2, but I already have material there. So to get around that, what I am going to do is I am going to drag and drop the clip to the end of the sequence. This enables me to now reselect the clip but via the audio tracks this time.

Now I can not only move the clip, but I can also repatch the audio down to A3 and A4 at the same time. Okay, finally, I'm going to have a third Broll clip, 1952, drag that over, and drop that after my other two Broll clips, like so. Now, if I start moving clips around in the timeline using these arrows, I can get some different behaviors. If I were to drag this clip now and drop it over the top of the third Broll clip that we just added, I'm going to remove that clip from my sequence entirely.

Now contrast this with if we have the material hold down on the same track here. Let's just drop that down. Let's swap arrows, and this time let's do a similar thing. Let's drag this clip and drop it, but this time we have swapped the order of our clips rather than overwriting the clip. I am going to switch back to my Overwrite arrow for a second. As I start to drag clips around in the timeline, notice the changes that take place in the interface#2. Up top, in the Composer Window area, now we actually have a display which is showing the tail of the previous clip, the head of the next clip, and then the head and tail frames of the current clip in my timeline.

I also get a time indicator showing me how many frames I am moving up or down the timeline. If I move towards the head of the sequence, I get a negative number; if I move towards the tail of the sequence I get a positive number. Okay, so that's how to use gestures to add and move material in your sequence.

Using timeline selections

So now let's look at some different ways to select clips using gestural techniques. We've already seen that we can select an individual clip just by single- clicking on it with one of our arrows, either the red Segment Overwrite or the yellow Segment Insert. When we select an individual clip like this, we can add to our selection by holding down the Shift key and then clicking on additional clips at the same time. Once we have our selection, of course we can now move all of those clips together just like we were moving an individual clip.

To deselect clips, just click on your timecode track. Now another way to select multiple clips in one go is to click just outside of the timeline area here, drag, and draw a little bounding box, like so. Now we've selected the three clips in one go, and of course we can go ahead and start to reposition them. Notice however that when I use this technique, my Link Selection toggle isn't working to bring the audio along with it. So just be aware of that if you are going to use the lasso technique.

I am just going to undo that to put that back in sync. Now another way to make selections involving numerous clips in the timeline is to use the Select Left, Select Right, and Select In/Out buttons. Now for most of you, they are going to be on your timeline toolbar up here, but because my resolution is quite low, I will use Command+3 to bring up our friend the Command palette and I am going to use it as an active palette for a moment, and then I am going to go to Edit tab. And you can see here all the buttons, Select Left, Select Right and Select In/Out, that you are probably going to have in your toolbar down here.

So if I use Select Left in my timeline right now, you can see that it's going to activate on only the tracks which are currently active, and it's going to select not only the material to the left, but also the clip or the black space that I am currently parked on. If I reverse that and select Right instead then I get this selection, and if I select In/Out then it's going to mark just the segments that are active that I am parked over. So if I wanted to make a very clean selection, for example, of just the beginning part of my timeline here, I'd have to park right there at the very end of frame and select Left.

And if I also add all of my tracks now, I could select all of my tracks at the same time. You may wonder why it is then that the whole of V3 and the whole of A5 and A6 got selected. Well, notice that there are no breaks in those tracks at that point and so as a result, the entire gets selected. Now let's go ahead and close the Command palette and I'd like to show you another technique, which is called Top and Tail.

Deselect there to remove the selections in my timeline by clicking on the timecode track. Now Top and Tail we already mapped to our Tool palette, adjacent to the Trim tools, and you will see why in just a moment. Let's move to the end of our sequence here, and let's lasso over our tracks and just be concentrating on V1, A1, and A2. If I select the Tail button, what's going to happen now is not only is the material selected from that point onwards, but it's also removed from that point onwards.

Let's do a similar example at the head of the sequence. Let's select all of our tracks and now click Top. Everything prior to that moment has now been removed. Let's just undo those two because we'll be using that sequence a little bit later on. So the difference between Select Left and Select Right versus Top and Tail is that with Top and Tail we not only make our selection, but we also remove the material at the same time. And talking of removing clips, another reason that you may be selecting a clip is to delete that said clip or selection of clips from your sequence.

The way we do this is that we highlight the clip in the timeline and then just use the Delete key on your keyboard. Now notice I made that deletion using the red overwrite arrow, so that's not going to affect the length of my sequence or affect synchronicity in my sequence. However, if I swap and use the yellow ripple arrow instead and now select my clip, when I hit Delete, I am actually removing a section of my sequence. And you can see, if I zoom in a little bit there, I've actually thrown my video and audio on V2 and A3, A4 out of sync slightly because I used the yellow arrow to initiate an extraction.

Let me undo that so that we put that material back into sync. As mentioned, we can in fact activate both the red arrow and the yellow arrow at the same time and work with them both selected over the top of a clip and actuate Segment Overwrite mode, or I can hover over the bottom portion of a clip and actuate Segment Insert mode. Now I should point out, by the way, that when you are in this mode, when you have both of these buttons activated, it now affects the way that the Delete command works in the timeline.

When we have both of these on and we select a clip with the arrow and delete then actually what happens is the timeline defaults to the Timeline settings behavior that we specified here under the Edit tab of the Timeline settings. So with both of these off or with both of these on, then the Delete behavior will be according to the Timeline settings. With either one of these on then the Delete behavior will be according to the current arrow selected.

Okay, before we wrap up in this section, there is one other thing I'd like to show you. So far, we've been moving and deleting entire clips. What if we want to move or delete a portion of a clip? In that case, what we are going to do is we are going to use the Add Edit button, which is very similar to the Raiser button in Final Cut Pro. I want to remove part of the Broll clip here, 9988, so with the correct track selected and my timeline cursor in position, what I can do now is go to the Editing section of my Custom tool palette here and choose the Add Edit button.

This adds a cut point to my clip, and now I could select one portion or the other of my clip and just remove that. So, that's it. That's using gestural editing in Media Composer and as you can see, it has a lot of commonality and a lot of similarity with the tools that you use in Final Cut Pro.

Editing with the keyboard and interface buttons

Here we are going to turn away from gestural editing and look at editing with the interface buttons and/or the keyboard. The reason for splitting the editing chapter along these lines is that when we are using the keyboard or the interface buttons, such as Splice and Overwrite, we need to pay attention to track activeness and track patching. If we are using drag-and-drop techniques, we don't really need to pay attention to that as much. Let's take a moment to contrast track patching and activeness between Final Cut Pro and Media Composer.

In Final Cut Pro, if I want to patch a track then I need to make that track adjacent to the track that I want it to go onto. And if I want to make sure that it's active and ready to edit into my sequence, I need to make sure that these buttons are connected, like so. In Media Composer, we have a very similar mechanism. I need to make sure that the tracks are actually patched to the correct track that they want to go to, but I also need to make sure that they are active. This is the same as putting the tracks together in Final Cut Pro.

If these tracks were all inactive right now and I attempted to perform an edit with my Splice-in button, notice that nothing happens, and that's because none of the record side tracks are active. If we try that again--let's put the timeline cursor back to the beginning and activate V2--now if I perform a splice-in, material can be added to the sequence. Because I use the Splice-In button, everything else on this track further down my timeline has been moved, or rippled, down the timeline.

So if but wasn't my intention, of course I could just use Command+Z and we could undo that operation. But let's take the long way round as an example. If I park over my clip and I use the T key to select it, now I'm going to use the opposite command from Splice-in, which it is this button here, Extract. With just that clip selected, if I use the Extract key, now I've removed that clip and everything has rippled back into position in the sequence.

The Extract button, or the X key on your keyboard, does the opposite of the Splice-in arrow. So now we're back to square one. Let's try the same edit again, this time with the track correctly patched and active on both sides. I'll use the Overwrite button. This time we've added the material into the sequence without rippling anything else in the sequence further down. The opposite of this action of course would be to park over a clip, select it with the T key, and then use the Lift command instead.

This time the material has been removed from the sequence and again a black gap has been left behind so that nothing else in the sequence has been moved or rippled to accommodate the deletion of that clip. There's another aspect to this that is not necessarily that obvious. So let's go and do another edit, but this time with a picture-only clip. Let's say we wanted to add a title to the beginning of our sequence, and in the bin here, there is a little title called SwingDance. At the moment, the title is offline, the media is currently missing, but because this is an element that we created inside of Media Composer, all we need to do is highlight the bin, go to the Clip menu, and choose Create Unrendered Title media.

We're asked which drive we would like to render to-- I want to point to my media drive--and what resolution we would like to render at. I'm going to choose XDCAM HD 50mbits/second and then choose OK. Now, you may get a prompt for a substitute font. If so, just go ahead and pick one out. Ok, so now we've rendered that title. We can see that the source is a video source only; there's no audio associated with it. If I were to go ahead now and insert this clip at the head of my sequence using the Splice-in arrow, it's going to knock V2 out of sync with the rest of the sequence.

So in order to prevent that from happening, I'm going to use Command+A to select all of the tracks in my timeline. Now when I go ahead and a perform a splice-in edit, notice that the same amount of black has been added on all of the other tracks as title, or video was added, to V2. This preserves synchronicity across the entire timeline. Now in this particular case, that's kind of a bit long, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to mark up a shorter section of my title here within an in and out, but re-perform the edit.

Now what I would like to do is add some black onto the head of my sequence using a similar technique. So what I'm going to do is pop the timeline cursor at the beginning all the sequence, come up here to the Source viewer, click down on the Clip Name menu, and choose Load Filler. I'm going to park at the in point of my filler here, and then I'm going to hit +429 on my keyboard, make an out point. Notice that's given me a five-second duration for the filler in my Source viewer.

I'm going to make sure that all of the tracks on the record side up active, and now I'm going to insert that black gap at the head of my sequence. So in both cases we were able to either insert a clip or insert black across all tracks at the same time thus preserving the sync relationship across the rest of the clips in the sequence. So far, we've been marking a clip duration in the Source viewer and then leaving the time bar in the timeline as the in point.

Let's do the reverse. Here, between these two Broll clips in my sequence, 9970 and 1947, I'm going to mark that section of the timeline using the T key. Next, I'm going to load the 9988 subclip from my bin into the Source viewer. And if I had in no marks in this clip here then wherever I leave my playhead will become the de facto in point. So you can see here that that frame right became the in point.

Now if I undo that, you can see that if I make an explicit mark-out point here then that will actually back-time the edit into the gap instead. So this time it was the out point that motivated my edit rather than the in point. So that's using the Insert, or Splice- in button, and the Overwrite button. There's another button that we can use-- just down here we have it mapped to our custom tool palette--and it's called Replace Edit.

The way this works is if I park over a clip that I want to replace--let's say I want to replace 1947 here--and the I have a clip loaded--let's say this one here, this Broll clip--then it's going to replace on the position of the blue time bar. Let me show you what I mean. If I Command+Snap back to the beginning of this clip here and now remove any marks in my sequence here--maybe we'll just park on the locator there--now if I use the Replace Edit function, it's going to replace from the beginning of the clip in the timeline from the blue time bar.

The shortcut for the same replace functionality in Final Cut Pro is the F11 key. If we move further down the sequence towards the end, I have a different example that I can show you. Let's just play back over the end of the sequence for context. (Female speaker: It was short and so quick. The second coming of swing has lasted longer.) (music playing) So let's say we like that, but the director prefers a different clip.

Over here in the bin, we've got 9971, and you can see here that-- (dancing) a guy does kind of a cool move where he throws out his arms and his legs at the same time. I'm going to use my arrow keys on my keyboard to land at the moment where his feet plant. Now I'm just going to leave my blue playhead parked there. Now I'm going to come back to timeline and listen back for an audio cue point. (Female speaker: It was so quick. The second coming of swing has lasted longer.) So that second symbol hit there, let's play back over that.

There it is. With my blue time bar parked there as well, let's just zoom in so you can see more clearly what's going to happen. When I use the Replace Edit function this time, instead of replacing from the head of the clip onwards, this time we're actually going to be replacing forwards from the blue bar and backwards from the blue bar using the source clip here. And you can see that now that move that he does is lined up exactly with that second symbol hit. (Female speaker: So quick. The second coming of swing has lasted longer.) Cool! So that's using Splice Overwrite and Replace Edit buttons in the interface to perform different types of edits, and remember, when we're using buttons in the interface, or else our keyboard shortcuts for editing, we need to pay special attention to track patching and track activeness in the timeline area.

Editing vertically

To this point, we are mainly concerned ourselves with the horizontal aspect to the timeline, putting one clip after another. Now we're going to turn our attention to the vertical editing, stacking clips on top of one another. The more tracks you have in your timeline, the more difficult your sequence becomes to handle, and that's why most rough cuts try to stick to maybe one or two tracks of video and two to six tracks of audio. Once you have the bulk of your story laid out, then there's much greater call for adding clips to different video tracks, such as the addition of graphics, filters, and multilayer effects.

But sometimes even just the storytelling phase requires a little bit more elbow room, so figuring out how to use multiple tracks in your timeline is a very useful skill set. Here I've got a timeline opened called Go Vertical. It has a single video track with a couple of clips on it and a couple of audio tracks. If I want to add more video tracks to my sequence, Command+Y. I am going to go ahead and stack up a bunch of video tracks here, give us a plenty of room to work with. If I wanted to use Commend+U, I could also add audio tracks as well, but since I'm not really interested in using audio tracks in this segment, what I'm going to do is switch off my video tracks, highlight all of my audio tracks, and hit Delete on the keyboard.

I get a confirmation dialog, "Are you sure you want to get rid of these tracks?" and Yes. So now we can concentrate on just video tracks. As you can see, I have got numerous different locators in the sequence here, and these are labeled to help us stack up these graphic clips here in the bin. So there is the first one, here is the second one, 1440x1090. I'm just going to go ahead and park my timeline cursor on the locater like so, and that means when I drag it over from the bin I can snap the head of my clip to that precise moment in the sequence.

These are the graphics which represent the size of different video formats as compared with the 1080 raster. So as I keep stacking these up here, we'll just add the last two in, and then we'll see what we've got. Of course at the moment we're not seeing the results of the stack, because the video tracks are being monitored just from video 1 down, so at the moment we are still just seeing the background video. Now if I climb up by hitting V2, now I'm monitoring from V2 down.

If I switch again, I'm now monitoring from V3 down, V4, V5, V6, V7, V8, and V9. So now you can see we've got all those different graphic layers stacked on top of one another, and we can see through the center by courtesy of the fact that that they all have a hole in the center that is transparent, so we can see all the way back down to the material on video track 1 on the bottom there. Now compare that with Final Cut Pro, where if I do have a multi-track sequence like this, then in order for me to see from a specific track downwards, I would need to switch off the tracks above.

In Media Composer, I don't need to switch the track off, I just change the monitoring position. Okay, so that's adding video tracks and stacking clips on top of one another. What happens if I need to insert a track in the middle of a bunch of tracks like this? Let's say I want to take this clip here called Stripes and insert it between maybe the HD and the SD layers here. Well, first off, Stripes is unrendered, so I'm just going to go up to the Clip menu and choose to Create Unrendered Title Media, make sure I'm pointing to my correct media drive, click OK, and as soon that's rendered, you can see here that there are just a bunch of shapes that I've created basically with some transparency gradients.

If I wanted to add this in over the top of my HD clips here then I would need to insert it basically at video track 7. There is the power clip right there. Instead of using Command+Y, I'm going to use Command+Option+Y. This time I get an Add Track dialog and I can go ahead and I actually specify the track that I wanted to insert. I'm going to choose V7 as my insertion track, say OK, and Insert. So now, the SD material, the PAL and the NTSC clips, have been pushed up, and the HD material has been left where it is.

So now what I could do is I could go ahead and overwrite this material onto V7 there, so let's go ahead and do that. Make sure that I am patched to the correct track before I do that, and let's overwrite it in. So now when I drag back over, if I'm monitoring from the top here, I can see that the SD clips are clear-- they don't have any of the gradient over them--but as I step down in the sequence now, you will eventually see, will pop back through that Stripes clip onto the HD material.

Now we can see it clearly again. So that's how to insert a track in the middle of a stack of tracks that you've already built up on. Turning back to the 06_04 subfolder here, I've got another bin called vertical_example. If I load this up, really all I'm talking about here is sometimes you just need a bit of extra room when you're preparing a sequence, to figure out different versions. You can see I've got this close-up clip of the dances here, and then moving through I've got this next clip that's a little bit wider, but I've also got an alternative shot down here on V1.

So if you think about it right now, I've got a version of my sequence which starts out with the close-up and then goes to this clip, or if I monitor from up here, then I've got my close-up followed by a different clip, and I can keep doing that if I want to. I'm going to go ahead and add an extra video track to my sequence, make sure I'm monitoring from the right place. And then I've got this Broll clip. I could mark out. If I wanted to, I could go ahead and add this onto V3.

Now when I play back I have essentially created a 3rd version. I've got this version which now we'll cut from 9964 onto video track two and then onwards. this version which starts with the close- up clip and then goes to 9962, and then I've got the bottom-track version as well. So really, all I'm putting out here is that vertical editing isn't just used for effects and graphics and things like that, but we can also use it to quickly preview different versions of our cut.

Obviously, I could've taken this clip and just put it straight onto V1, but I would have overwritten my choices, and so that's really how I'm using vertical editing at the storytelling stage.

07 EDITING IN THE TIMELINE

Using basic trim tools

In this chapter, we will be covering topics that will make heavier use of the Trim buttons that we mapped to the custom tool palette in Chapter 3. As a reminder, we placed the trim buttons here, pretty much in the center of the toolbar between the editing buttons and the effect buttons, so they are mainly centered around this area here. I have loaded up a simple example sequence here that is just to sync audio and video. If you don't have access to the course materials, just prepare yourself a simple rough-cut sequence like this.

Just make sure that the clips have some handles so that you can trim backwards and forwards. Now before you begin using the actual trim tools from the Smart Tool palette over here, what I would like to do is just run through some basic trim concepts and some very basic trim tools that exist in Media Composer. Here at this transition point between interview 1 and interview clip 2, we can here that the outgoing tail has been left a little long. (Female speaker: Three things that matter. It's the music, the dance floor, and your partner.) (Female speaker: My great-grandmother owned--) So if I wanted to remove that pause at the end of interview clip 1 there, obviously one way I could do it would be to make a mark in, make a mark out, and then use the Extract function to remove that material from my sequence, and close up the gap.

However, a far quicker way would be simply to play back to the point where I think the clip should end, and then use the Tail command. And whichever method we choose this is known as a single-sided trim because just one click on one side of the edit point was affected. In this case it was the tail of the first clip, and it was also a ripple trim, because the entire sequence got slightly shorter. Okay, let's zoom back out and look at the next transition point between interview clip 2 and interview clip 3. (Female speaker: When I was just in elementary school. There's this weird line that you have to try--) Again, we seem to have some slack on the outgoing tail, but then the incoming head on interview clip 3 seems to be slightly cut off.

So zooming back in, let's just look at this a little bit more. It might well be that simply by rolling this transition point backwards in the timeline we would remove the slack off the outgoing material and add a little bit of material back onto the head of our incoming clip, to remove that sort of cut-off feeling that we have at the beginning there. So let's just play over that. (clip playing) So that's how I feel that's the natural point of transition right there.

If I make an in point now and then I use my Extend button here in the tool palette, you can see now that I have been able to extend the head of the interview clip 3 backwards in time overwriting the material that was at the end of interview clip 2 that just was a little bit baggy. Let's play that back. (Female speaker: Just in elementary school. There's this weird line that you have to--) There we go! So in this particular case, we performed an overwrite edit. It was a dual-sided edit, so both sides of the transition were involved.

We extended the head of clip 3 and we retracted the tail of clip 2. And it's an overwrite edit because it actually didn't affect the length of the sequence. The sequence remained exactly the same length as it was before. So now those two examples that we have just seen are examples of simple audio-video cutting. Audio-video cutting is where every edit for a clip is the same across audio and video tracks. Now, usually this is done because as you work at the beginning of your project, you want the freedom to be able to trim and move clips around easily.

But later on in your project, you will probably want to introduce split edits where audio and video cuts are offset from each other, producing a more natural viewing experience. Let's zoom out again and go further down the timeline to the transition between interview clip 3 and 4. (Female speaker: Going to be doing it. And can this dress hold up. Swing dancing is bigger now, around--) So, in this particular case, I am happy with the audio edit, but I am finding the little smile that comes in just at the end of interview clip 3 as a little bit distracting.

So in this case, I'd like to go ahead and create a split edit where the video for interview clip 4 comes in a little bit earlier, maybe just before the smile starts there. So to do this, obviously the first thing I need to do is deactivate A1 and A2, so I am only performing an operation on the video track. And of course, now that I'm parked in the position that I want to be in, I can use my in point marker and then simply go to the Extend function again, and this time I've used it to create a split edit.

So that covers trim using the most basic tools available to us in Media Composer. In the next section, we will start to use the actual Trim tools, which give us more advanced features.

Using smart trim tools

Trimming tools are about making the process of adding and removing frames or altering transition points in a sequence faster, easier, and more intuitive based on feedback provided by the specialized trimming tools themselves. Here in my Bin, I have a sequence called simple_trim_2. That's really a duplicate of simple trim, which we used in the previous video. It's got the sign issues, but we are going to fix them using these tools here in the Smart palette. You can see I have got Overwrite Trim, which is the red film can with some film unfurling from it-- that's what the icon is meant to represent-- and then I have got the Ripple Trim tool, both of them used for directly trimming using the cursor in the timeline area. And just like the red and yellow arrows, they can be activated individually, toggled on and off like so, and you can also use them in combination with each other.

We are going to start out though, by just using them on their own. So we have the Ripple Trim tool activated. If I go to my first transition point, let's just zoom in a little bit. This is the transition point where we had a bit of extra material on the A side going out and the incoming side was just fine. So if I hover my cursor now near to the transition point, notice that if I hover to the left, I get film unfurling to the left on my yellow icon here.

So this indicates that I would be affecting the outgoing side of my trim only. If I move it over to the right and I hover on the right-hand side of my transition area then the film can is indicating that it would be affecting the incoming side of the trim only. Incidentally, if I hover over the center, I get this dual white roller trim. We are not going to be using this right now, but this would indicate that we were affecting both sides; it would be a dual-sided trim. So when it comes to this specific example here where we removed the material from the outgoing clip to get rid of this gap here, if I wanted to repeat that move using the Ripple Trim tool, what I'd do is hover to the left, because that's the side that I want to affect, click down, and I get a yellow roller.

I am going to make sure that my Link Selection Toggle in on, because next time I go in, that will automatically select my audio at the same time, because I want to keep everything in sync. Now all I need to do is click down and hold, and now I can drag backwards and forwards in the timeline. You can see that the outgoing tail is updating there, up in the upper part of the interface, and I am also getting those pink boxes which count the number of frames I'm adding or removing from any side of the edit. So, if I take about -15, that's 15 frames removed from the tail of the interview clip 1.

If I am happy with that then I can let go, the trim is performed, and if we playback -- (Female speaker: The music, the dance floor, and your partner. My great-grandmother--) We fixed our edit pretty quickly. Let's keep moving down the timeline and go to the next transition point. You may remember here that we had some slack on the outgoing side, and then the incoming side of the edit was a little bit clipped. (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school. This weird line that you have to--) So in this case what I am going to do is I am going to hover my cursor over to the top of the center point in the transition here and get to dual-white roller.

This time when I click down, I get dual-pink rollers across all my tracks because I activated the Link Selection toggle. And now, again, if I want to make an edit, I can click down and drag to the left. This is adding, now, material to the outgoing side and removing material from the incoming side. And this time you could see that I am getting a readout on both sides of the edit. I'm removing nine frames here, and I am adding nine frames here. Incidentally, this time I've left the rollers intact.

I haven't clicked on the timecode track yet, and so this has left me active within Trim mode. So I could hit the spacebar, for example. (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school. There's this weird line that you have to try to--) (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school. There's this weird line that you have to--) So spacebar is going to keep me in Trim mode but allow me to loop play over the transition point. Of course, if I wasn't happy now, I could go ahead and make additional adjustments. For example, let's say the producer just came back into the room and told me, "Okay, yeah, I like the fact that you've now fixed the incoming material, but I really liked the pause at the end of interview clip 2.

I would like you to put that back in." How would I do that? Well, all I need to do is bring my timeline cursor back over to near the transition point, like so, and you can see I now get the choice of my yellow cursor again, and click once, and now I've converted my dual rollers into single rollers on the side that I want. If I wanted to reinsert a gap now, just click down, and I could begin to extend out the tail, and obviously I don't want to get her too far, because she will start her next word, but extend out the tail a little bit like so, just give it a bit of a breath.

Now notice also in the center there, we are starting to see different numbers crop up in the pink boxes here. This one is pink because this is the side that I'm currently affecting. When we did that dual-roller trim, both numbers were the same. They were both nine frames different from the original transition point. Now that we've affected this side on its own, we have got a differential between the two. Let's hit spacebar again and see what we've got. (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school. There's this weird line that you have to try to--) Okay, so if that's what my producer wanted, we have gone ahead and make that change.

But let's just make one more note on these numbers here. Notice that when we moved towards the head of the sequence we get a minus number, and when we move towards the tail of the sequence we get a plus number. So if we see the same number in both boxes, we know that a dual-sided trim has taken place. If we see different numbers in the boxes then we know that a single-sided trim has taken place at some point during the operation. I am going to click on the timecode track to get out of Trim mode and just move down the sequence to the final example that we have here.

(Female speaker: And can this dress hold up? Swing dancing is big--) This was the example where we created a split edit, so if I wanted to create the same type of split edit here now, all I would need to do would be to lasso over that transition point like that. Now I get my dual-roller trim--and of course I want to a dual-roller trim, I don't want to know anything out of sync--and I could just now drag my point back, so I don't get the beginning of the smile in the left viewer there. I just go back just before the smile begins, drop that, hit Spacebar to play back.

(Female speaker: Going to be doing it and can this dress hold up? Swing dancing is bigger now--) Okay, so I've got a little bit of lip flap on the incoming side now, so I might just drag back a little bit. Maybe nine frames was too many, maybe -6 might do us. (Female speaker: Going to be doing it and can this dress hold up? Swing dancing is bigger now--) Okay. That was better. So now we have looked at some basic concepts again, but this time using mostly Ripple Trim from the Smart palette. Next, we will switch to looking at Overwrite Trim and some of the specialized trimming operations that can be done with that tool.

Combining trim tools

So far then, we have done everything using the Ripple Trim button. What happens when we start to use the Overwrite Trim button? Well, let's toggle Ripple Trim off and toggle Overwrite Trim on. Let's look at this little transition moment here in the sequence. (Female speaker: When I was just in elementary school. There's this weird--) Now let's say we wanted to try to pause there after 'elementary school' and a bit of a fade-down in the sequence, and then come back into interview clip 3 after a pause.

Then in that case what I could do is I could click down on the left-hand side of my transition-- notice I can also bring up the dual rollers in this mode too--but click on the left-hand side of my transition point, like so. Now when I click down and drag back, notice that I'm actually adding black into the sequence instead. I am overwriting black into the sequence. In fact, I have removed frames from the outgoing side now, but I have managed to open up a black gap in my sequence.

So, in actual fact, I probably now need to use Overwrite Trim and Ripple Trim in concert with each other. So what I am going to do is I am actually going to toggle over to Ripple Trim, and now I'm going to push these back the other way, so I get back to the end of my statement there. Let's play that back and see how it looks. (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school.) Didn't quite get all the way, so let's just pull it a little bit further, school. There we go. Now incidentally, since I can't hear what's going here, it might be tricky just dragging around in the timeline like that.

If we wanted to hear our way to the end of the phrase 'elementary school', I could now hold down K on the keyboard and use L to scrub forward slowly and listen to the end of the word. (clip playing) Great! Now let's use spacebar for playback. (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school. There's--) So that's pretty good. We managed to open up a gap in our sequence using the red Overwrite Trim tool, and then we were able to preserve that gap and trim the end of our phrase back out to a natural ending using the Ripple tool.

So that's one way to start to use combinations of the Overwrite Trim and the Ripple Trim tools together in the timeline. But of course, another way to do that will be just switch on both tools simultaneously. Let's zoom in a little bit now, so we can see a little bit more of what's going on. Now, when I hover my cursor near the transition point at the top of the clip, I get the Overwrite Trim tool, and when I hover the cursor at the bottom of the clip area near the transition point, I get the Ripple Trim tool.

So this is how to effectively switch backwards and forwards between the different trim types using the Smart tools directly in the timeline. The beauty of using these two trim tools together is that they can be used to create some pretty complex trims very quickly indeed. For example, here in the Bin, I have a sequence called trim_challenge. First, let's just inspect what's going on here, starting at the earliest transition point where the sync issues begin. Remember, these white lines are what represent a sync problem in the sequence.

(Female speaker: and your partner.) So the first thing I am going to do then, since there is obviously something wildly out of sync here, is I am going to use the T key to mark the direction of my audio clip, and I can see up here that the duration of that segment is 18 seconds and 24 frames. So now let's do the opposite. Let's use the T key to mark the video section. Ah! It is also 18 seconds and 24 frames long. That gives me a clue that maybe these have literally just been knocked out of sync with each other.

If that's the case, then maybe all I need to do is line up the head of the audio with the head of the video and the sync issue should go away. To do this, I am going to remove the marks in my sequence first. I'm going to swap tracks so that I'm going to be trimming on the audio tracks only. Switch that off because otherwise it will autoselect my video track. So now what I am going to do is I am going to single-click on this side of the trim and I am actually going to add both tracks to that, and now I'm going to use the yellow trim mode to remove the black from the sequence there at that moment.

Now let's play back. (Female speaker: dance floor and your partner. My great-grandmother owned a clo--) Okay, so the trim point isn't exactly perfect at this moment, but we have now fixed the sync on interview clip 2. So the next thing I'd do if I was trying to repair a sequence is move down here to the next transition point and see what that's all about. (Female speaker:--was just in elementary school. There's this weird line that you have to try to ride.) Okay. Same thing again this time. What's going on here? We have got an audio duration of 26 seconds and seven frames.

Let's swipe back over there. This time the video is shorter than the audio, so this may mean that I need to add to the video segment to restore sync between video and audio. If I zoom in a little bit more, you can see that I have got these numbers here, and they actually tell me how many frames out of sync the audio is, compared to the video. So what I am going to do is I am going to try the same technique as I used last time there. I am going to try just extending the head of interview clip 3 video backwards in the timeline, back to where the audio begins.

Now this number has reduced. That tells me that the sync problem is getting better, but it's not completely solved. So maybe one way to fix this would be to remove some material from the incoming audio clip. So let's select that, let's click down with the yellow arrow, and let's remove some frames until we get in line with the video there. Now we are only 12 frames out of sync, so let's now use the yellow Ripple Trim function to trim an extra 12 frames back onto the head of our audio here.

So if we are starting at 53, 12 off of that would be 41, so let's trim to 41, and now we've removed the sync problem from interview clip 3. I could lasso and do a double-roller trim back to the head now, and we are starting to really fix up our sequence, like so. If you're using the course materials then I have an extra hard challenge for you here called trim_challenge the sequel. Load that up and practice using the Overwrite Trim and Ripple Trim tools to fix this sequence, put everything back into sync, and sew pull all the transition points nicely.

So you can really see the power of being able to trim directly in the timeline using the feedback from the interface and alternating between these two tools.

Using the Trim mode

There are two main methods of trimming in Media Composer: either trimming using the timeline tools like we did in the early part of this chapter or trimming using Trim mode. Here we are going to be doing that. We are going to be using Trim mode. And I switched off my timeline tools. By the way, on the outside border of the Smart palette here is a toggle that actually allows you to toggle your timeline tools on and off, your Smart tools on and off. [00:0 0:27.37] So if I did have my Smart Trim tools on and I toggled, I'll be able to toggle them on and off both together, like so.

But I am actually going to leave them all off for now, because we are going to be using Trim mode. At the moment, I am in Source/ Record mode. How do I know that? Well, two things tell me that. First of all, I have the Composer window with the Source viewer and the Record viewer, but also here I can see that I am actually selected on Sources/Record mode, both at the bottom of the Composer window and here in the Timeline palette. So if I wanted to switch now into Trim mode, I can activate Trim mode using this button here or indeed this button here or the U key on my keyboard.

First though, I need to delineate which tracks I would like to trim with. I am going to concentrate on V1, A1, and A2 at this transition point, and because I am going to be concentrating on these tracks, I want to be monitoring those tracks as well, so I can see and hear what's going on at that transition point. So now, using U on my keyboard, I am going to enter myself into Trim mode. Notice a few things change. First of all, when we enter Trim mode, by default we enter with a dual-roller trim on our material.

In addition the viewers have now changed to represent the outgoing material and the incoming material. We have got our pink counter boxes here, and we could start trimming away in a very similar way to how we did so using the Smart tools in the previous part of the chapter. If you went through that, you may now start to think, well, hang on a minute, didn't we just use these tools in the previous segment? And the answer would be yes. Because even when you activate Trim using the Smart tools here, you will, by default, enter Trim mode as you are trimming. When you click back on the Time code track here you will exit Trim mode, like so.

So in actual fact we have already being in and out of Trim mode several times, but we've been concentrating on using the timeline, so I am dragging transitions backwards and forwards. Now what we are going to start to do is use some of the additional tools in Trim mode to move our transition points around. Now the first thing is, how do we change from a dual-roller trim to a single-roller trim? Well, there are couple of ways of doing that. Here in the interface we've met Trim A Side, Trim B Side, Trim Both Side.

So click on Trim A Side, I mean a single roller trim. The same for B Side. If I trim A and B sides, I am back to a dual roller trim. If I click on the left-hand image, I can activate a trim on the outgoing material; if I click on the right-hand image, I can activate a trim on the incoming material; and if I click right in the middle, I can activate a trim on both sides. Notice also that when I swipe backwards and forwards here, regardless of whether I'm in a single- or dual-roller trim, this green bar activates.

That's really telling me which side of the edit I am going to be listening to, if I choose to do a JKL trim, a dynamic trim. So, for example, with this side highlighted, if I roll forward slightly, I'm listening to this side. If I swipe over on to the right- hand side, I'm listening to the incoming material instead. Now because in Trim mode the Composer window is no longer showing the Source side and Record side, you can consider all of these tools underneath both of viewers applicable to both sides.

It isn't that these tools are affiliated with the left viewer and these tools are affiliated with the right. They are all controlling both viewers at the same time. So let's go through some of these tools and what they do. Here, for example, we have the Rewind and Fast Forward buttons. What these doing in Trim mode is take us between the various different transition points in our sequence, like so. And then we have a Loop Play, which allows us to loop play over our transition point. (Female speaker: In front of the phone company in Los Angeles. Since I was a little girl, she started--) And then over on this side we have these arrows which allow us to move the transition that we have currently selected by 10 frames or a single frame forwards or backwards down the timeline.

Next to that, we have these two values here, 2 seconds and 2 seconds. And that correlates with our loop play. It's going to preroll 2 seconds and then play postroll 2 seconds. These can be changed here if necessary. So if I use my Fast Forward button to move to the next transition point and listen back to it, we can see what we need to do here. (Female speaker: Just in elementary school.) So it's just a bit of a gap on the end there that may be needs to be trimmed off. So if we wanted to do a dual-roller trim, all I need to do is click on my arrows here and trim back a few frames until I've remove the excess material on the end of my edit, like so.

Let's do another loop playback using the spacebar to see how that sounds. (Female speaker: I was just in elementary school.) Okay, that's a lot better. So let's move to the next edit and play that one back. (Female speaker: Well, there's this--) Okay, so she sort of fumbles at the beginning of the line there, and probably where we want to come in is on the word, 'there is this weird line.' (Female speaker: Well, there's this weird line.) So what I'd like to show you this time is how we can use the same commands but on the fly as we are looping back to trim down the incoming or outgoing sides of our edits.

The keyboard shortcuts for these keys are M to trim left by 10 frames, the Comma key to trim left by 1 frame, the Period key to trim forwards by 1 frame, and the Forward Slash key to trim forward by 10 frames. So using those keys, let me show you how that works. I am going to drop into the Loop Playback mode and since I really need to remove material from the incoming side, I am actually going to click on the incoming side and make it a single-sided trim.

So drop into Loop Playback mode, and I'll use my keyboard shortcuts to trim up the head. (Female speaker: Well, there's this weird line.) (Female speaker: Well, there's this weird line that you have--) (Female speaker: Well, there's this weird line that you have to try--) (Female speaker: Well, there's this weird line that you have to try to--) (Female speaker: Well, there's this weird line that you have to try--) That's pretty good. So we are able to actually update our edit in iterations over time, and each time it loops back, a new keyboard entry will initiate a new trim.

So we can keep on seeing the results of our work play back until we are happy. The nice thing about this is I can stay in Trim mode without having to go back in and out and play back to see what the results of the trim were. So we've seen some examples of both single- and dual-roller trims using the interface buttons, as well as dynamic trim techniques. And we've also seen that the Trim mode interface itself has a number of specialized tools that give us great feedback in real time about exactly what we're doing.

In the next video, we'll look at using these tools in conjunction with transition effects.

Trimming with transition effects

So far, we've been concentrating on manipulating transition points between clips, or between clip and black. This time we're going to switch to manipulating transition points using Trim mode that have a transition already applied to them. So I'm going to switch my attention up to V2 here and park near this transition point that dissolves through from the suitcases there to the girl going to open the suitcase. So just park around the transition point and now click on the Trim Mode button to take us into Trim mode.

And the first thing I would like to point out is that the transition is displayed here. You can see the length of the transition, 20 frames, so I could change that right now by typing in a new duration of 18 frames. I can also manipulate the positioning of the transition here: Centered, Starting, or Ending on the cut point. And then, of course, I can use spacebar to playback the transition, to see how it looks. (Female speaker: '40s and '50s across the street from the phone company in Los--) Okay, so that's one aspect of using Trim mode.

Over here on the left-hand side, I have actually got a thing called Transition Corner Display. Let's click on that and see what happens. Now you can see the Trim mode is showing us the outgoing material from the beginning through to the end of the transition, and we're also looking at the incoming side from the beginning through to the end of the transition. This is really useful for making sure that you don't have a flash frame or something odd or disconcerting in the middle of your transition, or right at the end of your transition. Maybe you wouldn't have noticed it whilst editing, but here in the Transition Corner Display, it becomes very clear what's going on within our transition.

So if I were to use my buttons now to adjust the position of the transition point in time, you can see that I'm going to get an update of the material on both sides of the trim in the viewing area above. Now obviously, this clip is actually moving, but because there's not much action in it, we can't see the movement, but both sides of the transition are indeed updating as we trim backwards and forwards. So that's looking at a transition point that's between two clips adjacent to each other on the same track. Let's now switch our attention to this transition point up here.

Now this is a transition from black into this incoming clip here. But notice that if I switch my video monitor up to the correct track and now go back into Transition Corner Display, you can see that I can look down through the material. You can see that I'm looking through the empty track down to the track below, so I can see the outgoing clip here. And by virtue of the fact that being so close--if I zoom in you'll see what I mean-- you can see the transition is taking place over this material outgoing, but it's clipping MVI_1952 here, and that's why we see the girl's head at this end part of the transition.

So this is exactly what this tool is for: it's for showing you an error within your transition and allowing you to fix it really fast. So in this particular case, I'm just going to move the transition point until we no longer see this material creeping into the end point of the transition. Play it back and it should be perfect. (Female speaker: Clothes. So I started collecting vintage clothing when I was just an--) Great! So that's using Transition Corner Display in conjunction with Trim mode to not allow us to trim transition points, but also evaluate the quality of our transition points, adjust its length and its timing.

And again, to exit trim mode, just click on your timecode track and you are now back to Source/Record editing.

Using sync locks

In the 07_03 subfolder I've got a bin called Sync. Inside there, there is a sequence called fine_cut_interview. You can see that it's got three video tracks and four audio tracks. Now there is a sync relationship between the material on V1 and the audio on A1 and A2, and that's because this material was either captured or imported together into the system. This could be called an Explicit Sync Relationship because Media Composer can detect this relationship and will tell us if it gets changed.

However, by virtue of the edits of working on this piece and putting things together in the current pattern that they're in and the material on A3 and A4, there is an implicit sync relationship between all of the tracks of material. This implicit sync relationship is not detectable by Media Composer. For example, if I parked at the head of interview clip 4 and I entered into Trim mode--let's activate Ripple Trim mode--and we wanted to trim let say the video track V1 and A2, now let's say I added material on to the head of just V1 and A2 here, we would expect that clip now to be out of sync with the audio on A1.

Now when I let go, that's exactly what happened. As you can see, the white line has been invoked on the clip there, and we can see that the clip is now 42 frames out of sync. What's less obvious of course is that we've also altered the sync relationship between V1, A2, A3, A4 and V3, V2. So let undo that, and I would like to re-perform the same trim but this time using my sync locks/ I am going to switch these on. What these do, they act to preserve the sync relationship between material on different tracks, regardless of whether the sync relationship is explicit or not.

So, for example, this time when I drag out and add material onto the head of interview clip 4, notice that the system ignores my command. It's basically saying, "I can't complete that command without throwing the sequence out of sync." Alternatively, if I trim the other way, and I push interview clip 01 on V1 and A2 further down the timeline, in order to preserve the sync relationship, Media Composer will now open up a gap on the other tracks so that nothing will slip out of sync relationship.

Now let's undo that because I would like to show you a different variation on the same trim. Because maybe I do want to alter the beginning point of interview clip 4, I don't want to split my music on A3 and A4 or my Broll on V3 and V2. So this time if I repeat the trim and I push my material further down the timeline, now just these tracks will update, leaving my Broll and music alone. Because I still have the sync locks on V1, A1, and A2, if I try this trim now, notice that it's still going to bring A1 along for the ride in order to preserve sync.

Using sync locks is most useful when making adjustments to a very complex sequence and you want to make sure that nothing downstream from where you are working will get thrown out of sync.

Using Slip and Slide mode

Now as well as our Trim tools in Media Composer, we also have Slip & Slide tools, which are very similar to what you are used to in Final Cut Pro. Here is an example. This clip here, 9965, when I play it back, notice how the clip ends. (music playing) (Female speaking: Swing dancing is bigger now around the world ) (Female speaker: than it ever was. It's bigger now than it was when it first, when it first came out in the--) Okay, so I like the position of the clip in the sequence, but I don't like the fact that our dancers are coming out of their pose, relaxing, and starting to walk off at the end of the clip there.

So to get this right, what I'm going to do is I'm going to park on the very final frame of that particular clip. Next, I'm going to activate this track, and now what I can do is I can come up here to my Slip Left and Slip Right arrows. Now if I click any of these, what will start to happen is I'll start to slip the material backwards or forwards down the timeline, but leave the actual clip in situ, so you can see that I could end now quite accurately on her finger wag, maybe stop right there, and now if I were to play back the clip, we should have a much better end point.

(Female speaker: It's bigger now around the world than it ever was. It's bigger now than when it first, (Female speaker: when it first came out in the '40s) There we go. That's nice. So that's how to slip a clip without going into Trim mode. Let's go and look at a different example. Here I've got 9980. Let's play it back and just see how it looks. (Female speaker: You want to be authentic and you want to match the dance that you're doing, but you also) (Female speaker: need to be comfortable enough to--) Okay, so again, we've kind of got some spurious action here at the beginning. The hat's just coming out of the frame.

That's a bit disconcerting. So we might want to slip this shot, leaving it in exactly the same place again in the timeline, but slipping the content within it to tidy up the feel and the flow of the edit. So a different way to slip a shot would be to use Trim mode, and the way I enter is to lasso the clip from right to left. So I'm going to click just outside of the timeline here and draw the box over the clip that I want to slip.

Notice that now I've got dual-pink rollers, but they're on either end of the clip, and they are on the inside edges of the clip, indicating that it's going to be a slip. So now I could use my arrows, for example, to slip the content further down the timeline-- that would be one way of working. Another way of working would be to actually use a dynamic trim technique. And so what I'm going to do is drop into Loop Playback mode and I'm going to use my in-point marker or my out-point marker to adjust where the content should cut in or cut out on the clip.

Okay, so here we go. (Female speaker: For swing dancing, you want to be authentic and you want to match--) There we go. (Female speaker: For swing dancing, you want to be authentic and you want to match the dance that you're doing,) (Female speaker: but you also need to be comfortable enough to perform those dances.) (Female speaker: For swing dancing, you want to be authentic and you want to match the dance that you're doing,) (Female speaker: but you also need to be comfortable enough to perform those--) So there, I was able to adjust my in point at the content on the fly, and then I have the Loop Playback update to show the results of that change in real time.

So that's another way of slipping material in the timeline, but this time I was able to get a bit more context in terms of the feel of the music, what's being said, et cetera, et cetera. Notice also that when I'm slipping in Trim mode, I get a nice display that shows me the incoming and outgoing pops of the clip that I'm working on, but also the neighboring clips. This is the tail of the outgoing, and this is the head of the incoming clip, and that's why, as I move this clip forwards and backwards in the timeline, we only see updates here.

We don't see an update here on the outgoing or here on the incoming side, and that's because, again, we're not adjusting anything else in the sequence other than this individual clip and the content within it. Okay, let's move on to Slide. You can see here if I exit Trim mode and I zoom in a little bit, that we've got a gap between 9980 and 9940. Let's play over the gap and see what it looks like. (Female speaker: Comfortable enough to perform those dances.) So that's not really very smooth.

It's too short of a gap to really make any sense, so let's say we wanted to slide this clip further down the timeline. Well, yes, we could use our red Segment mode, lift Overwrite arrow, pick it up, and move it around. But I want to show you a different technique, so this time what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold down Shift+Option, click back outside of the timeline area, and draw a bounding box over my clip, let go. But notice there is a difference. The pink rollers are now on the outside of my clip, and what this means is that the contents of my clip won't change; rather, the outside edges will change.

In other words, the clip will move up or down the timeline and the transition point here would change depending upon which way I go. So let's try this right now. Let's start slipping up or down the timeline. You can see that the actual track here gives us some update, and we'll also see updates here and here, but obviously this material will remain exactly the same. Let's move it back down though, because it's really moving it up, so it covers that gap, which is really what I'd like to do.

Once it hits that clip, it stops there. I can continue of course, but it'll always stop when it hits another clip to give the opportunity to say, no, that's good. That's where I want it to be. So that's sliding a clip that had black both before it and after it. Let's change around now and slide maybe MVI_9980 instead and see how it beehives. Again, I'm going to hold down Shift+Option, click up outside of the timeline area, lasso my clip. Now this time as I slide the clip watch what happens.

As I slide this way down the clip or this way up the clip, again, the content of the clip that I'm working on remains the same. But notice this is very different to simply picking up a clip using the red Segment Overwrite arrow and moving it, and the reason for that is as follows: If I did pick this up with the Red Segment Overwrite Arrow and move it either left or right down my timeline then I would leave a gap on one side. Whereas when I'm doing this using slide and using my arrows here, or maybe doing a dynamic update trim, I'm actually going to be bringing the material on either side of my edit with me.

So as I slide this clip further down the timeline, notice that I'm also extending the outgoing side of 9980 and retracting the head of 9940. So that's the difference between picking a clip up and sliding it down the timeline, versus sliding it down the timeline using the Slide tools themselves. Okay, so now we've seen some really good examples of the range of tools available for working with clips in the Media Composite timeline. Using interface buttons, keyboard commands, gestures, and dynamic keystrokes during loop playback, we can trim the heads and tails of clips in either Ripple or Overwrite mode, and we can also move transition points backwards and forwards, move entire clips by sliding them, or change the content of a clip by slipping it.

In short, we have all the control at our fingertips now. The only thing that we need to do is practice to make us faster.

Setting up the timeline for multi-cam editing

As a culmination of our study of editing tools and timeline functionality, we are now going to cover multi-cam editing. Multicam is a powerful tool that's also a microcosm of many of the things that we've covered in the course so far. There are two main ways that Multicam is used in production. The first way is to use multiple cameras to capture different angles of action on set or on location and then use those group clips to cut together a scene. The pace and the timing of the events in the scene will be based upon the editing of the action of dialog.

The other way to use Multicam is to capture multiple different angles of action, at for example a sports or music event and then cut between the different angles as the action plays out in real time. In Chapter 3 we mapped some multi-cam functionality to our custom tool palette here. We have got the Quad Split button, the Nine Split button, the Swap Camera Banks button, go to Previous in Group, go to Next in Group. By the way, go to Previous and Next are also mapped to your up and down arrows on your keyboard when you are in Multicam mode.

If we come over to the Project window and into the Settings tab, I can open up the keyboard settings, and you can see here that the default Keyboard settings are to have Multicam 1 through 4 mapped on F9 through F12. If I hold down the Shift key, you can see that 5 through 8 are also mapped to the same keys, but the shifted version of those keys. I prefer to map my multi-cam cameras in a different way, so what I am going to do is I am going to come back over to the Keyboard setting in the Settings tab.

Now I AM GOING TO USE COMMAND+D TO DUPLICATE THAT SETTING, AND I AM GOING TO CALL ONE OF THEM MULTI-CAM. NOW I AM GOING TO SWAP OVER AND PUT THE CHECK MARK NEXT TO THE MULTICAM SETTING. NOW I WILL USE COMMAND+3 TO BRING UP THE COMMAND PALETTE, AND WHAT I AM GOING TO DO IS CREATE A SPECIAL KEYBOARD LAYOUT JUST FOR MULTICAM. So I am going to come over here to the Multicam tab, and now I'm going to use button-to-button reassignment to assign 1 to key 1, Multicam camera 2 to 2, and so on, there on my keyboard, so I can keep things pretty straight and easy when I am Multicam editing.

Just put 5 in there, 6 in here, 7, 8, and 9. And I am going to map Swap Camera Bank on to 0. Now I can close the Command palette and the Keyboard settings and we can move on to the next step of preparation. Now before going any further, I should point out the Multicam playback and performance is more demanding than regular editing, as there are more files or streams in action simultaneously. As such, the more your system meets or exceeds the minimum system requirements for Media Composer 5.5, then the easier time of it you will have.

In addition, if you're running you media or courseware from a fast external drive, you will again get much better performance than if you're storing your media on your internal Mac hard drive. If your system is struggling to play back multiple streams then try switching the video quality mode down to best performance, the yellow mode down here. If that doesn't work then the other thing you could try is going to your Format tab and switching you Format down to SD. And then worst case scenario, if you're on an older machine and you're using quite high-resolution footage, perhaps the best thing would be to switch to the SD tab and transcode your material into a smaller resolution and make your Multicam decisions with that material.

ANOTHER SETTING THAT WE NEED TO PAY ATTENTION TO WHEN WE ARE SETTING UP FOR A MULTICAM EDIT IS UNDER THE COMPOSER MENU, THERE IS A MULTICAM TAB. Here I can set how the Multicam tool will show up in my display, either Fullscreen or Quad or Nine Split. I can also choose how the Multicam edit will show up on my client monitor if I have monitoring or I/O hardware attached to my system. Again, my Client Monitor could be showing the Line Cut or the Quad or Nine Split, or it could be switched off.

Okay, back to Bins, and in my bin here I would normally have synchronous material that's being shot at the same time, and hopefully it's got the same time code. Now in the real world it doesn't always work out that way, and this is the real world because I don't actually have synchronous material. But what I do you have, are a number of GoPro clips of footage from the motorcycle here. And what we will do is we will use these as our example of having multiple cameras to edit with.

So let's switch back text view because that is going to be easier for us to manage. Now if these really were synchronous clips with timecode then the timecode is what we are going to use to sync them up. If they didn't have synchronous timecode, but they were still synchronous clips then we would want to move through each clip and find a sync point and make an in point there. Since I don't have either of those luxuries, I am just going to go ahead and SELECT ALL OF MY CLIPS LIKE SO, AND I AM GOING TO COME DOWN TO THE FAST MENU, I AM GOING TO CHOOSE TO GROUP CLIPS, WHICH IS SHIFT+COMMAND+G. I GET THE CHOICE OF HOW I WOULD LIKE TO SYNC THEM. In this particular case, I will just leave it on in point and I will go from the beginning of each clip, and there we go.

NOW WE HAVE CREATED A GROUP CLIP, SO LET'S GO AHEAD AND GIVE THAT A MEANINGFUL NAME. We will call it motorcycle_group, like so. Now if I load this clip into the Source viewer, it really doesn't look any different to any other clip that I've loaded so far in the course, with the exception that it has this group clip icon next to it up here. THE WAY TO GET MEDIA COMPOSER TO DISPLAY THIS AS A MULTICAM GROUP IS TO COME DOWN HERE AND SELECT EITHER QUAD SPLIT OR NINE SPLIT (put these buttons under the Record/Canvas Window). If I am in Quad Split mode then obviously I can move backwards and forwards between my material using my up and down arrows. I can go to next in group, next in group. Now I've gone off the screen on to Camera 5 and Camera 6 and then when I press down again, I am going to come back to Camera 1. So if I actually want to see the other group, I am going to have to swap camera bank, and now when I move my selection down, I'll finally see it onscreen here. So I have got my two Camera Banks that I can swap backwards and forwards between, and I can use my 0 key on the keyboard to do that with when I am in Multicam mode. And then I can move backwards and forwards between previous clip and next clip in the group, like so.

The green bar is obviously indicating which camera is currently live, and of course I could also click inside the window here to make those selections as well. And then, using Shift+Command together, if I hold them down, I will get the names of my clips. Let's switch to the next Camera Bank, Shift+Command. I can see the names of my clips again. And of course I could also use my 1 through 9 keys on my keyboard to swap camera angles when I am in Multicam mode as well. Now if I use my spacebar on the keyboard, obviously I can play back the results of what I have got grouped in the Source viewer right now.

(video playing) (car revving) IT'S PRETTY LOUD THOUGH, SO WHAT I AM GOING TO DO IS I AM GOING TO GO UP TO MY TOOLS MENU, I AM GOING TO BRING UP MY AUDIO MIXER TOOL, AND I AM GOING TO GANG TOGETHER A1 AND A2 (by making sure both green lights are on beneath their values), AND I AM GOING TO DROP THE LEVEL DOWN to maybe -8 or -9. Let's see how that is. (video playing) (car revving) Still pretty loud, so let's just drop it down a little bit further like that. Okay, so we won't deafen ourselves as we go through and do our Multicam edit.

Now that also brings up an important point.

IF I CLICK UP HERE AT THE TOP OF THE SOURCE VIEWER, YOU CAN SEE THAT NOT ONLY I HAVE GOT A CHOICE BETWEEN WHICH CAMERA IS CURRENTLY ACTIVE VISUALLY, BUT I ALSO HAVE A CHOICE OF WHAT AUDIO I AM CURRENTLY USING AS WELL, AND I ALSO HAVE THIS CHOICE UP HERE, AUDIO FOLLOW VIDEO. I WILL LEAVE THIS OFF IF I AM REALLY JUST CUTTING DIFFERENT VIDEO ANGLES TO A SOUNDTRACK, FOR EXAMPLE. BUT IF I WAS CUTTING A DIALOG SCENE THEN I'D PROBABLY WANT TO SWITCH ON AUDIO FOLLOW VIDEO. NOW WHEN I EDIT IN SOME PICTURE, I WILL EDIT IN THE AUDIO WHICH BELONGS TO THAT AT THE SAME TIME.

Okay, so that's most of the preparation that we need to do in order to begin a Multicam edit. In the next video, we will actually perform the Multicam edit and see how that works.

Multi-cam editing

So in the previous video, we went through all of the things that set us up to do a multi-cam edit. So now we're actually going to through the process of doing some multi-cam editing.

THE FIRST THING THAT WE'LL NEED TO DO THOUGH OF COURSE IS CREATE A SEQUENCE. SO WHAT I'M GOING TO DO IS RIGHT- CLICK IN MY BIN AND CREATE A NEW SEQUENCE CALLED COMMUTE_MULTICAM. THERE WE GO. SO NOW WE HAVE A BLANK SEQUENCE READY TO GO. THE NEXT THING WE NEED TO DO IS FIGURE OUT WELL, WHICH CAMERA WOULD WE LIKE TO START ON? I think I'm going to happen to know that's where the engine starts and the bike begins its journey.

So that's going to be the first camera that I LAY INTO THE SEQUENCE. WHAT I'M GOING TO DO NOW IS POP THIS MATERIAL INTO MY SEQUENCE LIKE SO, AND IT SHOWS UP IT'S JUST ONE BIG LONG CLIP. THE TRICK TO THIS IS NOW I'M GOING TO SWITCH INTO MULTI-CAMERA MODE, SO THAT'S SHIFT+COMMAND+M, AND NOTICE THAT THE CONTROLS UNDER THE SOURCE VIEWER HAVE DISAPPEARED. AND AS I MOVE BACKWARDS AND FORWARDS NOW IN MY SEQUENCE, NOTICE THAT THE SOURCE VIEWER IS SYNCHRONOUS WITH THE SEQUENCE. SO WHEREVER I MOVE IN THE SEQUENCE, I'M ALSO GANGED TO THAT SAME SPOT IN THE SOURCE VIEWER.

Now, why are some of the squares going black at various times? Well, that's just simply because some of the clips are shorter than others. So while some clips continue all the way through to the end of the sequence, some of the clips do not. Okay, so let's go back to the beginning.

The next thing I'd like to do is I'd like to add a couple of audio tracks into my sequence here. I'm going to disengage these tracks here because what I'd like to do is bring Sadies-Thing, the music, into my sequence like so, so that will be in the background as I'm cutting.

Now we'll lasso back over the tracks that we want, get rid of the tracks that we don't want to cut into, and now all I need to do is initiate playback, and then I can live-switch using the keys 1-9 that I mapped to my keyboard. And the 0 key will allow me to swap Camera Banks. So let's go ahead and do that right now. (cars revving) (music playing) Okay, great! So we've started creating our multi-cam edit, and you could see that because I have Audio Follow Video on then I'm actually getting my audio cutting in alongside the video.

So let's go back and review and see what we've got. (cars revving) (music playing) Okay, so there are couple of moments there that don't seem to match. First of all, it looks like we've got a clip coming in from the end of the journey here that's coming in way too early in the piece.

So here's the great thing. What I can do is I can ZOOM INTO THE TIMELINE HERE AND SHOW YOU THIS. IF I RIGHT-CLICK ON MY CLIP, NOW I CAN JUST SWITCH TO WHICHEVER CAMERA ANGLE BEST SUITS THAT MOMENT. And the same is true if I've cut to a camera angle that in this particular case looks like it may have ran out of material. So here, for example, what I COULD DO IS ADD AN EDIT POINT AND NOW JUST SWAP THE SECTION OF THAT CLIP THAT DIDN'T WORK TO SOMETHING THAT WILL WORK, like so. (cars revving) (music playing) There's another one with some black, so I'll right-click there and switch to a camera angle that's going to work for me.

And of course, if I have clips that didn't quite hit the beat--I know that maybe at the very beginning of the sequence here when I didn't quite have my full groove with the music, I may have hit some beat to little bit late-- you can see that as the audio beat on my Audio 3 and Audio 4 track there. So obviously, I'll just use my Trim tools now to bring that back to the right point and see how that looks. (cars revving) (music playing) There we go!

The great thing about this now is if I click on the timecode track and stop multi-cam editing, actually switch myself out of Multi-cam Edit mode, Shift+Command+M, and go ahead and do a whole bunch of extra work on my sequence, but now I'd like to go back into Multicam mode, re-sync my motorcycle_group with this current commute timeline, then all I need to do is choose Shift+Command+M again from my keyboard, and now I'm dropped back into Multi-cam mode, and everything is back in sync.

So I could even pick up and continue multi-cam editing from this point forward if I wanted to. So that's a brief example of how to use multi-cam Editing in Avid Media Composer.

08 UNDERSTANDING AUDIO

Exploring the audio environment

When you're editing, the use of various tools for trim, effects, multi-cam editing, or audio is a continuous flow. Editors are using all of the tools in concert to achieve the desired effect. However, for study, we sometimes have to break things out by themselves. In the case of audio, this is particularly necessary because the topic is huge and because there are many specialized audio tools, techniques, and processes. Here in the audio_basics bin, I've got a sequence called audio_pass loaded into the Record viewer.

What I'd like to do is spend a few moments just re-familiarizing ourself with the Media Composer interface, but this time from an audio perspective. So here in the bin I've got some audio-only clips. You can see that they have a small icon that's a black box with an audio waveform inside. If I switch to Frame view, you can see that they're displayed as a blue box with an audio waveform inside there. If I double-click and load it into my Source viewer, there is no image associated with the clip.

However, the name of the clip is up here, the icon is also here, and of course if I play it back, I'll hear it. (whooshing sound) Now, in Final Cut Pro, we're used to seeing the big old waveform here in the viewer, and that's not the case with Media Composer. If we want to see the audio waveform of our source material then we need to come down here to the timeline area, and we need to toggle the Source/Record timeline view.

Now we can see the audio waveform for our source material just like we would in Final Cut Pro up here in the viewer area. One thing that will really help us take full advantage of being able to see the waveform like this is to make the tracks a bit bigger. We have done that several times in the course. What I'm going to do here is actually choose my Audio Editing toolset that we set up in Chapter 3. Here I've automatically switched on various tools, such as the Audio tool, the EQ tool, the Audio Mixer tool, and resized the timeline area, so I can see and use the tools in the timeline a lot easier.

The Composer window is also being collapsed down into a single viewer. The thinking here being is if we're at the audio mix stage, we probably want to concentrate on our sequence. We don't really need to use up the screen real estate with the Source viewer. And now that my tracks are a bit bigger, you can also see that I'm displaying extra information here in the timeline. Not only do I have the name of my clip, but I also have its source track. So let's switch back to monitoring the record side, and let's play back our sequence and notice where Media Composer is giving us feedback.

(music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together.) (Female speaker: It brings you to a simple time where the rules were defined.) So one of those obvious places we're getting feedback is here in the Audio tool. Now, if this wasn't opened, we would be saving some screen real estate, and we would be relying on this audio meter here, built into the timeline. Now one quick thing here to note is that next to 1 and 2 we have an In/Out button.

If I click this to In, notice that the audio levels are sort of just hovering there, and the reason for that is what I've just done is I've switched my Audio tool to be looking at the incoming audio signal. Now, of course when I hit Play in the timeline, it's going to snap straight back to Output mode. (music playing) (Female speaker: One person follows one person.) And then flip back to Input mode when I stop again. Most times when we're editing we're going to want to leave that in Output mode and just be monitoring what's going out of the system.

Now next to the audio meters here, we have the Meter menu. Here we can do things like set how the meter behaves: Peak Hold, Infinite Hold, Reset Peaks. We can also set a reference level, for example, and choose what that reference level might be. We can also play calibration tone directly from here, (beeping) and we can also create tone media as well. If we wanted to create four tracks of tone media and send it to our bin here, just check the correct drive, click OK, and now I'm going to render Audio Tone Meter directly to my bin, like so.

If I really want to keep my setup looking very sparse, I also have the ability to hide the audio meters here in the timeline toolbar as well. Let's put them back on for now. If I now re-choose Audio Editing mode, I'll bring the bigger audio tool back up, and we can see that we have pretty much the same functionality inside of the main audio tool, as well as access to our Input and Output setting. The other area where we're getting feedback inside of Media Composer as we move backwards and forwards through our sequence is that the Audio Mixer tool is reflecting the levels over which it is parked.

So as I move other clips which have different levels, you see those levels update in the Audio Mixer tool itself. So that's a basic layout of the audio environment here in Media Composer. In the next video, we'll start to actually use these tools to affect the audio levels and audio properties.

Understanding audio basics

So obviously as we start to build up our tracks and create an audio mix, we've got various different tracks that we need to be able to listen to, either together or in isolation. So over here we've got our solo buttons, so this would be soloing A1 and A2. (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together.) Or I could choose, for example, to mute A1 and A2, which would therefore solo all the rest of the tracks. (music playing) Now obviously we can use all of the same navigation tools that we've been using up until now.

We can use the Spacebar or J, K, L to play clips back. We can scrub through the timeline, and we can step through the timeline. But when we're dealing with audio of course, we're most interested in those modes which enable us to listen to the audio as we move or navigate around the clip or the sequence. So, straight away you probably notice the difference with Final Cut Pro. If I move backwards and forwards in my timeline here or step one or 10 frame forwards or backwards, I'm not hearing any audio.

In Final Cut Pro, I would hear a digital scrub as I move forwards or backwards. So in Media Composer you can switch this on by using the Caps Lock key. Now as I moved backwards and forwards, you'll better hear what I'm doing. (music playing) Same is true from stepping backwards and forwards. (audio playing) If I'm playing back more quickly than real time, Media Composer will support up to 16 tracks of playback up to three times the frame rate. Beyond that, playback will be silent.

(audio playing) And we know that if we want analog scrub then we can hold down K and use L or J to scrub backwards or forwards. (audio playing) So there are some of the different modes of actually navigating around the timeline or within clips and listening back to what the content is. An important audio setting to bear in mind when scrubbing is whether the system is looking forwards from the playhead at the incoming frame, or backwards at the outgoing frame.

If we go to the Project window and to the Settings tab, right up at the top here we have a sitting for Audio, and you can see here that that's exactly what's being displayed. Media Composer is set by default to audibly scrub the incoming fine. If you want to change that, this is the setting that you need. Underneath that is another setting called Audio Project, and we'll cover that at the end of this chapter. Now so far, we've been looking at working with mono audio tracks only, but with Media Composer five and later you can also work with stereo tracks, just like in Final Cut Pro.

This mean you can import, capture, and edit with audio that contains two streams of audio. If I right-click in the timeline window, you can see that I've got the choice of generating a new mono audio track or a new stereo audio track. Command+U will create a new mono audio track; Shift+Command+U will create a new stereo audio track. Now as I mentioned earlier, Media Composer supports playback of up to 16 tracks in real time. So if you're working with stereo audio tracks, you obviously going to get a lot a more bang for your buck, in terms of real-time monitoring.

If you're working with Mono tracks, or you reach the full extent of the 16 tracks of real-time playback, then you can move through to do audio mixdowns. To mix down a whole section of the timeline, what we do is we select that area in the timeline, we go to the Special menu, and then we choose Audio Mixdown from here. We get a dialog which asks us where would like to render the media. We get a choice of which bin to go to and whether or not we're creating a mono or stereo audio mixdown, and this would be the wide combine tracks together to save track real estate and allow yourself more flexibility towards the end of your process when you're mixing many, many different tracks together.

Okay, so we've looked at all of the basics now to do with how to deal with audio and how to monitor our audio. Now let's move through and start mixing.

Using the Audio Mixer and audio keyframes

Okay, let's turn our attention to audio mixing. There are a couple of different ways of achieving your audio mix in Media Composer. We'll go through those right now. I've got the advanced_audio_pass sequence open, and that's the one I am going to be working with here. Now the first thing I'd like to look at is the Audio Mix tool. So I am going to go to the Tools menu and open up the Audio Mixer. Let's put it up over here. Now this should look very familiar. It is very similar indeed to the Audio Mixer in Final Cut Pro.

The only difference is that in Media Composer there isn't a master fader in the Audio Mixer itself. So we are just going to be controlling the individual levels of tracks in the timeline. The first thing is I want to be able to see the tracks that I'm working on. Now with reduced real estate, you'll probably want to keep to four tracks, but you can see here that you can open it up to eight or even 16 if you got the room on your desktop. Let's go back to four. When you are working with four and you've got more than four tracks then in that case you could just go through the groups here to display the other tracks in the timeline.

Other than that, the controls are very similar. You can see here that I can adjust my levels. One difference with Final Cut Pro is that if I'm dealing with dual mono tracks in Media Composer and I want to change the level, I need to gang the two sides together so that they change together, like so. So first off, let's play back and see what we've got. (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together. It brings you to a simple time.) That's a pretty good level. Let's just see what else we've got down here in the timeline. (Female speaker: A clothing store.) Now that clip might be a little low.

So if it is, I can just go ahead and adjust the level, like so, (Female speaker: The '30s 40's and '50s.) and then keep moving down my timeline. As you can see, when I park over a clip, I get a readout of the current level, and it looks to me like all of these levels here are just maybe a little low. So if I want to adjust more than one clip in one go, the way to do that would be to select all of the clips that I want to involve in my audio adjustment, and then I am going to park on the first clip here.

And I've got two different methods I can use. The first is I could set this to a new level, let's say 0--and by the way, Option+Clicking on the level will return it 0 as well. And if I wanted to set all of the clips now on this track to that level, come to the Fast menu, and I could say Set Level on Track - In/Out, and now all of the clips are set in/out at 0. Alternatively, if I just wanted to make an adjustment, if I had a whole bunch of different audio levels across a track but I felt that they were all just a little low, then I could do a similar thing: go over to Fast menu, but instead of saying Set Level In/Out, I could say Adjust Level In/Out. And you can see I've got the same functionality available for Pan as well.

And panning here in the mixer tool is simply done here at the bottom. I can pan left on the left track, pan right on the right track, if that's what I want to do. Or again, I can use my Option key, click in there, and it will return to the default value. Okay, now let's turn our attention to audio tracks 5 and 6 down here. What I am going to do is I am going to mute 1 and 2 so that they don't interfere with what I am doing, and let's see what we've got. Huh! Now, I am not hearing anything.

So let's see what's going on in the sequence here. If I open up the Track Control panel, you are going to see that these tracks are being switched off. So in order to hear them, I am going to have to switch them back on. Now let's see what we've got. (music playing) Okay, that's a really loud level and in fact if we play back with the sync dialog, (music playing) it's just completely drowning it out. So we are going to need to drop that level. Another thing that I'd like to do as well is I'd like to actually drop the size of the audio waveforms here, so I can see more description of what's actually going on.

So first of all, I am just going to highlight those tracks and then Command+Option+K will allow me to reduce the audio waveform. It looks like I've got the same problem on 3 and 4 so in anticipation of working with that track as well, same thing. Let's just reduce it so we can see more clearly what we're using. Okay, so back to 5 and 6. Another method that we can use to adjust audio levels directly in the timeline are audio keyframes. In Media Composer, the way that I switch these on is I would go to the keyframe button here in the Track Control panel and activate Auto Gain.

I am going to do this on both tracks. Now, Auto Gain is very similar to Toggle Clip Overlays in Final Cut Pro. We know that in Final Cut now we get a line across our clip and we better actually just drag that line up or down. The difference with Media Composer is if you want to work that way, the first thing that you are going to need to do is actually add a keyframe. I am going to enlarge in these tracks slightly so that we can see more clearly what we're doing here, because as you can see, when we're in this mode, Media Composer actually puts a scale as well on the tracks that helps us figure out roughly where we are in the audio level.

So first off, I am going to go ahead and add a keyframe. I am going to use the Add Keyframe button here from our customized tool palette. You see that the keyframe has now have been added and now just like in Final Cut, I could adjust the level upwards or adjust the level downwards, like so. And if you look just below here as I'm adjusting, you'll see that I am getting a little readout which is telling me what the value I'm currently at, -7 in this case. Let's play that back. (music playing) might need to drop it down.

So to do that with audio keyframes, we need to place one keyframe there and then another where we want the fade to end. And now we can drop our level down like so and when she comes in, we'll be able to hear her. (music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together.) So that's a very simple way to create audio keyframing in the Media Composer timeline. I should tell you that the Audio Mixer also has other modes. There is an Automation mode, which is very similar to Record Audio keyframes in Final Cut Pro, and then there is also a Live mode for using external control surfaces--again very similar to the way that Final Cut Pro works.

What I would like to show you though up here on audio tracks 3 and 4 is another method for creating animations in the audio level. Here I've got a clip that I think is probably a little loud again. Let's switch that track on. (music playing) Okay, so the first thing I am going to do on 3 and 4 is just drop the level down a bit, so we can actually here the dialog, or the sync audio, at the same time. (music playing) (Female speaker: You also need to be comfortable enough.) Okay, so that's probably a little loud. Just take it down a bit more. But it's right here there is a moment in time where I'd like to have the audio come back up to fill this gap.

Now earlier we use a keyframing method. Here what I'll do is I am actually going to use the Add Edit button, which is very similar to the Razor in Final Cut Pro. So I am going to add an edit point there on my audio track. If I zoom in, you'll be able to see that more clearly. And I am going to add another edit point just after the gap there. There we go. Now I can drop the audio level back up during the gap, and we'll hear that change. (music playing) (Female speaker: And can this dress hold up?) (music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing is bigger--) Now that's great, but I can also smooth it out if I mark the range like so, and now we go to our Quick Transition dialog, just here.

We can choose a dissolve, centered on the cut. I'll probably make it 20 frames long and Add. But before I add, let's click Apply to All Transitions (IN - > OUT). So now when we add, it gets added to both sides of the transition. (music playing) (Female speaker: And can this dress hold up?) (music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing is--) So there we have it, some basic tools for getting around the audio mix in Media Composer. We can use keyframes, we can use the Audio Mixer, and we can use audio transitions all together to achieve our desired results.

Applying audio effects

In Final Cut Pro, we've got the choice of using audio filters and audio transitions directly within the application itself, but we also have Soundtrack Pro, which has some really great audio EQ, and effect capabilities. In Media Composer, there are really two ways of adding audio effects or filters to our work. The first way is to apply a clip-based effect. There are a couple of different tools for applying clip-based efects. Let's look at those now. I'm going to come up here to my Audio Mixer, and I'm going to choose the Audio Mixer button here.

This is actually the effect mode selector. If I click on this, I've got the choice of going to EQ or AudioSuite. Let's start out with EQ. So EQ would allow me obviously to come in and start to do some primary alteration here. Basic alteration to the way that my clip sounds. (Female speaker: ?brings you together, brings you to a simpler time.) I could drop the clip into a loop playback mode, make adjustments, loop again and see what the results are going to sound like.

In addition, I've got access to a number of different presets in here that I can try out against my audio to see how that affects it. So this might be a fast way to solve the problems such as hum or hiss or something like that. If we now move to the next clip, what I can show you is that I can now click back on EQ and choose AudioSuite instead. Now, we've switched from the Audio Mixer to the EQ window and through to the AudioSuite Window. The AudioSuite Window contains a range of other effects that we can apply, everything from Time Shift and Pitch Shift through to Normalize, Delay, Multi-Tap Delay, and there is also EQ choices here as well.

So obviously I make my selection here. I can open up the plug-in interface using this button here, make my adjustments, and move on to the next clip. So there are some tools for adding clip-based effects to your work. Let's go ahead and close this window now, because I'd like to show you another technique. Here in the track I've got access to the RTAS tool. This is actually going to allow me to place an effect over the entire track. So, for example, if I went into here, maybe into Reverb, and then add AIR Non-Linear Reverb.

This is going to pull out my plug-in interface and now I could stop making adjustments as I play back. (Female speaker: ?1950s, across the street from a company in Los Angeles and since I was a little girl?) So as you can see I can mix together both clip-based effects and track-based effects. Incidentally, if we look here, this track-based effect is only on A1 at the moment. So if I wanted to copy this down to A2, what I would do is hold down my Alt button and now I can drop that into the bucket on A2 as well.

I've got an additional 4 buckets, so I can layer a quite complex effects chain in real time across the entire track. Now obviously there is a point where if you've got something very complex to do, you may reach the maximum number of real time effects on that track. If you do reach a point where you've maxed out the number of clip and track-based effects that you can do, then the solution is going to be to do an audio mixdown. So let's do that on the music tracks right here.

What I'd like to do is select from the beginning of my timeline all the way through to the end, and I'm going to activate just the music tracks here. Now, from the Special menu I'm going to choose Audio Mixdown. Here I'm going to select Stereo and the Target Track will be A9. That's the next available track in the sequence. Make sure I render it to my media drive and OK. The audio mixdown is created and now I've got a new track in my timeline which is my audio mixdown for the music.

So what I should do now is mute the original music tracks in my timeline and we'll be able to hear the combination mixdown now on A9. (Music playing) (Female speaker: Swing dancing...) So if I wanted to continue now adding effects, I could. I could come here into my mixdown audio, choose the RTAS tool again. Maybe this time I'd like to go in and alter the dynamics.

You can see here that I could compress, de-ess, expand or use the Bombfactory plug-in to give the whole track some more punch and base. So you can see that you can use these tools together to achieve a quite complicated mix and mix it all down and then continue to add effects onto the mixdown. Of course I do need to point out that when you mix down audio like this, this mixdown is no longer recapturable or reimportable, and as such you'll need to take steps to protect that media if you're going to be going on with your project perhaps to an audio facility or somewhere else for audio finishing.

Importing audio and input settings

There are a great variety of ways to manage audio into Media Composer and this is obviously a good thing because every project has different sources which need to be corralled together into the master sequence, mixed, and then output according to the final delivery specifications. The main ways to get audio into Media Composer? First of all as a signal, second of all as an AMA linked file, and thirdly, as an imported file. So first, let's consider signal-based input. If I go to the tools menu and choose the Capture tool, Command+7, you can see here that we've got our ability to choose what audio input that we're currently using, and also which tracks we'd like to capture or input.

We can also choose to group mono tracks together as stereo tracks on capture. Now, at the moment I don't have any hardware attached to my system, so my only choice is to use the Host- 1394 port for DV-based capture. But if I had some hardware attached to my system that could accept bass band signals, they would show up here too, and I would be able to choose which signal I'd like to record. For example, iDapt, IES, or SDI. Okay, let's go ahead and close the Capture tool, because I'd like to show you another tool that's used for getting audio signals into the system.

I am going to return to the Tools menu and this time choose Audio Punch-In. Now, this is very much the same as the Voiceover tool in Final Cut Pro. You can see here that I could choose to record either to a new track or a co-track in my sequence. Again, I have got my input source available to me and in this case it could be the built-in line in or the built-in microphone, choose the correct drive, hit Record, and then I can record directly onto this track in my timeline in context as I listen back to the other audio that's playing back in the sequence.

If you're following along with the course materials, have a go in Audio Punch-In now using the Voiceover Sequence here. Okay, I am going to go ahead and close the Audio Punch-In tool. Now to support the endeavor of bringing audio signals into the project correctly and efficiently, we need to pay attention to the Project Settings. So up here into the Project window under the Settings tab we've got the Audio settings that we looked at earlier in this chapter, and then we also have Audio Project. Double-click on that and let's open it up and have a look.

Here on the main tab, we can set up fundamentals like the Sample Right, the Audio File Format, the Sample Bit Depth, and then on the Input tab we can choose our Input Source. On the Output tab, we can actually affect the overall gain of the system. So in Final Cut Pro where we have the master slider in our Mixer, this would be the equivalent to that in Media Composer. And if I have appropriate hardware connected I should also be able to switch this not just from Mono to Stereo but also to Direct out as well.

On the Hardware tab we can control which audio device is being used, should there be a choice, and whether the Sync mode is internal, meaning software driven, or external, meaning hardware driven? And finally on the Effects tab, it's possible here to selectively switch off certain effects and level changes across your entire project. Perhaps, for example, we are using the editor's mix as a guide for the Audio Mixer, but supplying him or her with the media as it came from the camera or the source. Plus there is also control for sample rate conversion and the Dissolve Midpoint Attenuation, which is really required to stop two or more overlapping audio streams being extremely loud.

Some of the same controls could be found in Final Cut Pro under the FCP menu, User Preferences, Audio Outputs, and also under the FCP menu Audio\Video Settings and in the sequence presets. Okay, let's close the Audio Project window and let's turn away from signal based input now and start considering the other ways that we can bring audio media into our project. When we're dealing with AMA linked media, for example, there are no hardware requirements for I/O, but there are still multiple channels of audio to be managed.

Plus there may be requirements for some kind of external monitoring hardware. In the case of AMA media or imported media, for example, there are no hardware requirements for I/O, but there are still multiple channels of audio to be managed and other settings. So let's have a look at that. So back in the Settings tab, under AMA, and on the Link Options tab, it's here that we can edit our multi-channel audio choices. This sets how we'd like to bring material in when we link to AMA media.

Now, for media that we're actually going to import into the system, that is not just linked to it, but actually read it and write a new copy into the avid media files folder. We need to go to the Import Settings. If I click on the Import Settings, it's here on the Audio tab that I can make those decisions. Again, I have got the ability to choose how I handle mono or stereo sources, and then I have other settings. For example, convert source sample rate to project sample rate. This controls sample rate conversion during audio input.

When it's selected and it usually is by default, Media Composer will convert all of the incoming media to the sample rate of the current project. We can also affect the sample bit depth in the same way, and then we have choices about attenuating audio on the way into the system. Often times material that we import from CD, for example, or other sources is extremely hot when we bring it in. So to avoid having to keep on adjusting audio levels, we can set an audio level here that applies, for example, to CD imports.

Finally, we can automatically center monophonic clips and autodetect broadcast wave monophonic groups. In this case, if we have eight tracks that we will label sequentially then the whole group could be brought in as a single eight channel clip. So when we want to bring audio into our system, we need to not only be familiar with the tools that are used to do that but also make sure that we go through all of the settings associated with those tools to make sure that we're bringing the audio in exactly how we needed for our project.

Exporting audio and output settings

When it comes to audio output, we have similar choices to audio input. First, we can output audio as a signal and this would be done via the Digital Cut tool. So with my sequence selected, and I usually go through the process of marking the entire sequence as well, I will go to the Output menu and to the Digital Cut tool. Here I can choose which audio tracks I'm going to be outputting to and whether or not I'm going to be inserting the audio or assembling the audio. Obviously, this is the tool for laying out audio or audio with picture to tape frame accurately.

You could of course just play the audio from the timeline and record that too if you so wished. So I'm going to close the Digital Cut tool and talk about a different way to get our audio media out of the Media Composer, and that would be to take the sequence in the bin here, right- click, and choose the Export dialog. Here we've got the ability to choose a type of export, so let's go into our Options and we can choose Audio from our list of potential different output types.

We can choose Mono or Stereo, obviously conform to the Sample Rate, Bit Depth and Audio Format of the project, then save, choose a location, in this case I'm going to go to the catalyst_CONTAINER to catalyst_Outputs, and now I'm going to save the audio in my sequence out as a WAVE export. So that's how do we get material out of Media Composers as an exported audio file, so just media essentially. There is of course another option and that would be to take our sequence information and export it as a mixture of both media and metadata.

This, for example, would be the method of moving a project for Media Composer through to Pro Tools for audio finishing. To do that, I am going to do the same thing again. I'm going to right-click on my sequence in the bin and then I've got a couple of different choices. I can either say Send to and choose Pro Tools from here, and you can see I've got a couple of different choices. If my Pro Tools system is in the same facility and I can see the same media, then we don't need to actually render it out. We can just link to the audio. If the Pro Tools system is at another site or somewhere else in town, then we would want to consolidate the audio, so that those files go with the metadata to the mix session.

A different way to do it will be to just choose Export again and here you can see that I can access the same presets for export to Pro Tools here as well. In the Options dialog this is where I can set the video and data details and the audio details. So it's here, for example, that I'm going to choose what type of video I'd like to mix my sequence down to, for the Pro Tools engineers to watch as they mix. I can also choose my destinations for video and audio, and whether or not I'd like to use the current media correction settings. We will specify new ones.

On the Audio Details tab, I could choose a handle length and whether or not I'm consolidating, copying, or linking to the media. Once I'm all set up, I can choose to Export again and this time catalyst_CONTAINER, back to Outputs, and Save and now the AAF is generated to that location along with all of the media necessary to continue to mix the sequence elsewhere. If you're following along with materials, try exporting a few different timelines now using some of the different settings that we've covered.

09 ADDING EFFECTS AND FINISHING

Creating freeze frames and motion effects

I am going to start out by looking at how to create freeze frames in Avid Media Composer. I have got here some source clips in my bin. I would like to choose one of these clips to make a freeze frame out of. So first I have got to load it into the Source viewer. Then I'd choose the frame that I'd like to use as the freeze. From the Clip menu, I can now choose Freeze Frame and select one of the preset lengths. Alternatively I could also choose Other and type in a duration. Let's say we would like it to be 10 seconds.

Choose the media drive that I'd like to render the clip to and choose Ok. Once the clip is created, it's loaded into my bin and it's also loaded into my Source viewer ready for editing. And of course the same thing could be accomplished in Final Cut Pro using Shift+N. Let's look at a different example. Further down my timeline here I have a clip that's already in the sequence that I'd like to add a Freeze Frame onto. (Female speaker: Lasted longer?) (Music playing) So I'd like to add a bit more of a freeze onto the end there where they hold this sort of end pose.

So I am going to park here on this little locator that I have put in the timeline myself and what I need to do is I need to get this frame back into the Source viewer. So to do that I have got two choices. I can either select the track and then choose the Match Frame button or I can right-click and say Match Frame Track. Now that I've got that clip back into my Source viewer and the individual frame that we want is marked, we can just go back through the same process. So Clip > Freeze Frame. In this case I only need five seconds, so let's choose five seconds. Render it through.

It will go into my bin, auto populate into the Source viewer, and be a viable for editing directly into the timeline. So obviously our timeline cursor is still parked on the frame that we chose and we have got a locater it as well. But I may have moved my timeline cursor since then. If perhaps I'd gone off to do another task in the timeline before returning back to this. If I have moved my position in the sequence and I've lost now my point and perhaps I don't have a locator on it, how would I find that point again frame accurately? Well, with the source field highlighted I come down here and I would use the Reverse Match Frame button.

Watch what happens in the timeline when I click this button. You can see that it goes directly back to the frame which matches the timecode of the freeze frame here. So it's a very handy feature to rely on if you're trying to match back to something. So here now in the sequence, I am going to mark an in point there and an out point pretty much at the end of the sequence and maybe I'd like the material to go on to video track 3. Now I am going to move my play-head in a little bit in the clip and the reason for that is simply this. At the moment, the clip begins and ends here.

If I make my in point directly at the beginning of the clip and then later on decide that I'd like to create a dissolve through in to the clip, then that would cause a problem. So I tend to, with freeze-frames, graphics, things like that, I tend to make my in point a little ways into the clip to avoid those types of problems. Let's go ahead and overwrite that into the sequence and play that back. (Music playing) Great, so there is how to create a freeze frame directly in the bin or create a freeze frame from a moment in the sequence.

Let's now look at a different example of changing the speed of playback on our clip. Here at the beginning of the sequence I have a gap at the very start. I am going to use my T key to mark that gap. You can say that we've got a duration of 5 seconds and 21 frames. And now I am going to go back in time to Chapter 4 into the 04_01 subfolder into the AMA bin. There is a clip here that we brought in earlier in the course and I'd like to use this as maybe my first clip in the sequence.

Now this clip is missing or offline then please go back and watch "Linking to camera media using IMI" in Chapter 4. Now you can see I've got a section marked here that is longer than five seconds is actually it's actually 16 seconds and 13 frames. So the fastest way to get material, whether it be too much material or too little material to fit a gap in our sequence, is to use the Fit To Fill command. We have it mapped here to our custom tool palette, clicking on this it will ask us where we would like to put the new motion effect that's created.

I'd like it to go into my motion_effects bin. Click OK. It creates the effect and then it will automatically place the effect into the timeline for us. So rather than just generating a source clip, Media Composer will create the source clip and perform the edit in one operation when we use Fit to Fill. So now the new clip has been placed in my Motion_Effects bin. There it is and it's also in my timeline ready to be used. Here is a different example.

If we take our clip again of the gentleman here, load it into the Source viewer, if I wanted to create a motion effect of this clip, let's say I wanted to slow it down, mark in, mark out in the source view of this time. We've got a duration reflected up here, one second and 13 frames, and then go to the Tools menu into the Motion Effect Editor. This dialog should look pretty similar to the Time Remap controls in Final Cut Pro. As you can see here, I've got the ability to just type in a new number of frames, a new frames per second, or a percentage speed.

If I have a section marked on my timeline like it did with the Fit to Fill example, I could do that here too. I have also got a section where I can add a strobe motion which would obtain every 5 frames or type in a new value and then underneath here I have also got my rendering options. These options here are heavier and so they will require more rendering time. These options here are easier for the system to calculate in real time and depending on your system configuration may indeed play back in real-time without rendering at all.

If you hit a problem with material looking jittery when you apply a motion effect, just experiment with these different interpolation styles and you'll find a solution. So in this maybe I'd like to choose 50% speed, or add a minus to reverse the speed, and now choose the correct drive, the Interpolation Method and Create and Render. Again, it wants to know which bin it's going to put the effect into and there it goes. Again, the clip is loaded directly into the bin and also auto loaded into the Source viewer.

So there we have it. We can create a freeze frame directly from the bin or from a clip that's already in the timeline and we can create motion effects either using the Fit To Fill tool or using the Motion Effect Editor from the Tools menu.

Using timewarp effects

Now let's switch our attention to using Timewarps in Media Composer. Timewarps allow us to create freeze frames and speed changes, but also speed ramps and speed bumps as well. But Timewarps allow us to apply those effects directly to a clip that's already in a sequence. Now to apply a Timewarp effect, we need to come up here to the project window, to the Effects palette, and we're going to be looking down at categories of effects down here on the left-hand side, and pretty much at the bottom almost is the Timewarp category.

And this probably looks very similar to the Motion and Cadence filters that we can find in Final Cut Pro. However, the Timewarp effect also combines some attributes which are very similar to the Time Remap controls in Final Cut Pro as well. Now in our Timewarp category, you can see that we've got various different presets available. 0% To 100%, 100% To 0%, some of our Cadence options here, Pulldown Insertion and Removal, Reverse Motion, a Boost and a Bump, and then we actually have a blank Timewarp template, and a thing called Trim To Fill.

So just like any other effect that's applied from the Effects palette, what we'd need to do is drag the effect over to the clip in the timeline in order to apply it. So here, for example, I've got a b-roll clip that isn't quite long enough to span the gap in the sequence. (Music playing) So we get a bit of black flash there. I'm going to use the Trim To Fill effect, drag and drop the Timewarp effect onto my clip, and now I can drop into Trim mode and trim the clip out, but instead of actually changing the frame on which it ends, it's going to adjust the speed of the playback of the clip instead.

And you can see that there now, 89% is written on the clip and that's the speed at which it's going to play back to fill that gap. (Female speaker: ?the dance floor and your partner?) (Music playing) (Female speaker: My great grandmother?) So that's one application of using the Timewarp effect and as you can see, you're just going to have to drag and drop the effect over onto the clip in your sequence. A different way to access Timewarp will be to promote a regular motion effect that's already in the sequence. Remember that we added this effect using the Fit To Fill function here.

If we wanted to promote this to a Timewarp, what we do is park on the clip and then enter the Motion Effect Editor from the Timeline palette, like so. And you can see the Motion Effect Editor has come up, but it's telling us here this is a regular motion effect, and so in order to work with it in this tool I would need to promote it to a Timewarp. So let's do that. Let's promote it to a Timewarp. And now that we've done that, we can open up our Speed Graph. We also have a Position Graph as well, and you can choose whichever to work with.

I'm going to work with Speed in this case, so I'll close down the Position Graph. And so here this green line is representing the speed of my clip. If I wanted to start out at 100%, I could pull the keyframe down to that point, move through to a different place in my effect, right-click, add a keyframe, maybe move through to the end, right-click, add a keyframe. Now maybe I could take the central keyframe and just push it up in time, like so. So now we've created a speed around from 100% up to 275% and then back down to 100% again.

If I'm not quite ending at the right point, then maybe I just need to increase the speed a little bit more in the center of the clip so that I get further towards the end of the clip by its end, like so. Increase the speed in the center of the clip so that by the time we reach the end, we've progressed further through the material, like so. I've got choices again about how to interpolate. The choices at the top of the list are going to be easier to calculate and more likely to play back in real time, and the choices towards the bottom, especially FluidMotion, are going to require some fairly intensive rendering, but will give you a much higher quality result.

Down at the bottom of the tool I've got some useful buttons for rendering, removing, match framing, and loop play. I've also got a keyframe button here if I need to use it and a Fast menu which allows me to access some of the keyframe functions such as Bezier, Linear, Shelf, so that returns the interpolation between keyframes. And then things like Slip Keyframes, Align Keyframes, Select, and Delete Keyframes. Once I'm done, close the Timewarp Editor and the Timewarp is now available for playback in the sequence.

Adding transition effects

In Final Cut Pro, transition effects can be added directly from the Video Transitions option under the Effects menu. In Media Composer, transition effects are very similar to those in FCP and we'll look at a couple of different ways to add and use them. Here in the swingdance_transitions sequence, you can see that I've already added a Dissolve. Let's zoom in here onto the end of the first clip in the sequence, like so. (Female speaker: Swing dancing brings you together, bring you to a simple time.) So we can dissolve between two clips on the same track, or between clips on different tracks if we want to.

In fact, let's do that right now. Let's create a transition between this Interview 1 clip here on V1 and the b-roll clip here, 73565. To do that, the first way I'm going to show you is using the Quick Transition dialog. So park near the transition that you wish to affect, make sure the correct track is active in your sequence, and then activate the Quick Transition dialog, like so. We've used this a number of times in the course so far, so we already know that we can add different types of effects here from this Add dialog.

We've got Film Dissolve, Fade to Color, Dip to Color, etcetera. I'm going to leave this on Dissolve. Then we've got the positioning which can also be affected here graphically. We can also type in values. These buttons also allow us to affect the positioning, Centered, Ending, Beginning, and then we can choose the drive that we would render it to. Then here on the left, we could add additional tracks that we'd like to add effects to as well. Click Add and that effect has now been added to our sequence.

(Female speaker: And there's like 3 things that matter: the music?) Let's go here to the end of this b-roll clip and apply a different type of transition effect. So back to the Quick Transition dialog, but this time, I'd like to add a Dip to Color. I'd like it to be 18 frames long and centered on the cut point. Let's go ahead and add that now to our sequence and play it back. (Music playing) (Female speaker: My great grandmother?) Now, at the moment it's defaulted to a dip to black. So what happens if I'd like to now adjust the parameters of a transition effect when it's already been added to the sequence? We've got several different ways to do this.

First off, directly in the timeline itself, let's just zoom in a little bit, you can see that we've got the representation of the length of the effect displayed here with this light gray line. If I wanted to manipulate the length or position of the effect directly in the timeline here, what I do is activate my Transition Manipulation tool. You could see that now I've got little keyframes on either side of my effect, so I could lengthen one side or lengthen another side. If I hold down the Option key, I can drag both sides of the effect at the same time.

In addition, I can also use the hand to reposition the placement of the effect at the end of the clip. You can see that while I'm using these tools, I'm getting nice feedback up here from my Transition Corner Display. Let's click back on the timecode track to exit that mode. Now another way that I could re-edit this effect would be simply to park on it and re-enter the Quick Transition dialog. Here, I could make a change and then add and that would now be applied over top. The third way that I could re-edit a transition effect that I've already added to a sequence will be to enter Effects mode.

I can enter Effects mode a couple of different ways, either here using the Effects mode button or here in the Composer window. When I activate Effects mode, we get an Effect Editor window and this is where I could manipulate the parameters of the effect that we're parked on in the sequence. In this case I'm just going to make a very simple change. I'm going to come here to the background color and select White. Now, when we play it back in the sequence-- (Female speaker: My great grandmother owned?) we have a white flash instead.

Let's look at a different example. Here a little bit further down the sequence I have a cut from the suitcases to the girl opening the suitcases. Maybe I'd like to add a different type of transition effect. To do this, what I'm going to do is come over to the Effects palette. Inside the Effects palette, we know we have our categories on the left and we have the effects within those categories on the right. You can see that in the Blend category here in fact is the Dissolve that we added from the Quick Transition dialog. We also have Fade to Color and Dip to Color here too as well.

In this case, I'd like to go to the Push category and choose Left to Right. I'm going to drag it from the Effects palette and drop it not onto the clip on either side, but to the transition point between the two clips, like so. Let's play that back. (Female speaker: ?40s and 50s, across the street from the phone company in Los Angeles.) So if I'm just adding a default effect, I can drag it, drop it, and move on. However, if again we wanted to edit this effect, we would park over it and go back into Effects mode.

This time, I'd like to call out the fact that you can open the parameters within the effect by clicking down on the disclosure triangles. Here, for example, I could choose to manipulate how the effect behaves over time. Notice that when we're in Effects mode, the ribbon under the Record viewer now represents the length of the effect, not the length of your sequence. It's also containing keyframes now and we have some different tools for Loop Playback and Add Keyframe. We also have here the Grid tool which allows us to make sure that things are still in safe action and safe title as we start to work with effects.

If I wanted to make a basic change to my effect now, what I'd do is select one of my keyframes and then use Command+I to make sure that both keyframes at the beginning and the end of my effect are selected. Now, I could come over here and choose to add a border. There we go! We can see the border width has now created this white stripe at the edge of the frame. Obviously, I could go in and manipulate the color. In this case, rather than choosing a color from the Color palette, I'll choose a color from my image instead.

Let's choose another color to fade into. There we go! And then we could also go ahead and soften up the border a little bit as well. In addition, I can also show or hide the Keyframe Graph and you can see here that we've got a different display of the effect available to us. If I wanted to go in and do some more keyframing work now, for example, let's say I wanted to affect the width of the border as the effect takes place. Now what I do, I come to the Width parameter and I could choose to animate it over time, add a keyframe, add a keyframe at the end, add a keyframe in the center, and now I could create an animation over time for the width of the border.

Once I'm happy with that, close out of the Effect Editor. I'm back in Source/Record mode, and now I can play back. (Female speaker: ?in the 30s, 40s, and 50s, across the street from the phone company in Los Angeles and since?) Now, just like in Final Cut Pro, there are many, many different types of effects that you can add from the categories in the Effects palette. Not every single one of these effects is going to be a transition effect. So I suggest you play around, have a look through some of the options available, and try them out using the sequences provided.

Using segment-based effects and nesting effects

In Final Cut Pro we access video filters from the Effects menu and this is what allows us to create an effect across the duration of a clip rather than at the transition point between two clips. In Media Composer, these types of effects are referred to as segment based effects and they are accessed from the Effects palette. Here in the beginning of my sequence I have a clip that already has a Timewarp effect on it. If I wanted to add now another segment based effect on top of that, first I browse for the category that I'm interested in.

In this case, the Blend category contains the Picture-in-Picture effect and that's what I am going to start out with. So I am going to drag the Picture-in- Picture effect from the Effects palette and drop it on top of the first clip in my sequence. You can see that the result is immediate and I can play that back. (Music playing) So, so far we have managed to apply a segment based effect without having to go into Effects mode. If I'm happy with the default effect, I can move on and start creating other effects wherever I need them.

In this case though, I'd like to edit this effect. So in order to edit this effect what I need to do is go into Effects mode, so let's launch into Effects mode and this is the Effect Editor that we used when we're manipulating transition effects earlier in this chapter. We are going to use the same tool now to help us change the attributes of this Picture-in-Picture effect. Since I am going to make changes which last for the entire effect, the first thing I am going to do is highlight the keyframe at the front end. Then I am going to use Command+I to highlight all of the keyframes.

And now I can move over to the Effect Editor and start making changes. I am going to open of the Border parameter here. Once I use the disclosure triangle, I am going to see the effects sliders here, and then I am also going to see the actual category and if I open up within the category I will see the individual parameters and I can see a keyframing window here for keyframing with. In this particular case, we are just going to make a change to the width of the border. Make it slightly larger like so and then soften it up a little bit like that.

I'd also like to change the Scaling. At the moment it's defaulted to 50%. The X and Y attributes are linked together so I am just going to highlight my slider here and then I can either pull on the slider itself or I can use my arrow keys on my keyboard to reduce the size. I can use the arrow keys to stat at one value at a time, or if I hold the Shift, I can move ten values at a time. Down here underneath the viewer, I can switch on the Grid tool and this would allow me, for example, if I wanted to place this towards the edge of the frame.

I could make sure that I was still inside safe action. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's open up the Position parameter and now we can start to reposition our clip using the sliders here. If I want to switch between sliders, I can just use the Tab key on my keyboard and I can manipulate that attribute as well. If I want to move backwards and forwards between the attributes then using Tab or Shift+Tab will allow me to go backwards and forwards. There, I like that. Now if that's an effect I'd like to use again in the future, what I can do is I can tag the effect and drag it down into my bin area, let go, and now I get a copy of that effect for future use with the customized parameters already applied.

Let's look at an example of now layering another clip in concert with this on the timeline and compositing them together. Let's close the Effect Editor and look at this clip here, 9964. I have already got it marked up and I am going to put it onto the V3, like so. Now the moment because there is no effect applied to the clip on V3, we can only see that clip. If I step underneath, we can now see our original Picture-in-Picture, which is of course over nothing so it shows up as the black.

So now of course what I could do is I can take my Picture-in-Picture effect from the bin, drag it over, and drop it onto the clip that's on top. Obviously, it's exactly over the top of the effect that I already created. So let's go back into Effects mode now on the top clip and change its position. Obviously, I could use my X and Y sliders like I did previously or I could just go and grab on the image and move it down here, like so. Now notice that when I did that I was parked in the middle of the clip and so because I made a change, a new keyframe was added.

But luckily because all of my keyframes was selected at the same time, the same keyframe values have been applied to all of them. So as I scrub through my effect, now I've got two Pictures-in-Pictures, one in the top right-hand corner of the frame and one in the bottom left. Let's exit Effects mode and now that effect is live in the timeline, like so. So there is a simple example of using a segment based effect and starting to layer more than one clip over the top of each other in the sequence.

Let's look at a slightly different example. Further down here in the timeline, I've created a different type of Picture-in-Picture effect, but this time using a different effect. You can see that the icon here is a paper icon. Here, this is the icon for 3D Warp effect. That's this effect here at the top of the Blend category. Now first a note on 3D Warp. This is an effect that has many, many attributes. As a result it can be a heavier effect to process. So if you really only need to do a Superimposition or a Picture-in-Picture, you are better off selecting one of the most simple effects.

However, if you are going to need to do rotation and scaling, change the background, do de-focusing, then this is the effect for you. 3D Warp. Now the effects already applied to this clip and if I play it back, you will see that it's kind of a shaky shot. (Female speaker: To perform those dances, and not all?) So what I would like to do is use this as an example of nesting effects. I'd like to apply a Stabilize effect to this clip. So how should I go about doing that? Well, in Media Composer what we are going to do is we are going to step into the effect.

So here I am popped over the clip and I am going to go to my Step In arrow down here at the bottom of the timeline. Click on that and now the timeline view changes altogether. Notice that the timecode track is now called N1 and that mans that we are in nest level 1, so we are one layer down from the timeline inside of this effect. Now, the 3D Warp effect defaults to throwing a spare track on V1 and that's in case you have a customized background that you'd like to apply.

So the actual video clip is on layer 2 here. So now if I'd like to apply the Stabilize effect I just need to come over to the Image category, grab my Stabilize effect, drag and drop it onto my clip. Media Composer will nest out of multipoint stabilize. Stabilizing the image as much as possible and then at the end it will auto-zoom the image by just the amount needed to make sure we don't see any black edges at the side of the frame. And there we go. Now all I need to do is close the Effect Editor and I can play back the results of my Stabilize effect.

So you can see that the image is a lot more stable now and of course to see the full context, all I need to do now is step out back up to the timeline level. And so we have a Stabilize effect within our 3D Warp effect. (Female speaker: To perform those dances, and not all vintage clothing is designed with comfort. And also it has become much more scarce now.) So there we have it. A quick example of how to start compositing using segment based effects in Media Composer.

And if we need to combine effects, we can nest effects within each other and the order of the nesting is totally up to you. In this case of course, it makes much more sense for us to stylize the base image and then have the base image processed by the DVE, rather than the other way around. In the next video, we will look at some different compositing techniques.

Compositing with keyframes

In the compositing bin, I have an example sequence called composite_example_complete. If you load that up, you would be able to see a completed version of the effect that we are just about to create. You can see that we have got two layers; we have the tilt up on the swing dance poster and the slow motion of that guy here in the foreground. So let's go back to the Bin and load up composit_example. This is the same clips before we've actually added the effects to them. You can see that we have the gentleman here on V2 and then on V1.

We have the tilt up of the poster and at the moment both of them have motion effects on them. The clip on V2 has a constant motion effect, a slow motion, and then the clip on V1 actually has a ramp. Now what we are going to do is add a Flop effect to the guy in the foreground here. So back to the Effects palette and to the Flop effect. Let's drag and drop that onto our clip here, like so. Now he is on the other side of the screen which gives room for the text that we want in the background.

Now I am going to the Key category and you can see in here we have various different types of keyers, Chroma Keys, Luma Keys, RGB Key and Avid's own SpectraMatte Key. What I am going to choose is the AniMatte effect. So grab it, drag it, and drop into our clip. Oops! What went wrong? Well, in this particular case because now we are adding a second segment based effect over top of the motion effect, I need to hold down a modifier as I drag and drop the effect onto my clip.

So hold down Option and drag AniMatte and now you can apply it over top. Holding down on the Option Key auto-nests the existing effect inside the one that we just added. So if I wanted to see that other effect now, I would have to step in on my clip. There is the Flop effect and if I step in again, we can now see the original Motion effect there on the bottom level. We are on N2, so let's step up one level to N1 and step up one level again and we are back in the main timeline.

Now in order to cut this space out so we can see the clip that's underneath, I'm going to use the AniMatte effect to draw a custom matte. So to edit an effect, we park on the clip, make sure the track is active ,and enter Effects mode. Now in this particular case, since I've already added all the clips I need to my sequence and I don't really need the Source viewer anymore, what I could do is switch to Effects Editing mode. This time I have got a bit more screen real estate to play with my effects.

I have got a slightly larger viewer and if I have an effect in here that has the Keyframe Expand button, I can click on that and expand my keyframe out of this space here. To get working, what I am going to do is park on the first frame of my effect and I usually like to select all of my keyframes if I'm going to be adding something across the entire segment. Now, I want to go to my Poly tool. Come back over here, zoom out a little bit so I can see around the edges of my clip, and I am just going to start drawing.

Now if I just click point-to-point like so, I will get a straight line, but if I drag as I land, I will get curved points. Basically all I am doing here is adding control points that I can come and readjust again in just a moment. So having drawn around my shape now, you can see that I can look through to the layer below. Let's do a little bit more work though on the shape that we've created. Let's zoom in a little bit like so, so we can see the edges very clearly.

If I need to move around while I am fully zoomed in like this, then Option+Command will give me the hand and I can pan around inside my clip and get very nice and close up to my control points. If I want to reedit my control points, then I'd need to use this button here, the Reshape tool. That makes the control points active so I can grab hold of them and move them if I like. If I want to change a control point to a Bezier curve then hold down Option and click and now I get my Bezier handles.

If I want to break the handles, then Alt+click on one side and now I have got individual control off of just one side. And if I wanted to get rid of the Bezier altogether, Alt+click once more and I've removed it and it's gone back to a linear point. Let's zoom out a little bit and I can show you that by using the Selection tool, I can also move the entire shape like so or even stretch the shape if I need to do so. Going back to control points for a moment, I am going to highlight this one here that's sticking out and just hit the Delete key on my keyboard to remove it and now it's gone.

The next thing I'd like to do is move over here and add some feathering. So I am going to increase the Feathering amount and you can see that's adding softness now to the side of the mask, but the softness is eating into my mask. So what I'd like to do is alter the Bias now and push one way or the other until I get the kind of result I am looking for. I think that will do me right there. Okay that's working out pretty well. So now what I would like to do is start working on my background, blend that in a little bit more. So I am going to go back to my Effects palette and I am going to go to the Image category.

I am going to choose Resize. Take that and drag that onto the clip on V1. I can see that that's now the effect that's active in the Effect Editor. Now what I would like to do is start to reposition and rescale the tilt in the background so that I can see the information on the right-hand side of the screen. So first I am going to go to the Scaling and I am going to squeeze the image horizontally, like so. Now I am going to move the image over to the right here. So that's starting to work out okay, but now I need to flip back to my AniMatte effect and maybe take down some of the softness here because it's spilling over into my other image.

So to reedit my effect, I am just going to pop back on my keyframe here. Select all keyframes. And I am going to come over here and affect the softness. But at the moment, nothing is displayed and that's because I haven't selected the shape. Obviously, on an AniMatte effect, I can have multiple shapes so I need to define which shape it is that I would like to affect back here in the Effect Editor. Now what I am going to do is just drop down the Feathering a little bit here like so and I could even come back in and alter my effect points if necessary in order to smooth out this effect. There we go.

That's looking much better. So let's exit Effects mode and start to scrub through our sequence and we can see there is probably a little bit more work still to be done on this effect, but we are starting to composite really well. We have got a hand-drawn matte with feathering on it, over top of the Flop effect, over top of the Motion effect, and then on the other side we have got a motion-affected clip that's also got a Resize on it. Use the completed version of this in your bin as guidance as you are building this effect.

I am going to take this one step further though. Now what I would like to do is add a Defocus effect on the beginning and the end of this composite. I am going to use Ctrl+Y to add a new video track to my sequence. I am going to disengage V1 and V2 and now I am going to come back to the Effects palette and from Blend, I am going to choose our friend the 3D Warp effect. But this time I am not going to drag and drop it onto a clip. I am going to drag and drop it onto an empty track at the top of my timeline.

This is a different way to stack effects. Rather than nesting them, you can apply effects to empty space above other clips or clips with effects on them in the timeline. So to go into the 3D Warp now and keyframe above or defocus at the beginning and end, what we are going to do is reenter Effects mode, like so. This time because I have got an affect that has a keyframe window, I am going to see it displayed here on the right-hand side of my Effect Editor. I would like to show you a couple of things about keyframing.

First off, let's move to the beginning of our effect. Let's add a keyframe there and move through to where we would like the Blur effect to finish and add a new keyframe. Now move back to the original keyframe and let's go to the category where our Defocus is. Here it is. Switch it on and now increase the value on X and on Y, like so. So it starts soft and then as we progress through to the next keyframe, we are going to animate this down to 0, like so.

So now we get a Defocus effect at the beginning of the sequence and you can see this button here called Play Preview will allow us to play through an effect a frame at a time. Okay, now let's move to the end and do the same thing on the way out. But instead of using Add Keyframe button here this time, I'm going to move over and add the keyframe directly inside the Effect Editor. Now the reason for this is I want to show you two different models for keyframing. The keyframing model here in this ribbon is top down.

In other words if I apply a keyframe at this level, it's going to get applied to every single parameter within my effect. This time what I would like to do is open up the Defocus effect itself and you can see the animation we already made there at the start and instead I am going to right-click directly inside the parameter itself and say Add Keyframe. I am going to do the same on the vertical as well. Now when I move to the end, I am going to repeat that action, add a keyframe to both parameters, and now I can animate directly here inside the Keyframe Editor itself like so. And I've done pretty much the same thing, but let me show you this.

Let's close these parameters down and just look at the Keyframe Graph. On the end because we started at the bottom level, we only applied keyframes where we needed them, whereas at the beginning of the effect, because we started at the top level, we applied keyframes across all parameters. Sometimes it's a good reason to want to do that; other times that's going to be a waste of keyframe information. If you find yourself in that situation, no problem. Right-click at the top of the effect, and choose to Remove Redundant Keyframes, and now we are left with just the keyframes we need to support the effect we want to create.

Close the Effect Editor to return to regular editing mode or indeed click on the Source Record Editing mode button to return to that toolset. In the final part of this chapter, we will start working with graphics, titles and credits.

Creating titles

In Final Cut Pro we have a very basic built-in Title tool. If we want to go further then we've got the Boris FX title generator or Motion for creating more advanced graphics and titles. Media Composer has a similar situation. There is a basic tool called Title tool and a most sophisticated package called Marquee. Before using either tool, here are some considerations. First, if you're working in a mixed Mac and PC environment, then you'll want to identify fonts which are identical and available for both platforms.

Even fonts with the same name can look different from Mac to PC. You'll also want to consider size. Above 128 points you'll find that sticking with TrueType fonts is the best way to avoid unexpected results. So one of the first things you should do is research your font and find out if it allows for your project and workflow requirements. Once you've identified the font you want to use, copy that to your container folder for your project. That way when the project moves, so will the font. From there you should go ahead and use Font Book to import the new font on to your system, and then you can launch Media Composer.

The first example I'd like to show you is very similar to choosing color solid from the Utility menu under the viewer in Final Cut Pro. So with the bin active I am going to go to the Tools menu and choose Title Tool. Now I'm presented with a choice of either going into Marquee or going into the basic Title tool. This is affected by a setting under the Settings tab called Marquee Settings. If you would prefer to just go straight into one of the other, you can set that preference there. I am going to choose Title tool and because the Tool palette's over the top of the Title window I want to close that for now.

Now we are given a blank canvas. If we just want to create a solid color, then what we need to do is come down here to the very bottom of the Title tool and clicking here and turn off Video Background, which is essentially going to create a title over transparency, and instead switch it to a solid color. Now we didn't see any difference, because we switched from transparent over system black to actual black. So let's go ahead and change the color here. Maybe we'll make a solid yellow, like so.

And if that's all I want to do now, I can go ahead and close Title tool, Save, give it a name, make sure I know where I'm saving it to, and at what resolution and there we go. So now I have a solid color in my bin here and also preloaded into the Source viewer for editing. Back in the titles and graphics bin I have a sequence called swingdance graphics. Let's load that up, because now what I would like to show you is more of a typical workflow.

How would I create a graphic, which is going to go over the top of some video and thus have an idea of what the background video is going to look like as I work? To do that if I wanted to create a low effort here on interview clip 1, I just need to park over that clip in my sequence. Now that I'm parking over that clip, if I return to the Tools menu and go to Title Tool I could do it that way, or if I choose Source/Record Editing again, you can see that I actually added a button for the Title tool to the custom palette here as well.

I'll just click on that. Again, I'm presented with a choice. I'm going to use Title tool again and just rid myself of my Tool palette. So now we've got the video background presented as our reference as we create graphic elements over top. I've got the ability to create various different types of shapes from lines to circles and ovals to squares. I've also got my Text tool here, my Selection tool. So first off, I am going to create a box. I'm going to click on the Box tool, click and drag out the shape that I want.

At the moment it's got 90 degrees corners so I'm going to come down here and I can choose custom corners, or I can even type in an angle. Let's try 88. That's a nice round number, like so. Now that I've created a solid shape, I can change the color of that if I like. Let's come to the Fill box here and we can bring up our color chooser again. We can either choose directly from colors in the video or of course we could range around in the color finder here. If I like that, that's good, I'll close that color window and then next to that I've got the ability to change transparency. So I could change transparency over the entire object, or I could create a gradient from left to right, for example.

And then underneath that I've got the direction of the gradient. So I am going to shorten this bounding box up a little bit like so. Make sure it's not sticking outside of the safe title area. And there we go. Maybe I'd like to add some text over the top of that. So move to the Text tool, click, and let's type in Kim there, like so. Now when I am adding text, obviously if I just start typing away I am going to end up with the default selection of Media Composer, but I can change this before or after the fact if I'd like.

I can also go ahead of course and add shadows and borders onto all of my objects, including text, and in this case maybe I'll just add a shadow, like so. There we go. Now the other thing about text, by the way, is that when we first create it we get a bounding box around the text which is pretty tight to the actual word and that's probably what I want in this case. If you really want to take advantage of alignments, what I could do here is I could stretch out Kim so that her bounding box ends at the end of the safe title area.

And now if I use Justify, Right, Center or Left, it's actually meaningful in the context of the screen. In this case though I don't need that much room. I am just going to pull Kim down to here and sort of justify her by hand like that. Now I am going to right-click and I'll choose to Save Title As and I'll call this one kim. Make sure I am rendering to the right place and Save. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to move my text out of the way, get my bounding box, move that onto the other side of the screen like so, and maybe I'll move it up a little bit.

Change the direction. Pull my text back down here. Get everything centered up like so, save action safe title, and now what I'll do is I'll gust over-type Swing dancer. Now this time the text is going vertical and that's because my bounding box wasn't big enough for the longer words. So let's just drag it out like so. There we go.

Click on the text, drag that back in, and might be we'll make this text a bit smaller. There we go. That's good. Now I can right-click again, Save Title as, swingdancer, there we go and choose Save. And obviously this is the way to create a whole series of graphics with a same look and feel or even the same registration. Once I'm done, I can go ahead and leave Title tool. Before we do though, I just want to draw your attention to a couple of extra menus that crop up here in the top ribbon of the timeline area when we're working in Title tool.

You can see here we have the Object menu and the Alignment menu. Object menu allows you to switch on and off your safe title area. You can choose Safe Colors for working in a broadcast friendly palette and then basic operations such as Bold, Italic, and Font Replacement. In the Alignment menu, I've got the ability to align things to the center or to the horizontal or vertical center of the frame and we've got the ability to also show an alignment grid and even snap to that alignment grid if we want to do so.

Once we're done, close the Title tool and the titles that's we saved are in the bin ready for editing.

Adding titles and using them in sequences

So with the titles we created in the previous video here in the bin let's go ahead now and add them to our sequence. I'm going to zoom in on the timeline a little bit here, because we are going to be adding our titles in here above interview clip 1 on video track 2. So I am going to mark the segment where I'd like to add the first title. In this case, it's going to be Kim. Again, I am going to mark somewhere into the title here, just in case I ever need to do a transition or trim back out the side and now I am going to use my red Overwrite tool to add that clip into my sequence.

And you can see there it is available over the top of the video background. Let's go ahead and add other title in as well. Put that on video track 3, switch here to the other title, swingdancer, make a mark in and add that as well. And now they are staggered as they come on. (Female speaker: ?brings you to a simple time, where the roles are defined, and at one?) And of course if I wanted to I could park near the transition points for both of these, make sure they're both active, and then enter the Quick Transition dialog.

Maybe add a 10 frame dissolve onto the head at each of those clips. (Female speaker: ?brings you together, brings you to a simple time, where?) Let's just playback over that. (Female speaker: ?brings you to a simple time, where the roles are defined?) Cool! So now we've been able to add our graphics directly to the sequence here and start to use them in conjunction with transition effects and other types of effects. By the way, graphics themselves are in fact very much like an effect.

If I park on one of my graphic clips here and I choose to go into Effect mode, you can see there are various parameters associated with an effect. For example, I've got Crop and Scaling controls here, so if there was part of my graphic that I wanted to remove or crop out I could do that very easily. And of course, I could scale my graphics as well. My tip here though is always create your graphics as big or slightly bigger than you need them. That way you need to have to scale them down. Scaling that up could cause problems in terms of resolution.

Apart from being able to edit the parameters of the title, I've also got this Edit Title button here and this is the way to get back into Title tool with the current effect loaded so that you can make changes. So, for example, here if I wanted to capitalize the D in dancer I could do that now and save this version of my title back to the sequence. You can see that's now updated in my sequence, but I should point out that the original version of swingdancer is still the same as it was.

The new corrected version has also been added to my bin as well, with .01 after the name. Okay, we are going to look at another example now. Here I'm going to load up a timeline called credits. Now let's assume that we would like play some credits at the end of this sequence between these two locater points here, like so. You'd like the credits to roll over this last scene in a movie. So how do we do that? Well, the first thing I am going to do is actually hide Media Composer and go to my media drive.

On my media drive I've got my catalyst_CONTAINER that we've been using throughout the course and inside catalyst_ SRC_GFX I have a text file. Let's open that. You can see here that I've got the credits of all the people who have helped me in the production of his course. I want to select everything and use Command+C to copy that selection of text. Now I can go ahead and close that and get rid of my Finder window. And go back to Media Composer.

Now I'm going to go into Title tool, click down with my cursor, and then paste, and select all of the text, maybe drop that down to 24 point. Maybe keep it selected while I also add a drop shadow of my text. There we go. And then finally, I need to go through and make sure that I make space adjustments so that we get the right effect.

Now the moment I might be seeing the first page of my text. Where is the rest of it? What I need to do is initiate the roll and now I get this bar and I can scroll through the rest of the material. So now we can get rid of any errant spaces, like so. Let me go ahead and make some of these adjustments here and make sure everything is justified correctly. In fact, I'm going to select it all and go ahead and center justify it and then move the whole column over. In fact I could use my Alignment menu here, Center in Frame Horizontally, like so. Good! Now we've set up the role that we'd like to create.

All we need to do is close this and save it back to the bin. So we'll call this credits. Now as with most titles you can see it's been added to the bin and also preloaded into the Source viewer. If I scrub through the Source viewer, you can see that I've got a nice preview of what it's going to look like. So I am going to select the whole thing here and you could see I've got duration of 3 minutes. But that's a little misleading, because the way that a role or a crawl works is that it's one of the few edit types where if you have 4 points and an in and out in the Source viewer and an in and out in the Record viewer, then in fact it will compress the entire clip into the gap we have marked in the sequence.

So let's go ahead and do that right now. And you could see that now in the timeline my role starts there and moves forward according to the speed that it needs to in order to complete by the end of the mark out point like that. Now this has got a blue dot on it. You can see a lot of the real-time effects in the sequence all have a green dot and that's what that means. The green dot means that it will playback in real time or close to it. The blue dot means that this would indeed have to be rendered.

So if I wanted to render this title now, if the timing seems to work for me, what I do is I come here to the Render Effect icon, click on that, make sure I am rendering to the correct media drive and off we go. And so now in my sequence I've got my credits ready to role. (Vroom. Engine revving) And nicely timed out just before the end of sequence. There we have it.

We've created graphics directly inside of Media Composer. We've added them to the timeline and add a transition effects to them. We've also gone through how to re-edit a title that's already being added to the sequence and of course we've gone through how to create credit roles and crawls. In the final part of this chapter, we'll turn our attention to color correction.

Using the color correction interface

Now as we know in Final Cut we've got the basic color correction tools such as the 3-Way Color Corrector, which is good for making some basic corrections. And then of course there's also Apple Color, which has a deep powerful color correction toolset, but does require a fair amount of rendering if you're bouncing backwards and forwards between color correction and effects creation. The other thing to say about Apple Color is that while it's a very powerful application, it also requires an investment of time and effort in order to learn it and become proficient.

Now let's compare the Color Corrector inside of Media Composer. Well, first off, it's built into the system, so there isn't the render problem of going backwards and forwards between color correction and effects creation. It's also simpler than Apple Color for sure. It doesn't have as many options in terms of power windows. But it's a very robust tool and it will do for 90% of the things that you need to do on a daily basis. So let's dive in and see how it works.

The first thing I'd like to point out though is that whilst I am now selected on V1, interview clip 01 that I am going to be working on, I have to be aware of which track I am monitoring. Media Composer would allow me to enter Color Correction mode in context here, viewing from the top track down. If I did, then I wouldn't be able to see interview clip 01. So bear that in mind as you enter the Color Correction mode. There are a couple of ways to enter the mode. First off, there is a button down here in the Timeline palette. My preference, however, is to enter Color Correction mode via the toolset shortcut that we created in Chapter 3.

Let's go ahead and enter Color Correction mode now. And as you can see, it's going to be track one where I am making my correction and indeed I can't see through to that track unless I am parked here. So, let's move our monitor down so that we are monitoring on the track that we are actually correcting. Now, when we first enter Color Correction mode, obviously the interface has changed considerably. In the center here we have our current clip that we are working on. Then we've also got another two viewers on the left and right.

These can be used to display things like a reference or the entire sequence or even a tool, for example, the Vector Scope. Over here I could be looking at the next clip in my sequence or in this case maybe I'll choose the Y Waveform. So I can see my luminance information here and chrominance information here. Under each of these windows I have a set of tools. For example, go to Previous Uncorrected shot, Next Uncorrected shot, Remove the correction, or in this case Dual Split, which would allow me to create a box where I could preview the difference that I am creating in my sequence.

And below that is the Color Correction tool itself. And the Color Correction tool is divided. We've got HSL, which allows us to correct using the YUV color space, and Curves, which allows us to correct using the RGB color space. There are similar tools in both. Let's have a look at that, first of all using HSL. It has two sub-tabs: the Hue Offset wheels that we can see here and the basic Controls that we can see here. So under the basic Controls I've got Saturation, Brightness, Contrast Invert Chroma, Invert Luma, and then over here I've actually got some buckets where I can add pre-built corrections and I've also got a Match Color interface.

I can choose between different color models. I can select a color in my current image and then compare it and try and match it to a color in another image. Back on the Hue Offset, you can see that we've got Shadows, Midtones, and Highlights. So here, for example, I could pull my shadows towards blue and maybe I could pull my highlights towards yellow, like so. Now, if I want to turn off a parameter that I've been playing with, the purple box is the way to go. There I am toggling off the yellow highlights.

If I want to reset, Option+Click and I'll reset the particular parameter that I've adjusted. Over here we've also got control for Gain, Gamma, and Setup. So white, gamma across the entire image, and black level, and then I've also got Auto Balance, Auto Black, Auto Contrast, and Auto White. Under the Curves tab I can work between Red and Cyan, Green and Magenta, Blue and Yellow, or I can work in the Master graph. I've also got Saturation, Gain, Gamma, and Setup here as well.

Plus, I've got my Auto Balance and Auto Contrast tools again, plus my color correction buckets and again another match tool. In this case I can either use RGB, or I can use Avid's NaturalMatch. So, as an example now, if I wanted to remove the color cast, then what I would do is I would come down here to my Remove Color Cast tool. Now what I am going to do is look for something that should be white in the image area, maybe this box up here.

If I click on that, I am going to get an automatic color correction. And that's done a pretty good job I must say. So what I am going to now is I am going to Option+Click in the bucket here to save that version of the effect. Now I am going to remove it and I am going to try the Auto Balance instead, okay. Let's save that in the second bucket. Let's remove the effect again and of course I could come in here and I could actually work with my curves directly. For example, if I click on here I could create a keyframe and start to create my own custom version of my color correction.

If I liked that, I could Option+ Click and then save it in this bucket. Now, I can click between the buckets and try out the different color corrections and see which one I prefer. I think I prefer the first one here. So I'm going to drag it from the Color Correction tool into my bin, like so. Okay, now I am going to exit the Color Correction mode and go back to Source/Record Editing and I'd like to show you that now I can automate the process of adding this color correction that I've created to the other interview clips in the timeline.

I am going to choose my red overwrite arrow and now I am going to Shift+Select the clips in my timeline that don't have the color correction yet. Go back to my bin and double-click. Now it's applied to all of the clips that I had selected. So that's how to get into the Color Correction tool and begin to use it and how to save temporary effects in our color buckets within the tool itself and also of course save our preferred effect back out to the bin and then apply it across multiple clips in the timeline.

If you do a lot of color correction, then I suggest that you come to the Settings tab here and you explore the color correction options. Here under the Correction Mode Settings you can choose how the tool behaves and under AutoCorrect you can set rules for how clips will behave if you apply auto correction to them. The only other thing I'd like to say is if you're going to do a lot of color correction you probably would want to work with an external monitor. Using the interface like this is good enough for a lot of situations, but if it's critical work, if it's broadcast work, then you really should be working with an external monitor.

To do that with Media Composer, you would need to have some external hardware attached, whether that be input output hardware. For example, a Mojo DX or just monitoring hardware like the Matrox MXO2 mini.

10 DELIVERING MASTERS FOR WEB, DVD AND MORE

Preparing and outputting master sequences

Whatever stage of production we're at, its useful to keep checking back in with the original mission. What exactly are we trying to deliver, what format, what frame rate, what part is our cut playing in the process? Are we cutting and delivering the actual media or are we editing with a proxy, and then we are going to supply the sequence information only and the final master will be conformed elsewhere? First, a reminder on frame rate. If you are working with multiple frame rates, then Media Composer it's best to ingest each frame rate into its own separate Avid project at the native frame rate for that material.

In essence you're creating a small part of Avid projects to house the various frame rates of material. Then we'll pick the project that's at the frame rate of the master deliverable and do our editing in that project, pulling in all the various other frame rates via the Open Bin dialog. So we've contextualized the idea that we're working with the sequence reflecting our highest order master i.e. the frame rate and the resolution which will serve the greatest number of deliverables. So from that understanding how can we best breakdown the various different output types into meaningful categories.

Well, first, there is metadata. We can output the results of our work in the sequence here as a description that we can pass off to various of the facilities or other software packages. With my sequence selected in the bin, if I go to the Output menu, I've got FilmScribe and EDL. We can output standard EDL as using EDL manager, or we can output XML lists using FilmScribe.

Another Metadata example would be if we were to right-click on the sequence in the bin and choose Sequence Reports. Here we can choose to rename. We can also choose options about what's generated in the report and if we are happy, go ahead and generate the report. In this case I am going to go to the castle catalyst_CONTAINER, to catalyst_Outputs, and save it in there. And as you can see the report opens up and there is a lot of information in here. A summary of effects, what types they are, if there are any plug-ins in the sequence, and then down below that we've actually got source information. It's telling us there were no tape- based sources found in this sequence, but there are a number of imported solstice and we get to see both the import path and the individual farmland being referenced either via AMA or for importing media.

An alternative to generating information that way might be to use a third-party application such Automatic Duck. Automatic Duck will allow us to convert Final Cut Pro sequences into Media Composer sequences and vice versa and since Media Composer can either link to or import ProRes media, that's probably a pretty good workflow for some facilities.

Apart from outputting metadata I could also output a mixture of metadata and media. The way I would do that is I would select my sequence and choose either Send To > Avid DS or Export and from the Export dialog, I could choose the preset for Avid DS, or I could choose Untitled, go to Options, AAF, and create a new AAF export setting myself.

Here I can choose to either linked to or else consolidate or copy the media or else mix it down and I have similar choices for my audio. Creating an AAF would allow me to send a combination of sequence data and media to an application such as Avid DS or maybe Adobe Premiere. I am going to close this dialog because I'd like to also talk about now how we output this sequence as just media.

But before we do that I'd like to just quickly RUN THROUGH MY LITTLE CHECKLIST OF THINGS THAT I'D LIKE TO KEEP AN EYE ON BEFORE I MASTER ANYTHING OUT OF THE SYSTEM. FIRST OFF, WHAT STATUS IS THE FORMAT TAB IN AND WHAT IS THE RASTER DIMENSION SET TO. If this is in HD and I am set to 1920x1080, that's good. Now I'd like to go to my Media Creation Settings. So under the Tool menu > Media Creation, here I can DOUBLE CHECK THAT ANY RENDERS I DO ARE GOING TO BE RENDERED AT A QUALITY NECESSARY TO SUPPORT THE MATERIAL IN MY SEQUENCE. And of course I can double check which drive it's being rendered to. THE NEXT THING I LIKE TO DO IS COME BACK DOWN TO MY SEQUENCE, SELECT THE WHOLE THING FROM IN TO OUT, AND THEN I CAN RIGHT-CLICK AND CHOOSE CLEAR RENDERS IN/OUT. What this does is it purges all of the renders in my sequence. I can go back to the Clip menu and choose Render In/Out or ExpertRender In/Out. Either of these choices will now re- render all necessary effects in this sequence and again I get a conformation dialog of where I'd like to render it to and off I go.

ONCE I AM FINISHED RE-RENDERING ALL OF MY EFFECTS AT FULL QUALITY, THE FINAL THING I AM GOING TO DO BEFORE I DO A SIGNAL-BASED OUTPUT IS COME DOWN HERE TO THE BOTTOM OF THE TIMELINE ON MAKE SURE MY VIDEO QUALITY MENU IS SET TO FULL GREEN OR FULL GREEN 10 BIT. Now I'm ready to roll this sequence out as either as a signal, a stream, or a file. If I wanted to output it as a signal then obviously I'd come to the Output menu I would choose Digital Cut. This is where we can interface with Professional VTR and lay the material out frame accurately. Alternatively, we are actually connected by 1394 our VTR and so in this case rather than laying at a baseband signal, I'll be letting out a stream, either a DV or an HDV stream. Additional to the Digital Cut tool under the Output menu, we also have Export to Device, so we could export for an HDV, XD cam or P2 device.

FINALLY, WE COULD ACTUALLY EXPORT THE ENTIRE SEQUENCE AS A FILE. If I right-click and choose the export dialog, we've seen this plenty of times before. We know that we can choose a destination. I am going to go the catalyst_ CONTAINER to catalyst_Outputs and Outputs_5994 because it's the frame rate that I am outputting at. And then I could come down to my export settings. I am going to go to Options and you could see here that I could choose to create a QuickTime movie, maybe I'd want to output an h264 movie, or in our case I am going to choose to create a QuickTime reference movie.

I am going to use the marks and the enabled tracks because I have everything selected down here in the timeline area. I am going to use defaults for digital mastering. My Aspect Ratio is 16:9, Audio Format could be WAVE or AIFF-C, choose Avid Codecs, and in this case my COLOR LEVELS should be 601/709, because all of the material came from the YUV color space. Now I could save that as QTref_1080i _601709 and I can use that again in the future.

So now I could go ahead and export the entire sequence as a file. IN SOME CASES IF YOU HAVE AMA LINKED MEDIA IN YOUR SEQUENCE, THEN YOU ARE BEST OFF EITHER MIXING DOWN THE ENTIRE SEQUENCE IF IT'S A SHORT SEQUENCE OR TRANSCODING THE INDIVIDUAL CLIPS THAT ARE USED IN THE SEQUENCE. In this case I know that this is an AMA clip here, but I may have others in my sequence as well. So I am going to add a video track and I am going to choose to mix down the video across the entire sequence and I am going to put it on video track four.

Special menu > Video Mixdown, choose the correct drive, choose the bin, and in this case we'll choose DNxHD145, click OK. Okay, once the Mixdown is done we can load it into the Source viewer and add it to our current sequence. What I am actually going to do is I am going to take my sequence and use Command+D to duplicate it and create an output version of my sequence. Now load that into the Record Viewer and deselect all of the audio tracks because that won't do anything to them.

WHAT I'D LIKE TO DO THOUGH IS REPLACE WHAT'S IN MY VIDEO TRACKS WITH THE VIDEO MIXDOWN HERE. So I am going to record over the entire sequence like that. Now I no longer need tracks 4, 3 and 2 so I am going to delete those and now I have a very clean timeline to output as a file. IN/OUT TIME IN WILL MARK UP THE ENTIRE SEQUENCE, GET ALL OF THE TRACKS ACTIVE, AND NOW I AM GOING TO TAKE THE SWINGDANCE_ OUTPUT, RIGHT-CLICK ON IT, AND CHOOSE EXPORT.

I am going to choose the catalyst _CONTAINER, catalyst_Outputs, catalyst_Outputs_5994 and now through the options dialog I could choose to output a QuickTime movie, maybe with an h264 codec, or in this case I am going to choose a QuickTime reference movie. Make sure that I am on 601/709 color and Save. And straightaway over here in my catalyst_Output folder I've got access to my QuickTime reference movie.

AS YOU CAN SEE HERE, THE ENTIRE SEQUENCE IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A QUICKTIME REFERENCE FILE. I COULD NOW TAKE THIS FILE AND DROP INTO A THIRD-PARTY APPLICATION SUCH AS SORENSON SQUEEZE OR MAYBE COMPRESS IT AND GENERATE ALL OF THE VARIOUS DIFFERENT DELIVERABLES THAT ARE REQUIRED FOR THIS PROJECT.