From the course: Avid Media Composer: Documentary Editing

Using the exercise files - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Avid Media Composer: Documentary Editing

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Using the exercise files

If you're a Premium Member of the lynda.com online training library or if you're watching this title on a DVD, you have access to the exercise files used throughout this title. So if you've just finished unzipping your exercise files you should see three folders inside, Avid MediaFiles, Avid Projects, and Other Files. Now Avid Projects and Other Files can literally live anywhere. I am going to keep them right inside my exercise files folder, which is on my Desktop, and you can too if you like. The Avid MediaFiles folder, however, must live in a special location. So you need to move that right away, and the place that it needs to live is on the root directory of your Media Drive. So I have here my Media Drive and the root directory simply means that it's not inside any other folders, and you just drag this to that location and let it copy over. You may have a slightly different size here than I do and don't worry about that. Now if you don't have a Media Drive, this will actually work if you put it at the root directory of your Mac hard drive, your system drive, or your C drive on your PC. That is not recommended. It can result in a corrupted media more easily. So please definitely try to get yourself an external Media Drive or at the very least partition a drive so that it's separate from the drive that your operating system is on, Mac or PC. We'll just let this finish copying. So I've got my Avid MediaFiles folder right here at the root directory of my Media Drive. In addition to not putting it inside any other folders, it also must be named Avid MediaFiles exactly like this, capital A and then a space and a capital M and a capital F with no space here. So don't try renaming this, it must be named this for Avid to be able to see the Media. So most of the time this will work just fine, you just drag the Avid MediaFiles folder to the root director of your drive. However, in this case, what if you already have an Avid MediaFiles folder? So I have another drive here. It already has an Avid MediaFiles folder, because I'm already working in Avid. Inside the Avid MediaFiles folder you'll always see an MXF folder and then inside there they're always be a numbered folder and by default it's 1. But what I've done is provide you with a numbered folder that is not 1. So in this case, it's called 103 and the reason it's called 103 is that I have two other Avid courses that have folders with 101 and 102. So you could literally just work with all of them side by side. But in this case I would just drag this and place it right beside the 1 so I wouldn't need to combine media and my folders could exist in harmony. Now I am not going to do this right now, but this is what you would do if you already have an Avid MediaFiles folder on your drive. So that is kind of a workaround for you. So once you're ready with that we can go ahead and launch the software and get started. Once Media Composer is launched we need to go find the project that's associated with this course. So you want to make sure that you are on External and then we click on this icon here, and you just navigate to that Avid Projects folder, which as we know, is on the Desktop in my exercise files folder. Again, you can put this anywhere, you can put it in your Documents folder, on a different drive, on your Desktop, wherever you like. I am just going to click on Avid Projects and Open and then you'll see that the projects inside of that, which I only have one, Farm to Table documentary, are listed here in this menu. I click on it, and I click OK, and I am entering the project. And here's what it looks like when you open it up. You probably won't have a Trash folder, I've been working and so I do have this Trash folder. But you'll accumulate the Trash folder as you begin throwing things away. But mostly you'll be working inside this exercise files folder, and it's broken down by chapter. So if you're going through, and you're on Chapter 3, movie 2 just simply open up this bin, and you have all the materials that you need that are inside this bin. Now I do want to mention that you'll be working with pretty compressed media for this documentary course. Documentaries typically contain a lot of raw materials, and I had to fit a lot of media into your exercise files download. So just understand this footage started out as beautiful HD, but I compressed it quite a bit so that you get access to everything that you needed. But still looks okay though, you can see everything and here hear just fine. So that's how it works on either a Mac or a PC. Again just put that Avid MediaFiles folder at the root directory and then you're ready to go just navigate to your project, and you can start working. Now if you're not a premium subscriber to lynda.com, and you don't have access to the exercise files, you can follow along from scratch with your own assets. Now let's get started.

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