Using clip and track colors

- [Instructor] A handy way to keep organized in a multi-track session is by using color for specific clips and tracks. At the moment, my clips are all the same color, and this makes it difficult to quickly understand what's going on in the session just by looking at it. So, what I'm going to do is go over to my dialogue track and at the very end of the track header, you'll see I've got this colored tab, I'm going to double click this, and now, I can change it to any of these colors here. I think I'll go with this pinkish color and click Okay, and you'll notice that not only has it changed the color of my track header, it's also changed the color of the clips on the track.

If I was to select one of these clips, and I'll drag it down to the track below it, you'll see that it's inherited the color of that track now, and if I move it back up, it goes back to the original color. So, the color of the clip is dependent on the color of the track that it's on, and if I wanted to clip to have its own color. For example, if I zoom in on this section of my dialogue track, you can see I have all of these clips that come from the same interview subject. So, if I wanted to be able to visually distinguish this, I could select all of those clips, and I'll go over to my Properties panel, if you can't see your Properties panel, just go up to window and make sure you have Properties selected.

Here's mine over here, and under the Basic Settings, so I'll just expand this, so I can see my basic settings, we have a setting for Clip Color, and at the moment, this is set to a white square with a red line through it, which actually means that no color has been assigned to these clips, and that's why it's defaulting to the track color. So, I'm going to click this square, and this opens up the same options that we saw with the track headers, and I might set this to, let's go with the yellow here, and then, I'll click Okay, and now, those clips are easily distinguishable from the other clips on that track, and now if I was to move those clips to another track, it will actually keep that color that I've just set.

Of course, if I go back into my Properties panel and select the color that I just assigned and change this back to the white square with the red line through it, it goes back to taking the color of the track that it's on. So, this behavior is good to keep in mind, especially when you have many tracks of clips, and you need to easily identify specific content, and it's also incredibly handy in a collaborative environment because if you're all using the same color scheme, it means someone can jump into your session and easily figure out where everything is.