From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Dark and light text - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Dark and light text

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- [Instructor] One broad reaching feature in Media Composer is the option to change the colors of your clips to make them easier to identify in bins or in the timeline window. And if I go to my text view here in a bin you can see there's a color heading. I can right click here and choose any color I want for a clip. Let's choose a deep red for this one and I'll pull the clip into my sequence. But we're not actually seeing that clip color, it'll come up in the bin, it'll show around the thumbnail for example. But in order to see that color in the timeline window we have to go to the clip color options under the fast menu for the timeline window. And here, we're going to choose source for the type of clip color that we're going to see. It looks like I've used three pieces of that clip. And this highlights an interesting challenge in the timeline window, because right now I've got white text and it might be that I'm working with clip colors that are really bright. For example, if I decide to change the color for this clip to something lighter, I might not see the text. And right now I'm seeing my source clip colors but I'm going to go back in here and I'm going to go to my clip color options, and I'm going to set this instead to timeline local and click okay. I might as well go back in here, right click and remove that source color while I'm doing it. Next up, I'm going to see if I can change this clip color. And if I right click on the clip there is now an option to choose set local clip color. This option's grayed out in the timeline window unless you enable the option I just did using the fast menu. You've got to enable local colors first. If I choose something pretty light like this light green, for example, now you can see it's very difficult to read that text. So there's an option in the timeline window to specify whether you have light or dark colored text. To get access to that option you need the timeline settings. So with the timeline window active, I'm holding control or command on Macro S and I'm pressing equals, and here in the display options near the bottom we can specify white text, black text, or both and I'm going to choose white and black timeline text and I'm going to click okay. Now, automatically the timeline is going to display light text on dark colored clips and dark text on light colored clips. This is a really useful option, although I must say I'm not a huge fan of that green. So I'm going to select the clip, right click and choose set local clip color to none. And that'll restore the clip to the default color which is set when you first installed Media Composer. Whether or not you're viewing the local clip color in this clip color setting or the source clip color, it won't impact that setting to use both light and dark text. It's a pretty useful option to enable in Media Composer.

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