From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Grouping clips - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Grouping clips

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- [Instructor] For this tutorial I'm using a new project called Jiu Jitsu. Media Composer supports another special kind of combined clip called a group clip. Now group clip allows you to combine multiple takes or alternative angles into a single item in a bin. And you can switch between the angles right inside your sequence. It's commonly used for multi-camera productions where you know everything's in sync. You just want to choose the angle either live during playback, as if you were performing a vision mix or manually by editing individual segments in your sequence. Now let's take a look at how to create a group clip using our auto syncing. I'm going to right click in this Jiu Jitsu bin and I'm going to choose input and source browser. And in the source browser, I'm going to browse into our MC110 Assets folder and I'm going to look here in the Jiu Jitsu interview folder. I'm going to select all of these items. There's three video clips and an audio clip. I'm set to linking and I might as well turn on this option to close the source browser after link or import. Now I'll click link. Of course we've only got one bin open so that's selected as the target bin. I'm getting this auto start time options dialog box popping up because the audio has a start time assigned to it. It has some timecode and we need to tell Media Composer how that start time should be imported. I know that this audio was recorded using 29.97 frames per second, non-drop frame timecode. So I'm going to select that and I'll click okay to all in case the message comes up again. And this really highlights the importance of having those camera logs from your production. Now I'm going to select all of these items in my bin and I'll right click and I'll choose group clips. This is under the clip menu by the way. And there's a slightly more complex keyboard shortcut for this, which is control + shift + g on Windows or command + shift + g on Mac OS. I tend to just remember the right click option. Now in the group clips dialog box, I can specify how Media Composer's going to synchronize these clips. I'm going to use Waveform Analysis because I know that there's audio on the source video clips as well as of course in the waveform. And I'll click okay. This gives me a new group clip. You can see the icon is quite different with the additional letters GRP.01 at the end. And I'm going to double-click to open this in the source monitor. As I just scrub through, you can see that we've got one clip that partially covers the audio, but not all of it. There are other parts to this. So how do we access the other angles? If I double-click on each of these clips, you can see we've got a head and shoulders shot, we've got a looks like a medium wide, and another angle on the head and shoulder. So how do we choose the other angles? Well to access them, we're going to need some new buttons. I'm going to the tools menu and I'm going to the command palette. And in the command palette in the M Cam, that's the multi-cam section of the command palette, we have these options previous, in group, and next in group. I'm going to switch the command palette to the active palette mode, so you can see what happens if we click these. Next in group will just rotate through the angles in one direction and previous in group goes back the other way. In fact, if I go to my keyboard settings, go to file and settings, user, scrolling down, and opening up keyboard, you'll notice that by default next in group and previous in group are mapped to the up and down arrow keys on the keyboard. So I don't need my command palette. I can simply use the up and down arrows here. If you edit a group clip into a sequence, you actually get all of the angles. And you can just as easily choose a different angle within the sequence using these keyboard shortcuts or buttons on screen.

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