All right, now that we've seen how to work with bins as well as the various ways to display, organize, and load our bin contents, it's time to start working with our clips. So I have my all bin open as we did in the last movie, and I'm going to load one of my narration clips right here. And this is nice and long so it'll allow me to demonstrate a lot of navigation techniques. Right now, I'm just dragging the cursor through the time bar below the source monitor, and you can see I'm scrubbing through the clip. If you want to hear the audio as you scrub, you just hold down shift as you drag.
And if you want to have that on, continuously, just press Caps Lock, and then you don't have to hold the Shift key down. You can't exactly hear the words that she's saying, but this is really nice for just finding a specific audio edit cue, like when someone starts or stops talking. To step through your clips, you can go one frame at a time. Left arrow key goes back one frame at a time and right arrow key goes forward. This corresponds exactly to the three and four keys. Three goes back one frame at a time, and four goes forward one frame at a time, and that's these keys right here.
Step backward one, step forward one. Down below that is step backward eight and step forward eight. Because we are in a 23 976 frame per second project, this is eight. If I was in a 30 frame per second project, it would be ten. So basically one third of a second are my large steps. This corresponds to the one and the two key on the keyboard. So, if I want to step back eight frames at a time, it's one, and, if I want to step forward eight frames at a time, tha's two. If I hold down the one or the two, I can kind of race through the clip.
All right? And, just for now, I'm going to take off my digital audio scrub, so I'm going to press caps lock. And, now when I step through the clip. It's silent. Alright, now let's cover play. There are a whole lot of play buttons. Here's the play key on the user interface, it acts as both play and stop. Click it once to play >> More layers of glass can >> And again to stop. That corresponds to the spacebar >> Be added with a gathering line. Or the 5 key. >> All by dipping the pipe >> The Tab key. >> Back into the furnace.
>> They're everywhere. So pick one and go with it. If I want to go to the beginning of the clip, I press Home.And if I want to go to the end of the clip, I press End, if you're on a laptop that'll correspond to Fn+Left Arrow and Fn+Right Arrow for Home and End respectively. All right? And then there's the big guns. JKL. JKL is a variable speed control allowing you to play forward and backward at different speeds. You'll be using this most of the time when you navigate. So to go forward in real time, you just press L.
>> It was around that time when people discovered. >> You press K to pause. And then you press J to go backwards in real time. >> To go at steadily faster speeds forward, you just keep pressing L multiple times. So take a look at my play button here, and as I keep pressing L you'll see how fast I'm going, it's going to tell you the frames per second that I'm traveling. So I'll press it once to go in real time, >> Around that time, people. >> Twice >> Three times. >> And then you lose sound at four times speed.
All right, and now we've pressed it five times, and this is actually going actually at eight times speed. The same thing applies when you press j multiple times to go backwards faster and faster. Okay, if you want to go in slow motion, you hold the k button down, and then either press l to go forward at one quarter speed, or J to go backward at one quarter speed. All right, so I'll do that. I'll press K and then hold L down. And now, I'll go backwards at one quarter speed K and J, and you can see here that the play button turns into a 6 when I do that.
All right? So we're going at six frames per second. Also if you just want to go one frame at a time you can hold k down and then tap l or tap j and you'll be able to hear the audio as you do this. So I'm holding k down and I'll go forward with l One frame at a time. All right, now let's talk about marking clips. As you either scrub or play through your clip, you'll identify the portion of the clip that you'd like to edit into the timeline. I'm going to just load another clip here. And I'm going to come to this second marker here.
This is the Suzie interview closeup of glass blowing clip. And I'm going to identify the portion of the clip that I want to edit into the timeline. To mark my in point, I'm going to press the i key on keyboard to mark and to mark an output, I'm going press the o key. All right so I'm going to back up a little bit and go forward with l. And so I've marked and In here and an Out here. If I want to go to my in point, I can press Q, and you know you're on an in point because of these sharp teeth over here on the left, and I'm going to my outpoint I press W.
And likewise they're over here, and if I want to play from in to out I press six. >> So, more or less, we have to have our design ready to go. We have to have things planned out. We know seconds make a difference. >> And those three command correspond to go to in here on the user interface. Go to out, and play into out right here. If you need to move your in or out point, there are a couple ways to do that. I just want to show you one way right now. And that's just to simply mark an in or an out again and your in or out will move. So I don't think I have this quite right.
I'm going to hold down shift, and use my step commands to get past her so, and then I think I've got it, so I'm going to mark an in. And then I'm going to go to the end here, and I want to get this a little bit more perfect. So again, I'm going to use my step commands to zone in on this. >> All right. I think that's the end of her saying, difference, and I'm pressing out. And let's check this again. I'll press 6. >> More or less, we have to have our design ready to go. We have to have things planned out. We know seconds make a difference.
All right. So we zoned in on that a little bit better. Again, you don't have to get it perfect there are tons of really wonderful trimming tools that you can use in the timeline to perfect this, but I just wanted to show you that you can move your in and out points. Now, what I want to do now is just go through a super brief intro on editing your marked portion of your clip into the timeline. okay? We'll cover this i much more detail later on. So once you've marked your clip, as we've done here you can edit this into a sequence. If you want, you can just edit it straight into a blank timeline and then media composer will create a sequence for you automatically, and that's what we'll do right now.
Because everything in media composer must live in a bin, and I do not recommend putting your sequence in the same bin as your clips, let's go ahead and open up exercise files, chapter one, and then one dot four. I just have a blank bin and that's where we're going to put the sequence. Alright so once you've marked your clip with an in and and out there's lots of ways to actually bring this down into the timeline. But the way I'm going to show you right now is to use the splice in command. And it's this yellow arrow here and it corresponds to the V key on the keyboard. So I'll press V and up pops the selected bin window, and you basically just have to tell it where you want the sequence to go.
So I have my 1.4 bin all ready for it. I'll select that and say OK. And a couple things happen. Before we take a look at what happened in the sequence, lets come up here to the bin. Notice the second sequence that I've created recently. So it says untitled sequence.02. You're doing it for the first time, yours will say data one. I'm just going to rename this because you do not want to leave any sequenced called untitled sequence. So I'm going to click here and I'm just going to call this hot glass demo, and you can see that it changed up here and right here as well.
Alright, so now that we've named our sequence, let's just come down to the timeline and I especially want to take a look at my track selector panel here. These three track selectors on the left correspond to the tracks coming from my source material. So because I had all three of those enabled, I had my video and my two audio channels come in, this is the timeline over the record track selectors. So, if it's selected, it's effected. So because I had everything selected, everything came in. But let me show you. I'm going to take this exact same marked portion.
And I'm just going to turn off my video and we'll press v again to splice in and you'll notice that the same exact marked portion came in, minus the video and now I'll go ahead and select the video but not the audio. And I'll press v. And there you go, okay, so when you're editing with the keyboard in media composer, your track selector panel is really important. And we've only got three tracks here, but when you have five, ten, 20 tracks it becomes very important because it allows you to patch in exactly what tracks you want to participate in the edit.
Now just very briefly, I just want to say that all of the same navigation techniques that we learned. When navigating clips, up here in the source monitor, apply in the timeline as well. So if I want to step I can use my one, two, three, and for keys, three and four go one frame at a time. Then again if I want to hear the audio as I do that press caps lock, and I'll use my one and two to go back and forth eight frames at a time. >> And then I have my Play button, Space Bar. >> To play and stop, and then my favorite, J, K, L, I'll go forward with L. >> And we know second make a difference, more or less.
>> Pause with K, go back with J. >> We can go in slow motion holding down K and L. >> We can go in fast motion, tapping J a couple times. >> I have my Home key and my End key. To go to the beginning and the end of this sequence. One thing we didn't go over was fast forward and rewind, which is right here. This will allow me to go through the timeline, edit by edit. So I'll press rewind to go backwards, and forwards with my fast forward. By default, this is not mapped to the keyboard, but we'll learn how to do that a little bit later.
Finally, if you want to zoom in at the play head location, there is a couple ways to do that. Right now we'll just take a look down here at the scale bar. I'll go ahead and drag this to the right. And once you do that you'll have a little bit more room, so you can use the scroll bar to scroll through your sequence like so. If I want to use the keyboard shortcuts for that I can use command left bracket and command right bracket. Command right bracket to zoom in and command left bracket to zoom out. If I want the entire sequence to fit in the timeline view very quickly, that is command forward slash, the same key as the question mark.
Alright, so now that we've gotten our feet wet in Media Composer, let's go through one final piece of housekeeping and that's making sure that you know how to save and backup your project which we'll explore in the next movie
Updated
2/25/2016Released
9/17/2014Note: This Avid Media Composer v. 8 Essential Training only addresses software updates up to v. 8.5. if you are using Media Composer v. 8.6 or later, please access the following courses instead:
Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101
Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 110
- Setting up the editing environment
- Importing media
- Building a rough cut with basic editing and trimming techniques
- Navigation and customization techniques
- Editing audio
- Adding effects
- Multicam editing
- Performing color correction
- Creating titles with Avid Marquee and NewBlue Titler Pro
- Managing media
- Exporting your project
- Troubleshooting in Avid Media Composer
Skill Level Beginner
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Q: This course was updated on 12/12/2014. What changed?
A: We added and revised tutorials to cover the changes to Avid Media Composer in v8.2 and v8.3. Watch the "What's new" movies for an overview of the updates.
Q: This course was updated on 8/24/2015. What changed?
A: Avid released the 8.4 version of Media Composer in June 2015. We added two new movies to this course to describe the update and covering working with high-resolution files in the newest version of the software.
Q: This course was updated on 02/25/2016. What changed?
A: We added five tutorials covering the Avid Media Composer 8.5 update, released in January 2016.
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Video: Navigating and marking clips