Package a sequence

- [Instructor] When you have finished making adjustments to your project, you're probably going to want to share it with the world, and it's quite possible. You'll need to package it first of all, perhaps add some bars and tone, and so on. So, let's take a look at that. I've got a pretty simple sequence here, some music, some video clips, and an opening and closing title. I want to change the timing of the title, a little bit, so I'm just going to pull this in with my Smart Tool.

I'll line it up with last clip using the Command and the Alt key, that's Control and Alt in Windows. And this NewBlue Titler Pro title has a duration, and I can change that duration by trimming, as I would with any other clip. Just snap to that edit, and the animation will update. (lively music) Well, I'm pretty happy with that, and it's time to get the sequence ready for distribution.

The first thing I'm going to do is add some filler at the start. Because I want to put in some bars and tone. So, I'm going to right-click in the timeline window, and go to Add Filler, At Start. This is going to add a big chunk of space at the beginning of the timeline, that we can add whatever bars and tone, and countdown time that we want. Into this space, I'm going to add some reference tone. And to make that, I'm going to use the Audio Tool. I'm going to go and make a new bin, first of all, which I'll call Audio Clips.

And then under Tools, I'm going to go to my Audio Tool, and just click on the Peak Hold Menu, and choose Create Tone Media. You may have specific settings you need to put in here for your deliverables, but it's pretty common to go for - 20 dB and 1000 hertz, and 60 seconds is enough. I only need one channel, I'm going to play this out as Mono, and I'll put this in my Audio Clips bin, and click OK. I'll close the Audio Tool for now.

And open this up in my source, let's have a listen. (media tone) Definitely sounds like reference tone to me. So, I'll put my playhead at the beginning of the timeline, and I think I'll add an audio track here. I'll just right-click, choose New, Audio Track, Mono. And I'll just add 10 seconds of this. So, I Marker In on the timeline, +10OOO, and then Marker Out, patch my audio track, turn off my video, and override.

Next up, I want some bars, some color bars. So, I'm going to make a new bin that I'll call Graphic Clips, and I want to use the Source Browser to find the color bars I'm going to use. So, I'm going to right-click inside the bin, and choose Input, and I'm going to choose Source Browser. Media Composer comes with quite a few different reference graphics you can incorporate into your projects. Although, it doesn't come with countdown timers. There are plenty you can get, if you Google it, and download one.

The location of the included reference graphics, is inside the Avid application folder. I'm on Mac OS here, so it's in the Applications folder. You'll find it in the Program Files folder on Windows. In either case, we're just looking for ... Here, the Avid Media Composer folder. And if I go inside there, there's a Supporting Files folder. And inside there, we have Test Patterns. We've got a few options.

I'm just going to go for the SMPTE Bars. One thing you'll notice is, I've got the Source Browser set to link mode. And if I try to link to this, I'm just going to drag the clip into a bin. Media Composer says, well you can't actually link to this, but would you like to import it? So, I'll say yes, close the Source Browser, and let's take a look. Looks pretty good. We've got 30 seconds of it, and we only need about 10, so I'm going to mark my reference tone, and I'll add a track, just to avoid interfering with the tracks I have content on.

So, I'll right-click, choose New, Video Track on the timeline, patch my source video, turn off my audio, and override. Looking good. Now we have bars and tone. (media tone) I think for this stage, all that remains is to make sure our start time code for the timeline is what we would want it to be. And if I look in our Sequences bin ... In fact, before I go there, let's just see what our start time code is. So, you can see it's 59 minutes and 48 seconds.

And that's because, when I added filler at the start of the timeline, it added 12 seconds. That's a default setting that you can change in the Settings list. This works, because it means that our sequence will begin at one hour exactly. There we go. We've got a little extra filler that we don't need. If you're producing content for broadcast, it's likely that you'll be delivering with the first frame of your content at what they call 1 OO OO, one hour, zero minutes and zero seconds.

And my timer, right now, is set to 1 OO OO, for the beginning of what might well be a countdown timer, if I download one from the Internet. But if you want to change the start time code of your sequence, look up the start column in the bin for your sequence, and just type in a new value. So, if I want my sequence to begin at 1 OO OO, I just type in 1:OO:OO:OO, to get the frames as well. Press enter. Media Composer checks in with me to see if I really want to change that start time code, and I'll say OK, and now we're all set.