- Once you've gotten your footage into the project, and have categorized it and organized it, and begun screening it and making decisions, it's time to start in on making a rough cut. So in this movie, we're going to start laying in the first shots to begin building our sequence. All right, so after working in the project that we started from scratch for the last two movies, we're going to jump forward a bit and work in the Hot Glass Chapter 2 project, so I'll select that and say OK, and because we are working with AMA media, we're going to need to relink our AMA clips to the AMA media, and it's really simple to do.
I'll show you how. I'm just going to open up the All bin, which contains all of our media, and I'll just load one of these to show you that it is offline. I'm going to just select all of them, and then right click and choose Relink to AMA File(s), and then I'm just going to navigate to my Exercise Files, AMA Media, Glassblower, ALL, and you can see that it's trying to relink to a specific file. I'm just going to select that one, and then once it finds that one, it will find the rest, so here it is, and I'll say Open, and you can see that now, all of my chain links are there, everything's online.
You can always just go over to Frame View to verify, and everything is online, so we're all set. Once you do that, all of the clips in each of the bins is also online. OK? So just one Relink will relink everything. All right, so I'm going to come down to my 2.4 bin, and I've got several subclipped Narration and Interview shots that resulted from going through our footage, the ones we started plus a few others. So, I'm just going to load all of these into the source monitor, and again, when we do that, we have access to them via the clip main menu right here.
We have one extra one in there because I loaded that before to show you the MIDI offline, but that's OK. So, fortuitously, we have the Narration clip loaded first and that's what I do want to start with, and I just want to make sure that it's ready to go. I'm going to just play the first part of this and make sure that I don't want to set a further endpoint. - Glassblowing has been around since-- - All right, I think I'm just going to go in just a little bit. She's just about to start talking there. I could set an endpoint or I could just put my playhead there and it'll act as an endpoint. OK, so right now, if I edit this shot in the timeline, it's going to go from the playhead here all the way to the end.
And there are quite a few ways that you can start editing footage to begin a sequence, but for now, I'm going to start off with the most basic of the basic, and that's dragging and dropping it from the source monitor to the timeline. Now before I do, I want to draw your attention down here. These are the source track selectors. Because they're all selected, my video and my two channels of audio, that means that these are all going to be included in the edit, so if I want to make sure that my video and two channels of audio are to be edited into the sequence, I just need to make sure that they're selected, but keep that in mind when you want to be selective, for example, if you just want to edit audio into the timeline, you just turn off the video.
OK, but I do want everything to come in so I'm going to put that back on and I'm just going to drag and drop. Once I've done that, notice that several things have happened. First, obviously, I do have a clip in my timeline. I also have the visual output of that clip here in the record monitor, and finally, if you come over here to the 2.4 bin, I have an Untitled Sequence. I want to rename that right away, so I'm just going to call this Hot Glass Intro and I also like to add my initials and the date.
All right, so we have Caroline setting us up and talking about the history. Let's go ahead and jump to Suzi talking about the concentration that it takes in order to practice glassblowing. So I'll load this, and not the best frame to start out on, so let me just go ahead and play and find a better one. - I for one don't like to carry on a big conversation. - All right, I'm just going to kind of go a little bit to the right there. A little bit better. All right, so now, I'm going to splice this shot in right after the first clip. I want to make sure that my playhead is exactly at the end of the first shot, which it is.
If this clip was not at the end of the sequence, the way that you actually snap to an edit point no matter where it is, is just cmd + click or ctrl + click on a PC, just kind of near the edit point, and it'll snap there. So if I cmd + click near the edit point here, it will snap to the beginning. All right, so we're going to go ahead and splice this in instead of dragging and dropping now, we're going to move to the keyboard, which is how you should edit most of the time, and again, we're going to use the Splice-in command here, which is this yellow arrow or the "v" key on the keyboard, so just a quick glance at my track selectors, everything is selected, so I'm ready to go.
I'll press "v" and there we go. So I'm just going to play over this edit to see what I think. - Tube, and shaped by the human touch. - I for one don't like to carry on a big conversation while I'm working because I have to count. I have to know what's going on. - You know, I actually think that I'd like a different shot to come after the narrator. When she's talking about being "shaped by the human touch", I think that this one right here where Suzi talks about "harnessing the energy" would be a lot better. "Shaped by the human touch", "harnessing the energy", it's a match made in heaven.
So, I'm just going to play the first part of this to make sure that I agree. - And we're harnessing that energy and that hot mol-- - All right, perfect. So I'm going to go ahead and snap to the edit point here, and again, that's just cmd + click, and it will snap right in between those two shots, glance at my track selectors, everything's good, and I'll press "v", and we've made our edit. I'm going to play this to see if it flows a little bit better. - And shaped by the human touch. - And we're harnessing that energy and that hot, molten media.
Medium, and uh, you know, making it respond to our will with our bare hands. - All right, so the topics do flow a lot better but she obviously stumbles pretty badly here at the beginning of the second shot. So I just want to remove part of this. And to make this easier on me, I'm going to make sure that I can see the audio waveform. So I'm going to come to this arrow right here, the Track Control Panel, and click on it, and you can see here that I have a bunch of controls which we'll go over in much greater detail later but right now, I just want to click on my waveform buttons.
All right, so let's play this again and see exactly what we want to remove. - Touch. - And we're harnessing that energy, and that hot, molten media. Medium, and uh, you know, making it resp-- - All right, I want to go from "harnessing that energy" and then "making it respond" so let's get rid of all of this right here, and so I'm just going to mark them in right before it, and an out right after it, OK? Again, I want to make sure that all of my tracks are selected.
If they aren't, you'll be able to tell on the timeline, so if I just have my audio track selected and not my video, you'll be able to tell. OK, so I want to make sure that they're all selected. All right, so I want to get rid of this and I want to perform an Extract, and the Extract is this button on the user interface, but again, use the keyboard, and that's the "x" key for extract. So I'm going to press "x" and it's gone, and let's go ahead and play and see if we like it. - Harnessing that energy, making it respond to our will with our bare hands.
- All right, so, although she does a jump cut visually, that's fine, we're going to cover that up with some B-roll. The actual audio sounds nice. If I undo that just really quickly, cmd + z, or ctrl + z on a PC, and back up here, if instead of Extracting, I Lifted, and that corresponds to the "z" key on the keyboard, I just want to show you what happens. So that part is removed, but instead of closing the gap, it leaves a gap. All right, obviously, not what we want to do here, so I've already got this part marked. I'm just going to Extract it again by pressing "x" and I've Extracted it.
All right, so I'm just going to keep going through my sound bites, adding them one after another, or in between each other, and eliminating the parts that I don't want to use. Take your time doing this because you're laying down the foundation of your piece, and don't worry if you still have some shots that need some work. If they need moving around or turning up, that's totally fine, and we'll tackle that 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
Duration
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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: Performing basic edits to build the foundation