Use the Splice edit - Media Composer Tutorial

- [Instructor] When you add clips to a sequence, or move clips around inside of a sequence, or take clips out of a sequence, there are two ways that Media Composer can approach the change to the sequence. One way is like a word processor, pushing things out of the way or closing the gap when you remove them. Another way is a little more like an old style typewriter where you type on the page and once it's on the page it's there. You can overwrite on top of it but what you can't do is have the letters shuffle around on the page. These two ways of working are described in Media Composer terminology as Splice-in and Extract for the word processing style moving things around mode, and Overwrite and Lift for the laying over the top mode. Overwrite mode is a little bit like painting over the top of an existing design. Because you're replacing the existing material the overwrite modes are a little bit dangerous and so they use the color red. Here we've got a Lift icon for moving things here, Overwrite icon here for laying things into the timeline, and down here we've got a couple of timeline controls as well. Notice at the moment, just for the record I have all of these on and I'm in a new sequence called Insert Clips. I've set this sequence up so that we've got a clip on the V2 and A2 tracks, this is the video and the audio, lined up with a clip on the video one track, Fingers is just over Trees and you can see the first frames of these are perfectly aligned. And I want to draw your attention to that because I'm going to show you first of all, in this lesson, how to insert clips. You'll notice that I habitually click on the timecode bar at the bottom of the timeline to move my playhead. And as we discovered earlier, that's because if I click anywhere else I'm probably going to move things around and goodness knows what the outcome will be. Remember with an editing system like Media Composer you can always undo. So, I'm going to press command + Z in fact, rather than doing that I'm going to go to the Edit menu and I can go down here to the UndoRedo List and you can see I've got Undo Extract-Insert 0. This creates a list of undos as you work in the system. So this is kind of like a history if you're familiar with working in Photoshop or applications like it. We're back to the way we were. On the timeline, I'm not going to add an in or an out mark for now although I could do and they'd be used in a very similar way to the way they are in the source monitor. In the source monitor I've got in and out marks on this clip, my playhead is right at the start of the timeline, all of my tracks are turned on on the timeline and both of my tracks are turned on in the source. And what I'm going to do is click this yellow Splice-in button and when I do this, Media Composer is going to add the contents of this R8_88 Foot holds clip to the sequence on the tracks that they're patched to. You can see V1 is going to V1 A1 is going to A1. And in addition to that, because all of my other tracks are turned on those tracks are going to be effected as well. Earlier we were adding clips by overwriting so noting moves out of the way, but this time around we're going to insert, pushing things out of the way to make space. Remember we don't have any media available for these other tracks so though they're going to be effected by the edit, what they're going to be effected by is nothingness. So, you're probably waiting to see what happens and let's see if you've guessed it correctly. I'm going to click the Splice-in button. Everything moved out of the way, remember the playhead lines up at the end of the clip you've last added to a sequence. So, there's the end of the clip and everything has moved out of the way very neatly. I'm going to undo, and let's try this again but this time I'm going to turn off the other tracks. I'm just going to keep video one and A1 turned on. Both of my source tracks are enabled and these two tracks only are enabled on the timeline. So, I'm going to Splice-in and right away you can see what's happened. On video one and A1 the clips have been moved out of the way just as you would anticipate but because my V2 and A2 were turned off, this R8_82 Fingers shot has not moved, it's actually stayed exactly where it was. It's a little misleading, it looks like it's moved to the left and the reason for that is that the timeline by default will auto zoom and because the timelines gotten longer because I added a clip to it, the entire duration of a longer timeline is now in the same window. And that means that proportionately this clip looks like it shifts over to the left. But I promise it hasn't. Now just demonstrate this, I'm going to undo, I'm going to just line up the playhead and I'm going to hold the command key here in MacOS, this would be control in windows to snap to the first frame of the clip. There it is, at 15 seconds and 19 frames in the timecode reading. I'm going to go to the beginning of the timeline, turn off those tracks, Splice-in, again, I'm going to hold down command or control and there we are, the first frame of this clip is at 15 seconds and 19 frames, it hasn't moved to the left. What has happened is that this Matt Climbing shot and this RO5_54 Trees shot, these two have moved to the right, breaking the sync. This clip used to be lined up with the Trees shot. This is a problem. And in fact, many editors believe that it's so easy to mess up the timing, the synchronization of clips on the timeline when you're using Splice-in editing in this way. It really should be the icon with through red arrow not the Overwrite. And it gets worse, I'm going to undo, I'm going to turn off these tracks, and this time around I'm going to turn off the A1 track, the track enable option for my audio in my sequence, and I'm just going to allow the video to be added to the sequence with the Splice-in. And now look what's happened, now the video only has arrived on the timeline in the sequence, video only has been pushed out of the way, and the audio is exactly where it was before. Here's our Fingers shot lined up with the audio from the Trees shot and you can see these numbers are showing me that my sync is out. This is actually incredibly useful because it means that if you ever apply an edit to your timeline and suddenly your sequence is covered in little white numbers, you know you've messed up the sync. It's a great time to undo, as I'm doing now, and have a really good look at your track selection buttons. It really is like a Christmas tree, everything lights up when you've ruined sync in this way. Now that I hope I've sufficiently frightened you with the Splice-in editing option, I want to give you a little bit of reassurance. In the main when you're building your sequence initially, when you're building your assembly edit which is just the order in which you want the shots to be in your sequence, you're probably going to use the Insert edit more than anything else and I'll show you why. Let me get rid of this shot, I'm just going to select it with my smart tool in the red mode here and hit delete and we'll come back to how to do that later. What I'm looking at now is a much more probable scenario when you're working with your clips for the first time to build a sequence. I'm going to go to the end of the timeline, I'm going to open up a shot, I like the look of this, I'm going to splice it in. I'm going to open up another one, I like the look of that, I'm going to splice it in. And as I go, I'm just adding clips to the end of the sequence. Notice the playhead is right at the edge of the sequence. In fact, when your playhead is at the end of the sequence in this way, it makes very little difference whether you're inserting or overwriting. There's nothing in the way in fact, there's not even a timeline yet for the clip to interfere with. The value of the Splice-in edit is this. Let's say for example, I'm going to get this Hand Hold shot, I like the look of this and I'd like it to go between the Matt Climbing shot at the beginning of the sequence and this 5_54 Tree shot. Well I can move my playhead back in time and in fact I'm going to hold down command again or control in windows to snap in between these clips and I'm going to Splice-in. And when I do, Media Composer pushes the other clips out of the way and it allows me to insert the shot that I want to add. This is incredibly useful. This, I suppose is, a big part of the non-linear part of it being a non-linear editor. And it means that you don't have to worry about which clips you've got when, you can always just push another clip into the stack. Of course, there's a reciprocal way to remove items from the sequence. And we'll look at that a little bit later on. There are also ways for you to protect the location of clips on the timeline so that you can add items without ruining sync. In fact there's even ways of even locking down tracks altogether so that you can't make changes to them. We'll look at those later on. But this would be a great time to just take a moment to experiment with the Media in the Climbing Media bin and just try adding some shots combining track patching with the Splice-in editing option.