Using the exercise files

If you're a premium, member of the Lynda.com online training library, you have access to the exercise files, used throughout this title. Once you unzip your folder, you'll see a folder called Exercise Files, and inside of there are four other folders, Avid projects, Additional Materials, AMA Media, and Avid Media Files. Now, the first and most important order of business, is to place the Avid Media Files folder, at the root directory of your media drive. You cannot work off your desktop, it's gotta be at the root directory of the hard drive.

So here you can see, I have my hard drive, and I'll open it. And what I'm going to do, is just drag and drop the entire exercise files folder over to, my hard drive. Now, I'm going to go inside exercise files, and drag Avid Media Files, out to the root directory. Okay? Again, root directory just simply means it's at the top level, not inside any other folders. So this should be how you're working. You have an Avid Media Files folder, which contains the media for this project. And then you also have an exercise files folder which contains, three other important folders.

All right? So believe me, this is the number one error people make, when they launch the exercise files and everything is offline, this Avid Media Files folder, isn't in the correct location. So just make sure you're good, with this folder placement, the root directory of your media drive. Just briefly, let's take a look at what else is in here. In Exercise Files, I've got my projects. There are two projects. Hot Glass, which we'll work in most of the time, and Hot Glass Chapter two, which we're going to be working in during most of our fast track chapter two, where we'll be going on a start to finish workflow through a small project.

We also have additional materials. And, these are five folders that we're going to be using throughout the course. I'll be instructing you when you need to access those. And then we have AMA Media. And this is the media that we're going to be working in, primarily in chapter two and three. I'll be referring to this in a bit. All right, so let's go ahead and launch Media Composer. Once Media Composer finishes launching, make sure to choose External, and then come up to this folder icon here. Now, simply navigate to Exercise Files > Avid Projects. Okay, so I'll select Avid Projects and click Open.

And now, the projects, Hot Glass and Hot Glass Chapter 2, are displayed here in the left part of this window. Since the majority of this course is spent in Hot Glass, I'll go ahead and select this and press OK. Once inside the Avid project, you'll notice up here at the top, is a folder called Assets, and in it are all the raw materials that we'll use throughout this course. Now everything, is automatically online as long as you've placed your Avid Media Files folder in the right location. You don't have to follow along with this part, but let me just show you, I'm just going to double click on the All bin, and you can see that all of our media is online and ready to go.

Below that are the exercise files. So I had this exercise files folder, and if I twirl this down you can see that everything's organized into separate folders. So if I was working in chapter four and the third movie, I would just go to my 4.3 bin, open it, and in it are the materials that I would need, to work in this movie. Okay, I'll close that and twirl that back up. Now one thing about this media, in the main Hot Glass project. I had to compress it to a pretty low SD resolution to fit within the exercise files download limit for Lynda.com, so you didn't have a crazy long download time.

Now working with these low res files won't effect anything on your end, but you should be aware of the face that we're working in SD. And occasionally, when we're talking about HD workflows, we'll be switching to the HD flavor of our project. You do that by coming up to Format, and just changing your project type from the SD flavor, to one of these two HD flavors. Usually, we'll be changing to 720 23976. Okay? But I'll definitely tell you when we're going to do that, I just wanted to make you aware of this. All right, so, this Hot Glass project is pretty cut and dry, everything's laid out for you.

I do want to back out of this project, which I'll do, by closing this window here. Now I'm back at the select project window, where we were before, and things are slightly different in the Hot Glass chapter two project. Now I'm going to show you how to do this in chapter two, but I'll quickly show you here as well. So I'll select this project, and open it by saying OK, and if I open this All Bin, you can see that everything is offline. So you just need to perform a very simple relink process here. Just select all of these clips, and then right-click and choose Relink to AMA Files.

Then you want to go to the AMA media folder inside of Exercise Files. And then Glassblower, and then All, and you'll see here that it's looking for a specific file. Okay? It's up here at the top. And once I choose this one, it's going to find all the rest. So I'll say Open here. And now you can see that all of my media is online. All right? So you've just got to manually link the media in chapter two. And again, I'll take you through that process later. The format of the media in this project is HD, just so you know. So I'll go ahead and close this, and this time I'm going to quit out of Media Composer, because I want to discuss one last scenario.

If you've already been using Media Composer prior to this training, you've likely already got an Avid Media Files folder at the root directory of some drive. Well you don't want to replace your media with this media, so I'll show you what you do in this case. All right, so here is a drive here, and it already has an Avid Media Files folder. And inside there is an NFX folder, and inside there is a numbered folder, and it will probably be called one. Well, let me just move this out of the way, because I want to show you the exercise files has a slightly different system.

Avid Media Files folder, and then also again, MXF in there, but instead of a one folder in there, it's called 1001. And the reason that I named it that, is so that you could place it directly alongside other numbered folders. Okay, so I'll just select this and then drag and drop it right beside the one and now in a situation like this, Media Composer will be able to read the media no problem. Okay. Now, if you don't have access to the exercise files, feel free to follow along with your own assets. All right, let's get started.