What's new in Media Composer v. 8.2?

- In October 2014, Avid released Media Composer Version 8.2 which contains a number of exciting updates that I wanted to be sure to tell you about. So I'm doing a summary "What's New" movie here, but I'll also be inserting movies within the course when appropriate. So look for the Version 8.2 label, and the new or updated tags in each movie name so that you know where those are. Just so you know, this "What's New" movie is more for people who are already familiar with Media Composer rather than the newbies. So watch this if you just need to know what's changed, and if you're an Avid novice you can watch this or just go ahead and get started with the rest of the course in Chapter One.

First of all, I want to point out that the project window got a bit of a makeover. Here's the old project window, and here's the new one. We got a little more real estate here, and that allows us to better see and manage projects of all title lengths. We also get all the details of the projects over here to the right, and this is huge. Before, you had to actually enter the project and then click on the Format tab to see these details. Now, you just click on the project and you get to see all of these project details before entering the project.

Once you enter the project, we have a nice, new option on the top of our project window right here. This is a bin filtering text field so you just type in here, and bins matching the text criteria that you input will automatically filter in your list. I don't have many bins in assets, but I have a lot of bins in exercise files. Everything is broken out per chapter. Let's say I just quickly need to access the 6.2 bin. I'll just type in 6.2, and there we go, and I have access to that bin.

So bin filtering, really useful. Other cool bin stuff, now we can do favorite bins. Favorite bins allow us to make a bin or several bins accessible in any project so if you want to have music, or stock footage, or sequences, or effect templates available in each project you're working in, then favorite bins can be a great way to go. To do this, you first go into Settings and Bin, and you choose whether you want your favorite bins to show at the top or the bottom. I'll just keep mine at the top.

Then, you open the bin, so let's say that we want our music to be accessible in all projects. I'll go ahead and open this, and I right-click on the bin and choose Add Bin to Favorites. Now up at the top, I see Favorite Bins, and there's Music. Now this is accessible in any project. Just to show you this, I'll go into another project like so, and there's my Favorite Bins. You can see here over to the right which project it lives in. So it's accessing it from the Hot Glass project.

Another neat feature that we have is the ability to do background rendering. If I wanted to render an effect, I just come to Render Effect, and then this check box is new, Run in Background. For simpler or fewer effects this should work very well, but just keep in mind that if you're rendering a whole lot of complex effects, the system resources will be split so you could see a dip in performance. So use this option with care. Again, you really only need to render non-realtime effects, so in this case we don't need to render. One more thing I want to show you, searching for marker text.

You can now search for text in the marker comment fields even if the sequence isn't loaded. All you do is you bring up your Find tool, Command-F, and we have this new tab here, Markers. This is going to search for marker text in any open or closed bins. If I search in here for audio, I know that I have an interview where the audio is bad and I've marked it, and I can't remember where that is, so I'm just gonna type in "audio", and here it is Replace audio.

Again, I just double-click on this, and it loads it into the source monitor right at my marker location. Now that we can search for markers across the entire project, you may find yourself using markers in a different way. Those are some of the main updates in Media Composer Version 8.2. Check out the 8.3 updates next, and, of course, any applicable updates will receive a new or updated movie within the structure of the course.