Working inside bins

Now that we're a little more familiar with the project window and what it does in terms of holding our bins, it's time to delve deeper into the heart of editing by looking at what's inside of our bins, as well as how we actually work with everything. Okay, so I'm just going to go into my Assets folder and open up one of my bins. I'll just open up my ALL bin because it has everything. And I'll just expand this and I want to take a look at the various ways that you can look at the clips inside of your bin. Down here, there are three views. This is Text view, Frame view, and Script view, and I want to go through each of these.

Text view, by default, is going to show you just columns of information about your clips. And depending on what you have chosen in this list here, you'll see a different set of information. Okay, you can kind of go through and see what the default ones are. You can also make your own, okay? So if I go back to Custom and sort of get rid of everything, and then I'm going to right-click up here on the heading and say Choose Columns. There is lots and lots of columns of information that you can show. So, just for the heck of it, I'll just choose all of them and say OK.

And as I scroll through here, you can see that there is an awful lot of information about your clips that you can display. I'm going to go back to Custom because I want to show you one thing that you can do and that's that you can make your own columns of information. So if you click right up here in the heading and then just type, you can come in here and just give yourself some user-defined information. So, we'll go into much more detail about this sort of thing in chapter six. But I just wanted to let you know that you can use Media Composer's metadata, the information about the clips, or you can put in your own information.

I'll go ahead and delete this column right now. Just click on it and Dress delete, and yes, I do want to get rid of it. Now I'm going to come over to this next tab over here, Frame view, and to make these a little bit larger I'm just going to press Cmd+L or Ctrl+L repeatedly. And then I can come down to my Fast menu here and choose Fill Window so that everything is organized and kind of in a grid here. All right, so this is basically the first frame of each one of my clips. If you want to change the poster frame to something else. See, I have this kind of blurry shot here and maybe I want to go a little bit further and just redefine what this shot is as far as its poster frame.

I just click on it and then I play. And there's lots of ways to play, but one way is space bar, so I'll press space bar. And press space bar again to stop. Okay, so now this is the poster frame that defines this clip. And as you just saw, these are just little movies, so if you want to preview your clips via the bin, Frame view is a great place to do that. So if I want to just listen to my interviews in here, I can. >> But we start early in the morning choosing our colors, choosing the color of the vessel we want. >> All right, so pretty handy.

There are some other interesting things you can do in Frame view and we'll explore those later in the course. But I want to go to Script view next. And here, we can type in comments about each of our clips. And we can also actually copy and paste a whole lot of text into each one of these. So, maybe you have an entire transcript. You can actually copy and paste the interview transcript into these, but we don't have transcript data right now, so I can just come in and put a comment right here. I'll just say color correct.

Okay, and now I've added a comment to this clip. I can come in here and do the same thing, like so. And then when you go back to Text view, you can see that the comments column has that information. Okay, so any text that you enter in your bins becomes searchable data, so that's really important when you're actually looking for specific clips. For right now, I'll just go ahead and delete these comments because they aren't necessarily true. All right, so now I'm back in Text view and I want to start loading some clips and playing around with some basic navigation.

There are two ways that you can load clips. One way is to just double-click on a clip and another is to click and drag into the source monitor. And if you want, you can also drag and drop multiple clips into the source monitor. You can select up to 20 at once, but right now, I'll just select one and then press Cmd+A to select them all and then just drag them over into the source monitor, like so. And so, I have these 20 clips that are now in this list and I don't have to go back to the bin if I want to use them. I can very easily go back and forth between them right here and this is called the Clip Name menu.

You'll notice that it's in alphabetical order, but you can also display this in the order that you loaded the clips. So right now, if I just click on it, it's in alphabetical order. If I Option-click on it or Alt-click on a PC, this is now the order that I've loaded the clips, okay? And I did just drag and drop them, but if I had just one at a time, put each one of these into the source monitor, this can become really useful because these were the most recent ones I loaded and these were the ones I loaded 20 times ago. All right, so that's the Clip Name menu. If you want to just clear your monitor and get your clip out of the source monitor, you just say Clear Monitor, but your Clip Name menu remains.

But if you want to clear the entire menu, you'll choose Clear Menu. Okay? So that was a brief introduction on how to navigate and load your bin contents. In the next movie, we'll take a look at some of the various ways to navigate, mark, and edit your clips.