hello everyone and welcome to video editing one with Professor Harris I will be your guide this is AVID media composer mc101 lesson one introduction to Media composer this is a robust program top editors worldwide choose media composer as their go-to editing tool whether they're cutting breaking news Hollywood Blockbusters or the next binge-worthy streaming series media composer is the program of choice as you expected midi composer offers a deep and complex tool set so complex that they have two books over 200 Pages a piece just to cover the fundamentals of the program that should speak to how much this program can do it can be a little bit overwhelming at first but I like I said will be your guide I'm here to break this down into easy to understand lessons as we go through this whole series mini composer can be surprisingly easy to start using um if you have the right teacher and I'm here to be that right teacher why am I doing this why am I making a video series well this is external to my class at Franciscan University that's video editing one com 343 this is a resource that I want for my students I want them to be able to watch back these lessons these lectures to understand the program as best as possible for infinite review this is for your benefit hello everyone and then secondarily to the people of the internet world to the sphere when I was getting my different certifications with Avid media composer I saw that there was a distinct lack of media and video media surrounding these certifications and how to obtain them and so I decided you know what now that I am extremely proficient with the program or at least more proficient than I was before why not I take the mantle and teach this to the people of the world including my students so here we are this is what we're gonna do we're gonna roll with it um in this lesson we're going to learn how to navigate the application customize interface and prep for editing by watching and organizing media Clips but what's the point of this why we why are we doing this why are we pursuing video editing well it's this big thing right in front of you this is the badge that we're going to be working towards this whole series for the mc101 and mc110 this is the specialist certified video editor with Avid media composer there are two different badges that you can earn through Avid we have the specialist and the professional now there is an expert but they don't have expert certified for Midi composer so we're just going to ignore that again we're just focusing on Avid certified specialist for this series that's mc101 and mc110 you can get this specialist certification this is a badge to get from Avid media composer that can go on your social media including your LinkedIn and it certifies you as a competent video editor with Avid media composer now there are some video assets before we get into this there's some pre-made projects by Avid and you can download those off edit stock I'm going to leave the link for this in the description of this video it says 2022 it's currently 2023 or near the end and you might be watching this in 2024 2025 Avid media composer changes a little bit here and there with update to update and it is becoming more efficient more powerful but it's not extremely different the workflow is still much the same so just download whichever year whichever is the most recent version of that media packet and just roll with it and if you're with me in class I'll talk you through all this it's not going to be that complicated or confusing all right so as you work towards your specialist certification at the end of the semester you'll have an opportunity to take one exam this one exam covers both fundamentals books yes there are two books again to cover just the fundamentals of this program but you'll have I believe it's I think it's a 50 question and this could change but it's a 50 question 60 Minute exam that covers again both books so it'd be beneficial for you to be mastering the program as I teach it to you make sure you're working in the actual program what is the program well the things we're going to do in this lesson is learn how to launch it I've already launched it because I have it my doc if you're going to launch it all you have to do is navigate to where it is in your launch pad if you're on Mac and then just click it and that's going to launch Media composer again I already had it launched so that's why it launched so quickly but a few more goals for this lesson and we're always going to start each lesson with the goals we're going to identify the primary interface windows and understand their basic functions recognize project assets in the bins understand bin options create user profiles personalize the media composer interface map user selectable buttons and change auto save setting intervals let's get into it so here we are immediate composer this is the first window you're going to see once you launch up this is the select project window and it's got a bunch of different features that we're going to cover now the first thing we're going to see is the select project button we are currently selected and by default when you launch midi composer the select project button will be active so this is where we can access existing projects or create new projects media composer again launches this by default next we have the what's new button this is the what's new button and this tabs us over to this page this page essentially has a bunch of different details about updates and we can click the different updates and be like yes wow I'm a nerd and then we can look at that stuff you don't it's it's really it's pointless for beginners so it's just good to know that that exists but we'll go back to the select project window because that's where that's where the money happens we also have the OS user profile this displays the name that you use to log in on the computer that's this right here it says welcome to Media composer Benjamin Harris because that is my name we also have the projects tab this is currently active and this is active by default in this tab shows us the different projects that are already on our system so we can see I have this scroll wheel here you can see all the different projects that I already have on my computer next we have the new project tab that's adjacent to the projects tab we have the new project tab we can activate this tab to set up and create new projects easy peasy we also have the user profile menu I'm going to go back to project real quick with the user profile menu this is super cool feature we can use this menu options to select import or create media composer user profiles in media composer you'll employ your user profiles to customize the application so for uh going forward just for your reference this user profile drop down tab there are a lot of things when you customize the interface will be saved to your user profile so it'd be good to I mean you can have multiples but it would be good to be familiar with your user profile and the different settings that you have on each and it's also nice because like I said we can create user profiles import or access our user profiles directly from this user profile drop down tab we also have the location menu we use this menu to switch the project directory to display that displays in the project list so what did I just say the location menu is this this location menu we can switch between um essentially private or public slash shared documents on the computer's drive so if I click this one it shows me all of the different projects that are shared across multiple users on this computer if I click this one it's going to go to my private project now this is super important going forward for this semester that you never use the private one you don't want to use the one that's sent to users my user documents you want to use the user's shared media composer and on PC this is called users public I believe so make sure you're always using that public so that you can access the program from whichever user you're signed in on otherwise you'll be locked out of it because these are set specifically to each specific user when you use the private location or the one that stored in documents next we have the browse folder icon that's next to our location drop down tab because it's very similar in what it does we can click this and it's going to open up this window or then we can pick a location for instance maybe like an external hard drive that we want to work off of for our project so we can store our projects on external hard drives and work directly from there with this so it sets us select custom locations for new projects or navigate to existing projects in custom locations easy peasy all right number nine we have the project list this displays a list of projects in the current location menu directory plus information about each project so like here we are here we're set on our shared projects and we can see this list we have our different projects they all appear here we got rock climber mc110dn parkour anesthesia jacuzzi Harris anesthesia L2 so we've got a bunch of different projects here and these when you create a new project it will appear in this list as long as location menu is set correctly and then number 10 we have the project view we can leverage these options to adjust the Project's list appearance including which information columns we want to display and that is all of this stuff right here where we can kind of zoom in and out to change what kind of different columns we see we can select different views so this is frame view we can also set font and choose columns that will be displayed in the different views so let's say for instance I wanted something further down so we could say modified date we could move that up and customize this area as we see fit but right now we have for we have Name by default and frame and project type and frame rate that's all the basic information you're going to see just off the rip during the first exercise if you haven't done that already so there are exercises at different intervals within the uh the lessons and um in the first lesson it covers the select project window to create user profiles and open a project installed during the mc101 overview lesson that's essentially how to set up um that download I was talking about earlier onto your system I'm not going to cover that with this video for my students I Do cover that in class so no worries there I will eventually make a video on it um I might have already made a video on it and you can go ahead and check my channel for that look for that it should be called something along the lines of how to work off of a USB or on the computer chart drive so there you go there's that for that reference now that you've explored the select project window you're ready to dive into the main editing interface but first let's take a quick look at how to use the what's new interface and how to open a project so when we click the what's new tab going back here to the nerd settings um you can gain access to a list of media composers release dating back to uh different versions I mean like I said earlier this goes back to 2019.6 but not only can you review the update details from past releases but you can quickly research available features if you're working on a system with uh an earlier version installed so if you wanted to you're like oh you know I'm in 2020.4 I can see what features are available in this version to access the information about specific releases and its feature updates we can click the versions menu icon that reveals the release date and then we can click the I icon on these different uh little guys so we can see these little icons and that's going to pull up the different site different Avid websites and then we can see different information about those things specifically very cool thank you Evan all right moving along here swiftly uh since the select project window always loads after midi composer launches by default you'll have plenty of opportunities to explore and master its interface so since the select project window this is going to open every time we'll have plenty of time to master this all right now let's quickly move on to opening a project you open projects from the select project window the uh to open a project we're going to select the Project's location via the location menu so whether we're working in our private folder or our public shared folders then we're going to select a project that we want to open we can click rock climber once because rock climbers what we're going to be working with for this lesson and then we can click the open button or press enter on our Windows or Mac return on our keyboard Additionally you could just double click it so there's three ways to open it double click click it once hit enter or click it and then come down here and hit open so that's three different ways all right moving on to learning the interface to make starting and working with projects easier you'll want to familiarize yourself with the main application Windows let's start with a quick tour as you go pay close attention to the names of the windows and buttons the quicker you recognize them the less confusing things will seem and the faster you'll get up and running so we have our three main Windows our three main interfaces so when the project opens the three primary windows and media composer interface appear we have the bin container this is the bin container window next we have the composer window this is the composer window it consists of both these screens in this squarish area and then we have the timeline timeline down here so again we have bin container composer window and timeline easy enough so the three primary windows are interlocked when using a single computer screen as you can see on my screen here on Dual displays by default the composer window and timeline Windows occupy the right screen while the bin container occupies the left screen so this screen and this sorry this window and this window go to a write screen over here and this window occupies its own left screen window that's for your reference all right first we'll start with the bin container two sides make up the bin container we have this side and this side this whole square area makes up the bin container the bin container sidebar left that's this left side lists project elements like bins volumes scripts and folders the right panel displays open bin volume and script contents so these are different folders and bins and the right side actually shows us what's inside this is very similar to like finder Windows um so I mean like so I come into finder here and I go to let's say desktop and then I double click uh I don't know maybe none of those I'll do I'll go to music then I click here we can see that this kind of expands into this and we can see the folders and the contents of this folder very similar here in media composer you can just double click and that's going to open the different contents of each bin all right moving on we have the composer window by default the composer window displays two monitors and two different windows so you'll load and play Source media in the source monitor which is the left and you'll use the record monitor which is the right to view your editing program sequence let me talk with English I'm going to use English here so we're going to load Clips before they actually go in our timeline before they actually end up in our final composite we're going to load them to preview them here and then once we're satisfied with what we want um we could add this video to our timeline and our timeline displays here so we can see what we change what happens in our timeline in our record monitor whereas we can see what we're previewing from other media in our source monitor that's a simple way to understand it and then during the editing process the composer window will change to show you different images two three four and six at a time depending on what you need to see while performing particular operations this includes editing trimming visual effects and so on so these two screens are going to turn into six screens at one point this semester during this video series buckle up it's okay I'll explain it I'll make sure it's nice and simple in terms but all you need to know right now and one of the big things you need to know just going forward is that again this right screen displays everything that happens in our timeline this is the actual output of our video project all right then the last thing we need to know is the timeline the timeline displays a graphical representation of your program organized into tracks the image or sorry what you can see here on screen contains a fairly basic sequence so this is kind of what a sequence is going to look like it's not going to have these gaps in it I've been goofing around with these so you could just ignore all the different flaws that are in these but this is what a basic sequence might look like initially your timeline will be empty because no sequence will be loaded what is a sequence the sequence is a series of different clips or shots or segments that are arranged to make a final output video in your record monitor but let's keep moving we're going to move on now to opening and closing bins as mentioned the bin container remember this is our bin container window very nice bin container contains bins which are container files that hold project assets remember that word assets project assets so our bins so we have video we have titles effects audio these hold our project assets so this video here and this video here are assets that I'm loading in my source monitor to then figure out you know what of this do I want to take to put into my timeline and once it's in my timeline it shows up in my record monitor all right I hope that makes sense I'm going to undo that because I don't actually want that to happen but that's a quick overview but opening and closing bins so um we'll take a closer look at this now during the first exercise and throughout the editing process you'll open and close bins to open a bin from the container sidebar we can double click the bin I've been doing this multiple times already so I'm going to open my effects bin so I've got a dissolve and Avid titler plus and a lower third graphic this is my effects bin so I double clicked it and that's how it opened and then if we want to we can open additional bins by double clicking the bin icons multiple times on different bins in our bin container sidebar so I have a bunch of different bins open and they display up here as tabs um you can't really read them because I've got so many of them open so I'm going to close a few of these close my sub clips and we have our sequence spin video bin and titles so now we have a couple bins open but not all we can see the icons here change depending on which ones are actually open so you can see this titles bin is open and this video bin is open because they are open here in my different tabs inside my bin container window easy peasy now to close bins I'm sure you just saw what I did but you can just click the little x's in the upper right corner so if I want to close my titles tab or my title has been I can just click the little X and that's going to close that super easy we could also close primary Windows if we want so each of the three primary Windows has a vertical title bar on the left side if you click the X that's this if we click the X then it's going to close that window so let's go ahead and let's close our composer window so if I close this what's going to happen nothing apparently let me close the timeline instead I'll close the timeline so now I don't have a timeline how am I supposed to edit without a timeline well this is where media composer if you click one button it can feel like you broke the whole thing and you can have no idea how to fix it but there's a quick way to reopen close windows and to restore the default view we can click the menu icon to the edit button in the workspace bar this is the workspace bar and there's this little arrow at the bottom of our edit because this is the workspace we're currently in we can click this and we can do restore current to default and then we can hit restore and that's going to bring back our timeline so if you ever accidentally close your timeline your composer window and you're like oh I can't edit anymore you can always restore it restore current to default so that's a very easy way to get that back awesome and then a couple of notes Here closing windows does not cause you to lose work when you reopen the window you'll see your work again intact so don't worry about accidentally closing your timeline that doesn't mean you lost all your work it just means that the interface looks different and then closing the bin container causes all open bins to close and all Clips or sequences displayed in the composer and timeline Windows to close as well so what does that mean essentially if I closed my bins window right now it would close this and this and it would make this blank and all of this would also disappear or go blank but that didn't mean that I lost any work it just meant that I closed essentially my bins that were being used for my timeline and my composer window all right let's move on now creating and changing user profiles immediate composer you can adjust numerous settings to suit your personal style and editing needs these adjustments are stored within your user profile in addition you can create multiple user profiles and switch between them without having to switch system users at the operating system level if you launch midi composer and work inside a project without creating a user profile you'll likely work with the default profile named after the system's login name so media composer Auto creates this during the initial launch so if you don't set up a user profile for instance we saw that my name earlier at the operating system level was Benjamin Harris so it would by default make a Benjamin Harris created uh user profile when working with Avid but let's explore how to create your own user profile so as you work with media composer you'll quickly discover um that you get to choose between multiple ways to accomplish particular tasks for user profiles this means choosing when you create one you can do this either before you open a project at the select project window remember that first window that we opened you when we were showing I was showing you the create user profile or the user profile drop down you could create one there or after you open the project in the main interface so we can make one here as well the next two subsections explain how to do this so to create a user profile within an open project where we are currently if you open a project before creating a user profile you can use the settings window to set one up so first we're going to access our userable profile options by going to file in the upper left and then settings and then in the settings we can click the user Tab and here on the user tab we can find the active user at the top of this tab you can see it right here I'm currently set at B Harris the default user was Benjamin Harris which I was just explaining a little bit ago user profile is a menu you can use to create your profile to do this we'll click the user profile drop down menu and we can go to create user profile we'll choose create user profile and then we can type in our profile name so we could call this I'm just going to call this lesson one cool so now I have a user profile named lesson one it's going to load for a second it's going to change some settings and it's going to load up our new user profile did you notice how the timeline changed it got a little bit squishier a little bit skinnier that's because um on the B Harris user that I had opened just a second ago had settings to make these wider and chunkier and that's one example of different settings you can leave behind on different user profiles so if I wanted to see this bigger or smaller I could set that my user profile and it would be saved to my user profile all right now let's talk about creating a user profile in the select project window to quickly get back to the select project window we're going to want to make sure we save any progress that we made here in our project so we'll click our bin container and our bin container sidebar and we'll hit command s or control s on our keyboard then we'll come up to file and we can go to close project it's going to take a little second here but it's going to close the project and take us right back to the select project window we are back on the select project window and remember the user profile drop down we can see we're currently set on lesson one there's my B Harris profile but we could also create a user profile by selecting here putting in a name and then clicking ok I'm going to refrain from doing that and I'm going to jump right back into our project because I don't need to create another user profile I just showed you how to do it any changes you make to the editing interface gets saved to the active user profile a file media composer automatically saves to the computer's internal drive when you're ready you can copy and take this file to another system so if I had a highly customized setup let's say I rearranged all these tiny little buttons here I made this smaller I decided you know what I like to see more up here and less down here it's going to save all that to my user profile I can take that user profile folder load it on a different computer relaunch load my user profile and all of these weird wacky settings I just did are going to be saved on that user profile and I can continue editing like I never left the first computer all right so that's just a little bit on user profiles um as you get more advanced with the program as you as your skill level increases you're going to want to customize the interface and I'll say this now and I'm going to say this again multiple times that if your interface if you're not customizing your interface you're stagnant in your editing the point of video editing is to constantly be getting faster and more efficient and if your interface isn't changing to some degree if you're not remapping and rearranging buttons then you're stagnant in your editing process never stop improving all right let's move on now to working with bins in media composer a bin is a container file that holds your Project's assets remember I said this earlier here's our video bin it has our different projects assets got these different videos that we can load by double clicking into our source monitor monitor and then review the footage and figure out you know what from this do we like what can we use what can we add to our timeline which will then show up in our record monitor okay so you'll store all your assets in bins audio and video Source Clips sub Clips sequences titles effects Graphics everything everything you make is going to be stored in what's called bins every new project includes one default bin named after the project itself I deleted that because I'm working with it's not here if if it was here it would it would be named rock climber but there would be a bin named rock climber um I could make a new bin if I wanted to I could do command n or I could right click and click new bin and I can by default it's going to name it rock climber bin so I'll just leave it I'll leave it named that so now we have a bin called rock climber bin um in our our list here so um that and you can put bins into folders to further organize the project so we have a folder here it's named rushes and it's got my audio my effects my titles and my video bins inside a folder so if I wanted to create a new folder I could name this folder I don't know if I like project and then I could throw all of my assets my different bins inside of that that project folder I'll refrain from doing that and I'm going to actually delete this I can select the folder and hit delete on my keyboard and that makes a new trash it goes into the trash we could recover this from the trash later if we wanted to I'm over explaining this but I'm going to keep going okay because you must place all project assets into bins you'll constantly use them um as you edit so let's preview some basic bin features and controls so changing bin views is the first thing we're going to cover so I'm going to open back up my my video bin here and we're going to look at the different bin views quick note before we jump into the different bin views um if you can't see these icons there's a chance that the window was shrunk down enough to the point that you need to use this little drop down so you can still access those different views by using that little drop down feature all right now that we've previewed the bins and kind of the different bins in the way they look and the way they function let's look at how to change the different views here again I talked about looking at the different views so right now this is the default view this displays bin contents as Columns of information think of this as text view because this is called text View and this is a database sort of mode so we're currently set on text view that's this one here and if I scroll left and right we can see I have different Columns of information that I can scrub through we have duration FPS what else do we got derive which drive it's stored on the creation date the image size all kinds of other things that can help us determine what what it is about these um different clips that we might be interested in so that's text view media composer automatically tracks basic statistical information about clips and sequences this includes duration time code source and so on camera written metadata is preserved and tracked in columns that you can display yourself there's a way to customize this we're going to get more into that in the second book The mc10 sorry mc110 but for now um we can also also create custom columns and Show additional information about our different Assets in our bins so again that's all mc110 stuff but for now just know that there are different things that you can include and custom columns that you can add to this section in our text View as I've been navigating the different uh you know little bins here with the different assets did you notice the different icons for the different things well media composer wants you to take a second to look at them here in this screenshot and identify them for yourself what do you think each of these little icons on the left side represents so let's see if you can guess these correctly so the first one is an audio only source clip so this looks like a little short audio waveform and that's the icon for that so we've got a little audio these are audio Assets in our bin next we have video Source clip icon this resembles a single frame of film right so we've got a little frame of film that's icon for that and then next we have the sequence icon icon excuse me and this looks like a film strip I feel it looks like it's got a bunch of these little film segments in it because it is it does have a bunch of little film segments in it that's what makes it a sequence so as you go through this course you'll work on projects you'll instantly recognize these icons and others going forward like I said in lesson two we're going to cover some more of those and how those look but for now these are the three essential basic ones audio video and then the sequence which contains both the audio and video segments sweet all right next let's look at the other frame of the other different uh view here for our bins we have frame view so if I click frame view here you'll see that the representative frame for each item in the bin appears so now we have like these little images let's go to our video bin because it's going to be a lot more interesting to look at this with frame view we can see a bunch of little thumbnails or pictures um to each video that represent the content of that video uh this viewable this view simulates working with shots on a light table and lets you easily enlarge uh preview and rearrange your shots because most editors are visually oriented this can be a really nice way to work so we can be scrolling back and forth and checking these bad boys out as we see fit but yes this is a frame View a little bit more on frame view to make the frames larger or smaller in our bin here we can click and drag the frame size slider highlighted in the uh here on screen actually it's not appearing right now which is fascinating I don't know why it's not it should be there oh there it is okay now it's appeared so we can use this to zoom in and out and be able to see these little thumbnails or little frames a lot more easily or you can use the corresponding keyboard shortcuts now this is these keyboard shortcuts that that I'm about to tell you about they're they have a lot of functions in media composer and I think it's going to talk about it here in a second but um just to let you know these are Ctrl l or command L and Ctrl K or command K depending on your operating system but if I select one of these and hit command L it's going to make it larger if I hit command K it's going to make it smaller and this function works on a lot of things in media composer the increasing and decreasing of the size of things so for your reference going forward do remember those shortcuts so if you can if you prefer you can also adjust frame size by going to the edit menu and choosing enlarged frames or reduce frames that's another way we can do this but Ctrl L and Ctrl K or command L command K our Universal keyboard shortcuts in MIDI composer depending on which window is active they also affect the timeline track height or composer window zoom level so there are different things we can use this for to remember them you can think of L for large or k for cleaner cleaner cleaner I don't speak German but this is the German word for smaller or we can just remember the K key is next to the L key so L makes it larger K makes it smaller all right we can also change the representative frames that's another cool thing that we can do here in frame view so by default a bin displays a clip or sequence's first frame when in frame view in television in the television environment excuse me this first frame may be color bars or just video black so there might not be anything at the beginning of our video clips here and we might need to change the representative frames to help us identify what is the actual content of this video so we can change the representative frames by doing the following uh we can preview the clips and then change the representative frames so we can single click the clip or sequence frame uh to select it to start so we'll select this once and then we can do any one of the following things to change this representative frame for this shot I'm going to zoom up just a little bit so we can see it a little bit better we could click it once and then hit the space bar or 5 key to play through the clip uh and then hit spacebar or the 5 key again to pause so if I hit spacebar right now oh okay I can't do it because I'm currently recording I'm screen recording and I can't my computer's not powerful enough to send to do both things at once but trust me on this one if I hit spacebar and I wasn't recording this clip would play through right here in the frame View and I could hit spacebar again and that would pause it on the frame that I want it we could also press the step forward or step backward keys on our keyboard to step through the clip by default these are the one two three four Keys uh we could also press one and two keys to move in and multi-frame increments and three and four to move in one frame forward or backward uh at a time so if I hit one and two we can see I'm jumping forward a pretty significant if I hold it it almost plays through if I held one it'll go backwards in time same thing with three it'll go backwards frame by frame or four will go forwards frame by frame so there's that and then the third way we can do this is on a full sized keyboard we can press the home key to set the first frame in the clip to be the representative frame or the end key to see the last frame to set that as a representative frame so those are three quick ways that we can click on these videos and we can kind of like scrub through them and change their representative frames so we can tell what is this shot about cool all right optionally uh we could press Ctrl s or command s to save our changes to our bin so let's say I change the representative frames on these shots I said okay this Frame here is perfect I can then hit command s and that's going to save the fact that I've made this adjustment to that that representative frame all right now let's move on to rearranging clips and tidying up the frame view display so you can group smaller shots together or plan out the edit as a virtual storyboard by rearranging these shots directly here in our frame view so I could say um I want to I want to make a scripted story so I'm going to use this as if it's a storyboard I'm going to rearrange my shots here in my view to make sense when I'm actually adding it to my project but when you resize frames and rearrange shots Clips often end up outside of the bins viewable area or overlap each other so I could accidentally overlap video or as we can see I gotta scroll left and right to even see all the videos so there's a way to make this more efficient so you can easily tidy up the arrangement by doing the following we can go to bin align and fill so we come up here to bin we go to align and fill and then we can fill window to arrange the clips to uh the designated area so if I hit fill window we can see boom it snaps all the videos into a nice arranged format um we can also arrange Eclipse to grid pattern as wide as our current window um but and that's that's included excuse me that's included with the fill window we can also go to bin we could do a line and fill and fill sorted this is the same as choosing fill window except media composer arranges the Clips in the same order as listed in text view so if I go to bin align and fill uh we go to fill sorted then it's going to arrange it in the order that it would appear in text view so easy peasy there if all the Clips in your bin don't fit within the view you can scroll vertically to see the others each use the scroll wheel either either you can use the scroll wheel on your mouse or you can just scroll with your fingers on your touchpad so I got my mouse here I can scroll it easy peasy all right a quick note here from Avid if you're rearranging clips into groups for example grouping shots with visual similarities we can go to bin align and fill and align to grid this aligns grouped shots to the same visible grid with it invisible grid sorry without reordering them or significantly changing their location and swiftly moving on here we're gonna get now into script view script view is this guy here um so script view button displays a bins contents as a combination of the text View and the frame view with an added comments field so you can type anything that you like into the comments field but typically you'll use this field to log notes and keywords so for instance in this shot this guy's like I hate you you're my worst enemy um we can put that information into our script View and then boom it's saved in our script view so now we can see not only the representative frame for the shot which we can also adjust here too if I hit one two three and four we can see I can adjust the representative frame I can also zoom in and out but I have that nice little text area as well you could also put um yeah like it said little notes so I could say oh this shot needs to be color corrected I could add all kinds of different notes directly in script view which is super efficient and really helps later when you're trying to find things we'll go into more about finding stuff I don't know if it's later in this book or in the second book but we can essentially type in notes and then use those notes to find shots later a few notes about script view though before we move on is that the comments you create here automatically appear in text views comment column so I have I hate into quickly and I go to text view I can see if I find that shot uh and I scroll over to the right and go to comments you can see that's there as well I hate whatever so that does appear here in the comments section uh second thing is script view displays the same column Arrangement as the last active bin View and then third thing is you can use the same method as frame view to change the representative frame I already said that in a moment you'll work with the bin features covered in this section but first let's go over key features you'll use throughout throughout the editing process so we have essential tool the fast menu this is the fast menu it's going to be on like almost all the little Windows you have fast menus where you can perform quick functions by clicking these little two bars these are fast menus so many windows and tools contain a button that reveals menu options when you click it it's shown on my screen here like I just showed you this is the fast menu each one contains different options but the icons remain the same for example if you click the bins fast menu uh you'll reveal commands like fill and fill sorted that we wouldn't see if we clicked the timeline so I can do quick actions here for fill we can also do a line snap to grid all kinds of different things that we would be able to do in our normal menus as well they're just directly here in our fast menu now it's funny it calls it a fast menu when there's 300 options here but trust me this is a fast menu and you will learn how to use it as we keep moving here with media composer moving on to personalizing the application as mentioned in previous sections you can adjust media composer's appearance and functionality to suit your style and needs this includes window and Tool Arrangements button visibility placement and keyboard shortcuts and so much more this section covers how to use workspaces customize how bins display adjust interface setting options and map functions to the interface and keyboard you'll save all these preferences to your user profile and that's not something you actively have to do again that's just a passive thing so if I scrub this over just slightly that's going to be saved to my user profile if I rearrange some of these buttons that's going to be saved to my user profile automatically so it makes midi composer makes that part at least incredibly easy if you're new to Media composer and you're not ready to personalize your setup yet no worries as you work through lessons 2 and through 12 and other projects this will change you're going to get more comfortable with it but the book recommends that bookmarking this section so that you can quickly return here and use this as a guide when you're ready to start customizing your interface all right so we'll start with using workspaces the first and perhaps most obvious way to customize media composer is to rearrange the windows depending on your preferences screen size and even the task at hand You may wish to resize them as well so midi composer includes several pre-designed workspaces to get you started one for each stage of the editing process when active each workspace workspace displays a specific window Arrangement and relevant tools you can activate this pre-configured workspace via the workspace bar or by going to Windows workspaces this is the workspace bar here on the right side of the screen we can also go to Windows workspaces and we have those same different options here but this is our workspace bar you can activate the pre-configured workspace by the workspace bar or like I said by going to workspaces you may have as you may have guessed you can adjust each workspace to your liking so we have editing color effects and audio and I'm going to go through each one now with you so to customize the workspace we can click the button in the workspace bar for the workspace that we want to customize alternatively we can go to Windows workspace workspace name and then we can arrange and add and remove windows as we see fit or as we want so choosing a Windows workspace save current or click the menu icon to the workspace bar and choose save current so thanks very cool um it's not really telling us much it's just telling us that we have different options we can add different tools I could go to tools it could be like I want the audio EQ EQ tool for some reason with my color and I can pick a destination to drop this and then I can save this custom setup including the audio EQ EQ tool in my color workspace this all sounds super confusing I'm just going to close it so what it's saying is that we can save we can rearrange and set up you know we can make small adjustments and we can click this little area and we can hit save current and that's going to save this workspace so I'm going to go to color and I come back to effects it's going to save that little parameter adjustment I made so many composers just saying there are ways to customize the interface to your liking and ways to save it manually um or ways to restore it if you want you can restore current to default you can restore it to save or you could save whatever format you have currently so thanks media composer so what changes are saved to our workplace workspace save changes include bin container composer and timeline window size and placement as well as the presence and location of any tools midi composer tracks workspace Updates this means that you can seamlessly switch from editing workspace to another workspace and then back and when you come back to that workspace let's say from Back to the editing workspace media composer Returns the windows and Tool arrangement to the workspace most recent configurations you can restore an active workspace to its last saved version or reset it by clicking the menu icon next to the workspace and selecting either restore restore to saved or restore current to default when you Choice when you choose the restore current to default the following dialog box appears so we'll click restore current to default we're going to get this little dialog box it's going to ask us for sure we want to restore um you know restore workspace view settings to defaults and we can just hit restore and it's going to restore it so media composer trying to protect you from losing a custom Arrangement if you had one set up all right now let's look at customizing how bins display but first we're going to go back to our edit workspace the edit workspace is your bread and butter this is where you're going to spend 90 of your time because and this is this is an obvious thing but I'm going to say this just out loud for you when you work on a project in your editing you always start with the story the story comes first you want the story to be Flawless then you make it pretty you come into color you make your adjustments in color and then you add your special effects also audio is important I'm not saying audio is not important but you always start with the story and then you move into making it pretty okay so always start with the editing process customizing how bins display besides customizing the workspace you can change how bins display to accommodate your setup as you've experienced bins open as tabs in the bin container this saves space especially when working on single display system so I have a single display system we have our different bins open here and it's saving space by being able to tab between these otherwise they'd be out and I'd have a bunch of different windows and areas and it just would take up too much space this is why when you're on a two monitor display the bin container window is its own separate thing it goes on the left monitor whereas all this ends up on the right monitor so if you have a two monitor display good for you you're cool all right let's look at two ways you can customize bin layouts to suit your style and needs first we're going to organize bins into separate subdivided panels in the bin containers right panel to do so and to do this we can click an open bins Tab and then drag it into a green eligible Edge and drop it what did I just say so what I'm saying is if I wanted let me close some of these real quick I'm gonna close audio alright so we have our rock climber bin and our sequence has been if I wanted my rock climber bin open but kind of separate I can click and grab this tab and pull it out until I see an available green Edge once the screen turns white I know I can let go and now I have my very own separate oh now it's floating I didn't mean to do that hold on go back there all right so now I have them stacked I mean let me let me start up let me do that again because I'm sure you're confused and I just closed my sequence has been which closed my whole project let me just relaunch one of these uh we'll do that one okay so if I wanted to make this his own bin I could come down here go to go to the bottom we can see now I have my own come on give me the scroll now I have them stacked I have my sequences on top of my rock climber now what I could do is Select my rock climber and then I could open another bin and that's going to open my effects bin down here so I have my bin my rock climber bin and my effects bin open I come back up to sequences select that one open titles now I have titles and sequences here you can see how customizing this would help with your editing process because you can essentially arrange it to your liking so you can keep similar information together so maybe I could keep my audio and my video separate by opening my bins onto different layers you can do this over and over and over again as many times as you like so that's a cool feature there but the big big thing to take away here and something avid's gonna test you on is that when you grab this tab and you drag it away you gotta look for one of these eligible green spaces and then let go and then you're gonna get the option to drag this down and customize it so keep that in mind what if you wanted to have one of these bins as its own kind of floating window well I could open a different bin so let's open our video bin and then I could drag it a short distance but not to the white and then let go and we can see now I have my own floating whole individual bin window for my video clips and I can double click these and load these into my source monitor but that's an option as well if you're if you're looking to make a floating window that's separate I'd say I had like a three or four monitor display I could be doing this and making all kinds of different specific bin floating windows cool all right so if you'd like to open and close bins into separate floating bin container you can either right click the bins icon and choose open selected bins in one window or you can hold the control or command key in Mac and double click the bins icon so I could hold command and double click titles here now it also open this as its own floating window so you have options you have there's multiple different ways to do the same things in Avid midi composer okay once open you can drag the floating bin container anywhere you want that's kind of obvious and you can allocate more space to a bin by dragging the bin container divider line to the left and you can even drag and conceal the left panel so if we wanted to we could just conceal this entirely I don't know why you'd want to do that you'd want to be able to see these so you can open them but if you wanted to you can completely cover it up as you can see you can customize the bin container and how bins display as you see fit plus these are adjustments are persist when you switch to other workspaces or reset workspaces to default in the next exercise you're going to practice how to do this so good luck on that if you go do the exercise but first let's explore a few more ways you can customize the interface by the way when you close a project midi composer remembers a bins location and reopens the project with the bin in that location all right uh so yeah if you want to keep moving on to the next exercise you can but first let's explore a few more ways you can customize the interface and this starts by adjusting the interface settings by default media composer's color scheme is dark gray with light gray highlights you can change the overall interface brightness and highlight color to do this we can go to file settings and then the settings window we can go to user tab there's my mouse there we go file settings let me go to the user Tab and we can double click the interface settings so I'm going to shrink some of these so I can find the interface settings more easily uh where's interface there we go double click interface that's going to pull up this window here all right and then in the general tab we can click the tile to choose the interface brightness or highlight color option so here we are in our general tab we have the interface brightness we can turn this up and down or we can go the highlight color and we can select between purple blue orange and white so we have options here I'm actually I'm going to switch it to no I should leave it white I'm pretty basic I like it dark and I like it white like a dark and bright I I am a video editor so I like the darkness we can click apply to preview the changes or click ok to accept the changes so if I hit apply here we can see I didn't make any change let me let me hit apply now there now we can see some change we saw a little bit of purple a little bit of Life come to this project it's not really doing much but it does do stuff so for your reference that does work we can apply or we can hit OK to apply and save those changes let's look at one more interface setting that can affect how the the workspace customization we explore earlier works so when switching between workspaces you can control how the workspace loads just set when moving to a workspace interface setting to either load the last known state which is default or load last save space State excuse me so when moving to a workspace we need to load last saved state or last known State and that can be nice when you're trying to switch between stuff on the Fly all right if you're having trouble reading the user interface you can improve text legibility by changing the windows font and or size to do this we could select the windows set font and in the font dialog box select the font and type a point size um I'm not an old person yet so I'm going to just keep it at default here all right mapping functions to the interface and keyboard many essential functions include ones covered in this course don't appear by default on the keyboard or interface and this is kind of dumb so let me just close it real quick so what did it just say it just said many of the buttons that you're going to use on your interface aren't default aren't mapped by default and that's kind of silly but I think many composer is trying to force you to learn how to do this which I guess is fine but it would be nice if it could just say you know hey this is how you do this by the way anyway but most editing professional use most editing professionals excuse me used highly customized settings in time you will too but for now let's explore some basic customization so to change buttons you'll open the command palette to change the keyboard mapping you'll call up the keyboard palette so understanding the command palette you can access the command palette from the tools menu so we can go to tools then we can go to command palette I'm always blind I can never see these things there we go command palette a quick shortcut for this on the keyboard is command three I think it's Ctrl 3 on windows so this is our Command palette and get familiar with this see this this is your best friend now you are going to learn to use this a lot over the course of these coming lessons if you click the category tabs listed across the top you can find the palette contains every user selectable button included in media composer so if we go through these different tabs we can see all these different functions and buttons that are possible here in MIDI composer we're going to leave it on edit just for now because these are a lot of what you're going to be using to start now let's Identify some parts to this and these are the buttons across the bottom and these three enable different mapping modes so number one we have button to button reassignment so button to button reassignment we're going to activate this button to remap buttons by dragging them from the command palette this is the command palette uh to the interface or the keyboard palette so we can remap buttons from from here to our keyboard or from here into our different areas on the interface next we have active palette active palette this button is used uh you you can use the command palette as an editing tool itself and you can click buttons to perform functions so if I click active palette and then I start marking in and marking out and trimming videos it's going to function I can click these buttons right here it's going to function directly and affect uh the whole program so if I wanted to use this to edit I could I don't know why you would it's kind of weird but it's an option to you if you wanted to and then number three we have menu to button reassignment we can activate this to map menu commands that don't have a mappable button for example the fill window button or fill window bin menu command so remember when we were looking at this in frame View and we were trying to figure out what are we looking at what is this chaos we could map using the menu to button reassignment we could map that a line and fill buttons directly to our keyboard using the drop down menu and the menu to button reassignment so that's pretty cool all right we'll use the command palette to remap buttons to the interface and or keyboard more on that in a moment but let's go to the keyboard settings the keyboard palette displays a map of functions assigned to the keyboard's physical keys and that's not open right now so I'm going to open that so we'll go to file we can go down to settings here in settings if we go to user and come down to keyboard we can double click or sorry we can click the drop down for keyboard because I have multiple keyboard settings but I'm going to double click this keyboard and now we have the keyboard open I'm going to close this window now we have our Command palette and our keyboard palette our keyboard window open so from here we can map functions to our keyboard a couple of notes if you leave the command palette open none of the buttons on the interface will be active so if if we're trying if we can't use these buttons down here we can't use these buttons while the command palette is active um so it's kind of null and void um if you hold down the shift key on your keyboard you can map buttons to a second layer of hotkeys for example mapping uh the effect mode to shift y you'll use the effect mode extensively during the effects lessons later on but what did I just say essentially with the keyboard active if I hold shift we can see that it switches to a whole different keyboard so I can use the shift key as a modifier to have different functions as well so what it was saying is I could switch between my different workspaces I could map that to my keyboard to make like command 1 or shift one shift two shift 3 the different workspaces and I do on my other keyboard setup have it mapped that way indeed so it makes things fun it makes things easy cool uh all right what else what else we're looking at here so it doesn't go too in depth with how this works but I'd like to show you a little bit more so if I wanted to map for instance uh let's see here what do I want to map here I'm gonna map using button to button reassignment I can map my my quick Transitions and this is going to make more sense to you in the future but I'm gonna map my quick transitions button I can just drag it and drop it onto my my backslash key um or forward slash key I I can never remember which direction they go but this is what button the button reassignment does I can just drag these and remap buttons on my keyboard um to function these different functions here in media composer and this is going to make more sense going forward but and then again I talked about active palette so we could use this to to actually go forward and backwards we can see I can actually use this and this affects the program and then menu to button reassignment um the way this works and this is where things get kind of weird is you I believe you select a button on the keyboard so I could select this uh maybe I shouldn't do shift or option um I'm gonna do shift three so now I've got shift three selected and with my menu to button reassignment selected I can go to this fast menu I can go to align and fill and I could do fill window and now we can see I click this on my keyboard and hit shift FW fill window is now the command for that so if I close all this and I come over here to frame View and I can I hit shift three Boom the fill window command automatically executes for me so it makes things a lot faster if you want to map fast menu buttons to your keyboard so it's a quick preview because midi composer just says well that's a wrap cool now you know exactly how to use these tools and it just kind of leaves you hanging that way so I don't want to do that to you all right that's a wrap personalizing the application to review the topics covered in this section as you explore the workflows and functions that can benefit from interface customization and button remapping later reminder to bookmark this section so you can quickly return here to be ready to optimize your media composer experience and setup so we have menu to button active palette and button a button reassignment don't forget it oh also I I didn't even I didn't even talk about excuse me if if you want you can drag these buttons down to your timeline so for instance if I wanted to add top and tail editing I could drag these down here uh to my my timeline you probably don't know what these are yet that's perfectly fine but just to let you know with button to button reassignment we can make these edits so you can even rearrange stuff in your timeline later if you don't like it but yeah there you go um so button button reassignment uh kind of closed up there all right now last thing we're going to do for this lesson is we're going to adjust the auto save settings intervals and how to end a session so the auto save settings do just what their name implies they control how often midi composer automatically saves a copy of your bins this is your Project's assets and your hard work so this is the sequences that you edit this is just the content for your project how often it's going to save those to your uh to to the computer so midi composer is highly stable application with few crashes that's a lie so I love how it blatantly lies I'm going to read that again media composer is a highly stable application with few crashes I work on campus we've been working with this program for years it crashes frequently but the better computer you have the less likely it is to crash and the better you work in it the less likely it is to crash so don't try and stress the system because it will crash on you but even the best computers and apps crash sometimes so if you dial in your auto save settings to the right values you can save yourself massive stress if your system happens to crash so let's get into how to adjust our auto save settings intervals for this we're going to refer to the bin settings dialog box and the way to access that is to go to file and then settings and then in our user tab it's very close to the top we can double click bin then we can see our auto save interval inactive period Force auto save at maximum files at project addict blah blah blah so I'm going to talk you through each one of these things so notice the three values Define how autosave will work so here's what the default means so auto save interval midi composer will wait 15 minutes before attempting to save the inactive period is Media composer will only save after you pause for at least 15 seconds and then the force auto save at if after 17 minutes which is the current setup you have it paused for at least 15 seconds for media composer to save media composer will interrupt you to force and autosave so that's what these three different settings mean um the shorter period you have on this less work you're going to lose so if I set this to like five minutes and I have an inactive period yeah 15 and then I do a force auto save 10 minutes you're far less likely to lose hard work I mean losing five minutes of work sucks because you essentially lose 10. you lose five in the work that you had done prior and five to get it back but if you have it set to 15 or you know whatever 20 minutes you're losing 40 minutes you're gonna go it's gonna be ridiculous so don't don't don't don't don't don't that's all I have to say don't okay what's the right setting for you it depends but following considerations the following consideration can help you figure out what works best for you um I can just tell you you should probably keep it pretty low um yeah it's gonna interrupt you to save every once in a while but is that really a bad thing it's not trust me it's not um I know people who spent hours my wife now she was my girlfriend at the time she spent hours editing a project and just didn't save and the settings were weird on the computer the save interval the auto save interval wasn't set up and it just she made one mistake the program crashed and she lost hours of work and it was the night before something was due so don't uh don't don't risk it it's not worth it okay so anyway um the following considerations can help you figure out what works best for you how fast do you edit the faster you edit the more work you'll complete in a given amount of time how much you can afford to lose if the system does crash if the system crashes just before an auto save point you need to recreate a recent change from memory so how good is your memory and then how often are you willing to be interrupted momentary Interruption may occur when media composer performs save so keep that in mind and then are you facing a tight deadline if you need to deliver your program within a short time frame consider setting the short consider setting a short autosave interval period for example news stories and other things might work best if you're saving more frequently regardless losing work before an auto save occurs May jeopardize your ability to deliver on time so keep the following in mind as you can see there is no right or wrong answer here I can tell you right now there is a wrong answer setting this at like 30 minutes then you lose an hour's worth of work if you lose stuff anyway many editors choose to work with the defaults because that's not too much time lost but you can dial in values you think work best and then change them as needed as your skills and confidence increase the right values will also change so it's going to change for you it's going to change for everyone and this is all saved on your user setting your users your user profile excuse me so if I click OK here it's going to save to my user profile to change your autosave settings though we can go to oh yeah I already just told you how to do all this yep easy peasy no problem cool and when media composer conducts an auto save it will not only update the bins on your project it also creates backup copies to a folder called The Attic we're going to talk about the attic at the End of This Book we're going to talk about the attic more in the second but book excuse me the second book um but for now just know that this is a place where backup backups of your project are essentially saved so if you look at this folder and how to restore the bins from it at the end of this course but for now just know there is a place where If All Is Lost all is not lost the last two auto save options address how media composer manages files in the Attic folder so we can see we have maximum number of projects that we can have saving our adject is a thousand and Max versions of the file in the Attic can be 50. and you can change this so depending on how often your system crashes how scared you are how nervous you are about crashes you can change those I leave mine at default those are more than sufficient to get the job done all right and then let's move on now to ending a session I'm going to hit OK just to save those settings and close this all right ending a session session when you wrap a session and exit media composer the software Auto saves your work that means ending a session takes just one quick step to end your session and exit do one of the following on Windows we can select file exit or we can press Ctrl K or sorry control Q on Mac we can select media composer so we took media composer and we give you a quick midi composer or we can hit command Q on our keyboard uh and this is gonna prompt us it's gonna say do you you sure you want to leave the application and you'll hit leave and then boom and you're out of the program and that's going to do it for this lesson thank you guys so much for watching to my students I will happily see you in class and to those of you on the internet like comment subscribe and I'll catch you guys in the next one bye-bye