From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

Add markers - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

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Add markers

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- [Instructor] Markers are another great example of Media Composer incorporating advanced features into an elegant interface. On the surface, they're just a little colored swatch, a little tiny mark that you can use as a reference to guide you when you're looking through your media or your sequences but embedded in this simple functionality is a lot of technology that you can use to simplify and speed up your editing workflow. Let's start with the simplest example. I've got an interview clip here. This is Close Interview. It's quite a long clip. I can see from the time code information at the top here it's eight and a half minutes roughly and I'm probably going to want to take some different sections of this clip to incorporate into my sequence. If I want to, I can go through and watch the media and I can make subclips from it and that's a perfectly good way to work and I might well work that way with interview media but I can also click here to add a marker. When you add a marker by default, a popup comes up inviting you to add a comment. I'm just going to put in here, let's call this Quote 1 just so we've got a reference and I'll click Okay and now, whenever the playhead is on this particular frame, we can see the comment that I've made. If I click away, it's easy for me to click back and locate the exact frame the marker's on because it becomes like a little anchor in the clip. I can click this and now I'm on the same frame and let's add a couple more of these. Let's say I've looked through my media and I've found another spot. This is not the section of the interview I want and I know these aren't in the same order but let's call this Quote 2 and let's have another one over here and I'll call this Quote 3. Now, my rule is that if you're going to do anything five times or more, you're probably going to want to create a keyboard shortcut for it and if I already have created a keyboard shortcut to add a marker and if I go to my Keyboard Settings, we can see it's here on F1. It wasn't being used before and it seemed like a simple option to me. If you go to the Tools menu and go into the Command Palette and look under More, you'll notice there are actually eight different colors of marker available and I would tend to use these to indicate to myself different types of task that I need to attend to. I might well add the green markers to indicate color correction adjustments, maybe the blue one to indicate audio adjustments, stuff that I need to do. And as I work my way through my material, I remove the markers when I finish doing the work and I know that when there are no markers left, there's no more work to do and it's time to deliver the program I suppose. You can add all of these markers to keys on your keyboard if you want or of course you can add them to buttons. Remember, you've got the option to use the Fast Menu where you can have as many buttons as you like but you can also change the marker color retrospectively so I'm just going to close this. Remember, we have our F1 key set up here. I'm going to go to a different spot in this clip and I'm going to click the Add Marker button again. Notice that in the Marker window here, we've got the option to specify a color. I've also got information about which frame it is, the start and end time code and so on. And notice there's a Duration option which I'll come to a little later and instead of clicking Okay, I'm going to click Markers and this is going to take me to the Markers window which by the way is under the Tools menu. In this window, I've got my list of markers and in fact, I've already enabled in the Fast Menu here the option to Show Images. We're not seeing those right now because they're offscreen so I'm just going to resize right the way across here and we can see we've got my quotes which I can edit if I want to and we've got the numbers of the markers and who made them and so on. You can also do things like enlarge and reduce the image size. I'm just going to hide the images for now. I found by the by turning the images off and on, you might find there's a bit of a lag and if that's the case, just resize the window and you'll find that it updates. In the Markers window menu down here, the Fast Menu, we've got the option to disable the marker popup from appearing when adding a marker which is pretty useful I think because it's not always that you're going to want to have that popup come on screen. So I'm going to turn that option on and back in my long interview here, I'm going to press the F1 keyboard shortcut I created and no popup. I can if I want to double click on a marker and the popup still comes up and I can add my comment here. Okay. We've also got the option to disable the popup altogether which I suppose would only really be relevant if you were accidentally double clicking instead of single clicking when you were jumping to markers in a particular monitor. You can also double click on a marker in the Markers panel of course to jump to those markers too. If you want to remove a marker, you can just select it and hit Delete. In fact, if you click on a marker so that it's displayed on screen, you can also hit the Delete key and it'll go away and this is one of those curious selection features in Media Composer but in other circumstances, the Delete key would do nothing or it would delete something else but because that marker is displayed on that particular frame, the Delete key will automatically relate to it. And the last thing to say about adding markers to clips in this way is if I go to my sequence and I'm just going to demonstrate by putting my playhead at the beginning of the sequence here. I'm going to edit this clip in. Turning off all the other tracks here. I'm going to insert the entire clip so let me press the t key here in the source monitor which is the Mark Clip keyboard shortcut. I could have clicked here as well of course. If I insert this clip, you'll notice that I get all of the markers inside of it. So it's worthwhile adding markers even when you're just initially browsing through your media and building your familiarity with it. If you find there are sections of no sections of interest then you might as well add a marker to draw your attention to it later on. In many ways, the preparatory state of organizing your project is a bit like writing a letter to a future you and the more notes that you make and the more you organize your project and leave little indicators for yourself in the future, the easier it will be for you as an editor in the future to work with that content.

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