From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

The Clipboard Monitor - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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The Clipboard Monitor

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- [Instructor] Another of my favorite features of Media Composer is the Clipboard Monitor. The Clipboard is the part of the application that stores anything that you copy until you paste it. And you can access the contents of the Clipboard in a couple of different ways in Media Composer. First of all, you need to get something to be in the Clipboard, and you do that by either lifting or extracting, or simply by using the copy command, that's control C or command C. And let's try this out. I'm going to pick out a couple of shots here on the timeline. I might as well use in and out marks, so I'll lasso to select these clips, and I'll press T to mark that region. And now if I press control or command C, I've copied those clips. If I move my playhead to the end of this sequence and press control or command V, I'm pasting those two clips at the end of the sequence. So we can copy and paste just as you would expect to in a word processing application. I'm going to undo that with control or command Z, but I still have that information in the Clipboard, and I can access the contents of the Clipboard and then selectively take part of it by right clicking in the Player Monitor and choosing Clipboard Contents. I now have the two clips that I just copied available to me in the Source Monitor, with all of the editing tools at my disposal to selectively take a piece of it and edit it into my sequence. If I click on the toggle source record in timeline button in the Timeline Window, I've got access to multiple tracks. And, of course, this is a relatively simple sequence. I've just got one video track, but if you had 15 video tracks, this actually turns out to be an incredibly useful feature. You can selectively identify the clips that you want to use and it gives you more information to manage your track patching. There is in fact also a Clipboard Monitor tool. If I go to the tools menu and choose Clipboard Monitor, the Clipboard Monitor actually functions just like a Source Monitor, except that it automatically contains anything that you copy. Want to copy a clip from your sequence and selectively edit a piece of it somewhere else? Just select it, press control or command C, and the contents of your selection is displayed in the Clipboard Monitor with all of the usual editing tools at your disposal. This is just a fantastic feature. You'll find as well in the Command Palette, if I just go into it here, in the edit section, there's a Clipboard Contents button. So if I set this to active palette, which it is now, and I'll just select a clip and copy it by pressing control or command C, of course, that means the contents that I've just copied appears in the Clipboard Monitor. But if I now click this Clipboard Contents button, I'll just scroll up here with my Command Palette. I'm getting the contents of my selection displayed only in the Timeline Window. If I go to my Composer Window and click into there, and again, I click the Clipboard Contents button, I get the contents of the Clipboard displayed there. If you look up in the Composer Window, we've actually got the Clipboard Contents item listed here as a recent item. I'll go back to the sequence we were looking at for a second and just close the Command Palette. I don't think it's particularly elegant to go into the Command Palette for every single feature in the application, but if you expect yourself to be using copy and paste a lot in Media Composer, you're probably going to want to map that command to a key.

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