From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Cloning and duplicating clips - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Cloning and duplicating clips

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- (instructor) There's a distinction in Media Composer between duplicating a clip and cloning it. And I'll illustrate the difference quickly now. This is a great mechanism for organizing multiple copies of your clips in different bins, so that you can arrange them for example, based on the scene that the clips are in, or location or a character name, and so on. I'm going to take this anesthesia raw video bin and just drop the name on the right side of the bin container window so we can see it nice and tightly in the interface. And then I'm going to make a new bin temporarily, which I'll call copies. And I'm going to drag the name of the copies bin down at the bottom of the right side of the bin container so that we have both bins visible on screen at once. Let me resize the interface a little here so they're both inside our bin container window. If I take one of these clips, I'm just going to select it and go to the Edit menu and choose Duplicate. And you saw there possibly the keyboard shortcut for this is Ctrl D or Command D on Mac OS, I get a copy of the clip, which has the word copy in the name. If I double click on this to open it in the source monitor, which is pretty tall at the moment, and maybe add an endpoint turn on pressing I here on the keyboard, and then open the original clip, they'll notice that endpoint doesn't exist. I'm just going to take this copy, and I'm going to drag it into this copies bin. Next up, I'm going to select that original clip again. And this time, I'm going to hold the Alt key here on Windows or the Option key on Mac OS as I drag this into the other bin. And you'll notice that this time around, I've got a separate instance of this clip you can see that it's definitely an independent icon. But if I double click on the first instance in my anesthesia video bin, and maybe I'll add just an output here and pressing the OK, and then double click on the copy I just created by using the Alt or the Option key, or look what happens, I have the same outpoint listed. So maybe I'll add an endpoint to this copy of the clip, and then double click on the other copy and the input is there too. How is this possible? Well, when you alt drag to create a copy of a clip, rather than dragging to moving or duplicating, you're creating a kind of a clone. And the changes you make to one instance will update on the other. You can also add markers for example. This is a really useful way to arrange your media because it means that you can put your clips in a bin for a particular purpose like a location and mark those clips with in and out points, and those in and out points will translate automatically to the original instance of the clip. But equally, creating an independent copy by duplicating is also pretty useful, because perhaps you have a very long clip, and you want to use different parts of it or market different parts of it in order to use different sections in different parts of your sequence. So there's no right or wrong approach, but it's very important to know the distinction between the two. A duplicate is a separate master clip pointing to the same media file. A clone is really a connected copy of the original clip, and one will update the other and of course, they both access the same media file. I'll just take this copy's bin, select it, hit delete, right click on the trash and choose Empty Trash because I don't want to confuse the organizational system of my project by having extra copies I don't need.

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