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

Create a stringout - Media Composer Tutorial

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

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Create a stringout

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- [Instructor] A stringout is a sequence that contains lots of clips of a particular type or from a particular time that you're going to use as a resource to edit into another sequence. A classic example would be that you might add all of the clips from a particular location when working on a documentary project. Or you might take all of the camera angles on a particular character in a scene. The benefits of creating a stringout sequence from your source material is that you can scrub through it very quickly. And in a way, the sequence becomes a container, a repository, a kind of single reference for all of a particular kind of content. It's an alternative to arranging your clips in a bin. Let's take a look at how to make a stringout sequence. I'm looking here in the Anaesthesia Dailies bin. And right now, these are sorted in start timecode order. And the first thing you're going to want to do is decide on the sorting order. Because this is the order, your clips are going to be added to the stringout sequence. These clips are named based on their scenes and slates and takes, so I'm going to double click on the name heading to sort them in that order. I think that's going to be useful for this content. If you look in the composer window, we have this button to remove the in and out points that you've got added to your clips. And the keyboard shortcut for that is G by default on the keyboard. That keyboard shortcut works just fine in the bin, as well as in the composer window. So with the bin active, I'm going to press Ctrl A here on Windows, this is Command A on macOS. And I'm going to press G to remove my in and out points. You saw those two points just disappeared from the clip that I have open in the composer window right now. It's common when building stringouts not to add in and out points. And it's important to make a decision about them because they are always honored whether you bring your clips in from the composer window or directly from the bin. When we build a stringout, we want access to all of our content. Because the stringout is not our main or master sequence, it's going to be a resource from which we pull clips into our edit. So let's make our stringout. I'm going to go to the exercises sequences bin, and I'm going to right click, and I'm going to choose new sequence, and I'll call this Stringout. And now we have that sequence open in the timeline window. I'll go back to the Anaesthesia Dailies bin, these clips are all still selected. If they weren't, you could press Ctrl A or Command A to select them. And having selected them, just drag them straight into the empty sequence. You can see from the activity in the composer window there, all of these clips have now been added one after another to the sequence. If I now look in the Exercises Sequences bin, there's our string out with a much longer duration, of course, because it's got all of the content from all of the clips inside of it. And it's interesting looking at the contents of the sequence in the timeline window because I can see a few of these clips have no audio at all. That's just useful to know by looking at them in the window. And now, if I drag this sequence into the source monitor rather than dragging it into the timeline window or double clicking to open it, I get the contents of that sequence displayed as source. And now I can scrub through this really fast. And if I switch the timeline window over to viewing the source, of course, now I can see those clips again. It's a little bit confusing I think, because if I click back to the Record side, it looks identical, of course, because I also have the sequence open. So let's make a new sequence. I'll right click again and choose New Sequence, and just temporarily I'll call this Master, this is our master sequence. Now in our source monitor, we have all of these clips. And I'm going to make a pretty random selection just to illustrate a point. So I've picked out a range of content in that source stringout sequence. And now I'm going to click, it doesn't really matter because there's nothing else in the timeline, but I'll click Overwrite, and you can see what happens. I don't get some kind of nested combined sequence clip in my master sequence, I don't get a group clip, I get the individual clips that are inside my stringout. This means I can use stringouts really as an organizational system without impacting the rest of my workflow.

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