From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Duplicate - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Duplicate

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- [Instructor] While it's useful to be able to undo and redo steps in your sequence, there are going to be some key turning points in your post-production where you're probably going to want a backup of the work that you're doing. And, yes, you can back up the entire project folder using your operating system, but maybe you want to back up your sequence at different stages in the edit. Or, for example, you might decide that you want to have a second copy of a clip that you're going to move between different bins for organizational purposes. This is a really straightforward thing to do in Media Composer. Here I am in the timeline window. Let me go into my Sequences bin here. And in the composer window on the record side, I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to choose Duplicate. Because I've got multiple bins open, Media Composer's going to ask me where I'd like to put the duplicate. And I'm happy for this to go in the Sequences bin, so I'll click OK. And right away, you can see we've got our version one sequence. And this is copy, and there's a number two there because I've copied this before. Notice over in the composer window that we're actually looking at the copy now. We're no longer working on the original version of the sequence. So I'm going to click on the name here, and I think I'm just going to select this and delete the rest of the name and call this version two. And I'll press Enter. And so now we're working on version two. This is a completely independent copy of the sequence. And it might not be a bad idea at this stage for me to make a new bin. I'm going to right-click. Let's call this Backup Sequences. And let's open up this Backup Sequences bin. I'm going to pull it out so it's its own floating window here in the interface for just a moment. Double-click on the original Sequences bin. And I'm going to drag the Scene 7 version 1 sequence into that bin. Might as well put that Drag-and-drop editing sequence in there was well. And I'll close that bin. It's worth noting that of course naturally the intuitive thing to do would be to drag an item from the right side of the bin container over into the left side onto an open bin, but this is not a feature that exists in Media Composer today. It's something that Avid might well add in the future. And who knows? Perhaps by the time you watch these tutorials, it's something you'll be able to do. Another version of this of course is duplicating clips. And if I go into this Scene 6 bin as an example and I select one of these items, I can go to the Edit menu and choose Duplicate. And I want to draw your attention to the keyboard shortcut here, which I think is the most useful workflow when duplicating items in Media Composer. It's Control + D on Windows or Command + D on macOS. If I select this option, now, the interface is a little bit cramped here, but you can see we've now got a copy of that 6_38_2 clip. And just to illustrate the difference between the new clip and the original, if I double-click to open up this copy, and maybe I'll just add an in point and out point towards the end of the clip. I'm doing this pretty randomly using i and o on my keyboard. And then I go back to the original instance of this clip. You can see that it still has no in and out point. In fact, I'll add some now. I'm pressing i and o. And then let me look at the copy. And yep, those are independent in and out points. So these two instances of the 6_38_2 clip are genuinely separate. However, they both reference the same original media file. So if that media file should be offline, perhaps, for example, because you disconnected your media drive, they will both become offline in Media Composer. This is actually a really useful workflow. When you duplicate your clips, you can move them into bins based on different scenes or different locations or filming times or characters or whatever you need for your project. And know that the duplicates you've created will not change each other in any way.

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