From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

How to use the exercise files - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

Start my 1-month free trial

How to use the exercise files

“

- [Man] If you have access to the exercise files for this course, you can download them to your desktop. You'll have two folders "MC_Training_1" and "MC_Training_2." These contain an Avid MediaFiles folder, and another Avid MediaFiles folder and some exercise files. Throughout this course, I'll have the exercise files on my desktop, but you can put them anywhere that's easy to find. I'm just going to drag these straight over here. The Avid MediaFiles folders must go on the root directory of a storage drive, ideally a fast one. And by root, I mean the very first window you see when you open the drive. I'm going to open up finder here and I'm going to go to my Macintosh harddrive. If this was a Windows machine, we'd be looking here at our C drive. But again, you can use any drive you like. I'm going to take this Avid MediaFiles folder and drop it unto this drive. And just as a heads up, you might find that your computer complains about having files added to your main system drive in this way. You might have to make sure you have administrator privileges on your machine, or perhaps put these files on another drive. I'm going to close that folder. And I'm going to go into the Avid MediaFiles folder I made. And you'll notice, there's a subfolder called, "1." If we look inside our other MC_Training folder, if I expand this a little, you can see we've got the same folder structure here. There's a folder called "MXF" inside and some numbered folders. We need to put all of the numbered folders inside this MXF folder, on our storage. So I'm going to go into our MXF folder here, I'm going to take these two folders, and drop them in. So if I just go up a level, in fact, let's go right up to the main drive. You can see now, on our storage we've got Advid MediaFiles, MXF and in there we have these numbered folders. That means that both of my MC_Training folders are empty now, so I'm going to select those and delete them. We'll just need the exercise files folder for this course. Once you get into Media Composer, you're going to need to browse to the exercise files folder to access the projects we're working on. I'm going to be going through this in detail during the course, but just for now, I'm going to click this browse button, go to the desktop, into my exercise files, and enter "projects," I'll just open this up. And here, we have some projects. It's possible, when you get into the lessons, that some of the media might not be connected yet, to the project files and that's because you might well have the media files at a different location to mine. So, I'm going to go into a project here and I'm going to open up a bin, we'll be looking at what these bins are later. And inside the bin, I'm going to open up a clip. And this looks fine, you can see I got some media. But another bin here, with some linked media and let's just double-click to open one of these up. That looks pretty good as well. If you find, for any reason, that the media's not online, you can select the items, I'm just dragging to select a number of items here, and you can right-click and either choose "relink" or "relink to files." Now the media management in Media Composer is pretty advanced, so usually it's enough to just go to the file menu and go to media and choose, "refresh media directories." This should mean that Media Composer looks again for the media it has and your files come back online. Online, in this case, means that the clips inside projects in Media Composer do seem to have media, just like the one we're looking at in this window. However, there are two ways you can bring media into Media Composer. We'll be looking at both in detail during this course, but essentially, if you see clips that have an icon like this, and when you attempt to open it, it has no media. It shows as offline. You can right-click and choose "relink" and you should find that the default options in the relink dialouge will work. You can press enter and Media Composer will re-find the media. If instead, you have clips with this extra chain icon on them, rather than choosing relink, you'll choose "relink to files." This allows you to browse to the file that you need. In this course, that media's always going to be that "Rock Climber QTs" folder on your desktop. And if you select a batch of items, you only need to find the first one. Media Composer will automatically find the rest. I'm going to cancel this. If attempting to relink your media fails, Media Composer generally gives information about what to try to improve the chances of it working. So you can follow that advice, but you should find with this media, with Media Composer, the steps I've shown you will work. And then you can follow along as I go through the exercises. If you don't have access to the exercise files, that's okay too. I encourage you to still follow along as we go through the course, ideally, with some media of your own. Let's get started.

Contents