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

Reviewing clips - Media Composer Tutorial

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

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Reviewing clips

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- [Instructor] For this tutorial, I'm working on a new project called Getting ready to edit. This is based on the jacuzzi project. I'm going to double click to open this up. And I'm going to open up the Scene 7 bin so we can see its contents and I'm in the Frame view, so I can see the thumbnails. Before you decide what you're going to include in a sequence, you need to be familiar with your media. One quick way is to scroll up and down in a bin and look at the thumbnails in the Frame view but of course, if you double click on one of these, it'll open in the Source Monitor in the Composer window. Once the clip's in this window, you can press play, you can use the space bar to do that or you can scrub by dragging. One of my top tips for reviewing your media is to open every one of the clips that you have and drag right the way through from left to right over a period of about two seconds. Just drag at the same speed trough every single clip. And what's going to happen is you'll get a sense of just how much media you have and the colors, the textures, the number of shots you have of particular action and so on. In a sense, you're building a catalog in your mind of all of your media. Let's just double click on this clip as an example. Though there are some other ways we can work through this content. First of all, we looked earlier at using the J, K and L keys to play back. The K key is kind of a pause or stop key. So if you press L, the video plays forward. And K stops. If you press L or J, which plays backwards, multiple times, playback occurs at multiple speeds. (mumbling) And there comes a point where the audio stops playing back because it's just incomprehensible. You can also hold down the K key and press L or J just once to move one frame at a time and hear the audio, which is pretty useful for finding an audio cue. Still, on the keyboard, we've got the one and two keys. These will jump 10 frames at a time. And the three and four keys which will jump one frame. There's a similar control right here at the bottom of the monitor. You have the option at the bottom of the source monitor to add in and out points and these are used to identify the part of the clip that you want to use in your sequence and we'll cover that in a bit more detail later. You could also, if you have them, use the Home and End keys on your keyboard to jump to the beginning and end of your clip. This works in sequences too. If you're working on a Mac with no apparent Home or End keys, you do actually have them. You can hold the Function key and press the left or right arrow keys. Another useful way to browse your content in the source monitor is to add a list of clips to it. So if I go up to the Clip Main menu up at the top of the screen here and choose Clear Monitor, and I'll choose Clear Menu, I now have nothing in the monitor and no history in the monitor. I'll just take a selection of clips on lassoing across several thumbnails here and drag them all into the monitor. So saw them all update there pretty quickly and right away, the available source track buttons appear in the timeline panel. Usefully, if I click on the menu at the top left of the monitor, I now have all of the clips I just added to the monitor in a list and this way, I can use the menu as kind of a mini bin, a mini selection for me to browse between multiple takes of a shot. One last important thing to mention about reviewing your footage in the source monitor is these buttons here, splice in and override. We'll be exploring these in detail later when we get into editing, but these are critical buttons in the interface and Media Composer. You'll use them day in and day out to add content from the source monitor to your sequences.

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