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

Setting up workspaces - Media Composer Tutorial

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

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Setting up workspaces

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- [Instructor] Workspaces are preconfigured layouts for the windows in your media composer interface and they're really useful as you get deeper into the process of post production. Sometimes you're going to be editing and as the names suggest, sometimes you'll be working on color, sometimes effects, and sometimes audio, so how do you configure these and create your own? First of all, let's make an adjustment to this edit workspace. I'm going to take the effect palate window which right now is docked with the bin container and I'm going to drag it over to the composer window. I'm going to hold alt here on Windows. This would be option on Mac OS, and release the mouse, so now I've got these two windows sharing the same space in the interface. If I click on this edit icon, you'll see the effect palate jumps back to it's original position, so I'm going to take it over again and I'm going to hold alt or option to reposition it where I want it, and this time I'm going to click on this small triangle which appears next to the selected workspace, and this brings up a menu where I can choose to save the current workspace, create a new workspace based on the current layout, or restore the current workspace to default. I'm going to choose save current and now if I click away and click back you can see the effect palate's still in that position. I can click the button again and again and it just refreshes that layout. If I go back to this little submenu and choose restore current to default, I get a warning message saying are you sure you want to do that? Your workspace settings will be lost, and I can click Okay and the effect palate jumps back to its original position. So when this menu refers to default, what it actually means is the original design of the workspace at the time that it was created, not when you last saved it, which is actually pretty useful. You can resize this workspaces bar to make it absolutely tiny and even disappear off the screen and if you do that you'll notice right at the top we get a menu to give us access to these workspaces again. This would probably be my preferred way to work most of the time because of course, I want the maximum real estate on my screen. Still, I'm going to go down here and choose show workspace bar and we're back to the way we were. It's worth noting that actually the position of your bins will not always be incorporated into workspaces in the way you might expect, and I suppose that's partly because actually you've got a bin container. That's this whole window, and then within that bin containers there's a display region where you see the content of a particular bin. If I drag this rock climber clips bin out and leave it as a floating window, you see I can save the current workspace and then move this bin over and choose another workspace. Click back. It kind of floats there but doesn't always go exactly where I expect it to be. There's no easy rule to this. You'll just have to experiment with it, but I suppose the main thing to be aware of is that this is actually a bin container window as well. I'll just resize a little and stretch this over and you can see we've now got two bin container windows. These just allow you to browse the bins and view their contents on the right. If I take the heading of this bin where it says rock climber clips and drag it around, rather than dragging the name of the window around, this is bins number one. This is technically bins zero but we don't have a number for it. I can drag this over and position it as I would other floating windows except that you'll notice I'm not seeing any of those green highlights except when I position this window over an existing bin, and now if I want to I can position this as a second part to the same bin container and I can now easily move items between these two bins. If I want to dock this particular bin, or rather the bin contents in with that other sequences bin, well, it's just the same as docking a whole window. I'm going to hold down the alt or option key and now I get that blue highlight. Release the mouse, and now I'm getting my tabs. If I decide I want the effect palate to be, well, let's see now. Let's put it over here as a separate window next to the timeline window. If I decide I want that as a separate workspace, I can always click on the menu at the bottom of the workspaces bar or of course I can click on that menu next to the current workspace and I can choose new workspace, and let's call this We Love Effects. I'll click Okay and that now appears as a user-created workspace on the list. I can click on the submenu for that user-created workspace and choose delete workspace. It's gone. That's an option that you'll notice is missing from the built-in standard workspaces. You cannot delete them. They're always going to stick around, which I actually find quite reassuring.

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