From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Setting up workspaces - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Setting up workspaces

- Workspaces are pre-configured 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 suggests, 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 palette 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 palette jumps back to its 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 wanted, 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 palettes 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 sub menu 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 OK, and the effect palette 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 container there's a display region where you see the contents of a particular bin. If I drag this rock climber clips pin 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 it doesn't always go exactly where I expected 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, 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 raw climate clips and drag it around rather than dragging the name of the window around, this is bins number one and 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. 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 secrets its been, well, it's just the same as a 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 palette 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. Let's call this we love effects or click OK, and that now appears as a user created workspace on the list. I can click on the sub menu for that user created workspace and choose delete workspace, that'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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