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

Using the lesson files - Media Composer Tutorial

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

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Using the lesson files

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- [Instructor] Where ever you have downloaded them to, when you unzip the lesson files associated with this course, you're going to discover a list of folders. We've got these 101_A, B and C folders. There's an Avid MediaFiles folder and so on. To follow along with the lessons in this course, you'll want to move several of these folders to different locations on your computer and there's one really important set of folders which is these 101_A, B and C folders. These contain a special type of media that Avid Media Composer has already ingested or imported or if you like incorporated into its media management system. The way that system works is at the top level of each drive on your computer, you'll discover a folder called Avid MediaFiles. If you don't have a folder called Avid MediaFiles, you can just drag this empty one I've provided over into your drive. This folder does need to go at the top level, you can't put it in a subfolder on your computer because well it's just the way Avid works. In this example, I'm working on my media drive and this is a good moment to mention that it really doesn't matter if you're working on Mac OS or Windows, the media management is pretty much the same. Here I've got a separate drive called media and the Avid MediaFiles folder is already in place. I'm going to double click to open it and there's a folder in there called MXF and I'll open that and we've got a numbered folder. You can have as many numbered folders as you like and in fact, if you look in the example I've given you for download and go inside the MXF folder there, you can see that I've included a folder called 101. This is an empty folder actually. You can have whichever numbers you like but of course as is always the rule with operating systems Mac on PC, you can't have two folders with the same name in the same location. I'm going to drag this empty 101 folder over so that we can use it to contain all of the media that we need to go inside there. I'll double click to open it up and then back in the lesson files I'll go up a couple of levels to find these three 101 folders. I should explain the reason that these are divided up is that like a lot of media distribution services, we have a two gigabyte file size limit for the downloads. So this would actually be one big folder but we can't fit all of the files into two gig. So I'm going to double click and open this up. I'm going to press Ctrl+A for select all here on Windows. That would be Command+A on Mac OS and drag these from the unzipped lesson files into this Avid MediaFiles, MXF, 101 folder on the computer. Again this is at the top level of the hard drive. I'll just go up and go into the one 101_B folder, I'm selecting all again, I'll drag these over and then I'll go up into the C folder, select all and drag these over. So I've now taken the entire contents of those three folders and combined them in one folder on my computer. In this computer, I've got a system drive and one additional drive that I've named media. You might have several drives and it's not really important for the purposes of the training which one you use but speed is a factor so you'll want to go for faster drives if you can simply because the files are really, really big and slower drives will struggle to allow you to access them fast enough. Now I'm going to go up and look at these other folders. I've got a folder called Jacuzzi QT and if I look inside here, we've got a number of subfolders and we've got a number of QuickTime movies inside those, we've got some music and so on as well. As you can tell right away, these have a different file extension. These are dot MOV instead of dot MXF and that's not the key reason why we need to put these in a different location, the real reason is that these other files have already been ingested into Media Composer which is something we'll look at later on but for now, we're going to want to put these files somewhere else. So I'll go up and up and up again to our media drive and just to make them easy to locate later, I'm going to take this entire folder and just drag that over as well. So on the media drive, I've got an Avid MediaFiles folder. I've also got a Jacuzzi QT folder. In fact that lesson Files folder is just the downloaded zip files that you should have as well. And there's just one more item here, we've got this Avid Projects_Students folder. If I look inside of this, we've got a folder called Rock Climber and this is the name of a project that we're going to work on throughout this course. As I record the lessons in this course, there will be several more project folders added and you'll want all of them on your computer in your documents folder and again it doesn't matter if you're on Mac OS or Windows, both operating systems have a documents folder. You're going to have an Avid Projects folder as I've here if you've opened Avid before and if you haven't, you can just make a folder. But I'm going to put this Rock Climber folder which contains a project inside of that Avid Project folder in the documents folder. You'll notice before I release the mouse button that windows here and this would be the same on Mac OS is offering to create a copy of the folder rather than move the folder, I'll just release the mouse button so you can see that. This is because I'm moving the folder between two different drives. This is a standard feature have Windows and Mac OS. If you move things within the same drive well, they get moved. But if you move things between different drives and here I'm moving this folder onto the system drive, then the operating system presumes that you want to make a copy and there's modify keys to override that but a copy is fine by me. In fact, it's no bad thing to have a copy of the original on hand just in case you want to go back to the original version. Again, there will be several more project files for you to copy across when I have completed recording the lessons. So copy them all over to the Avid Projects folder. Like the jacuzzi QT folder, you could put this project folder anywhere you like. It's just extra convenient having it in the documents folder because it means that the Avid Media Composer application will automatically discover it. With these files in place, you're ready to begin following along with the lessons in this course.

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