From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

What's new in 8.8? - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 8.7 Essential Training: 101

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What's new in 8.8?

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- [Instructor] For this video, I've created a new project file. It's called Avid Media Composer 8.8, and it's in the Update Project Files folder. There's a subfolder there called Media Composer 8-8. I'm going to go into this project, and there were just a couple of things I want to show you in Avid Media Composer 8.8. There are a few other features that have been added, some more advanced workflow features, and some really little things to do with the way the interface updates, but there's two things I want to draw your attention to. First of all, I'm going to go to settings in the project window here, and I'm looking for the media cache setting. I'm going to double click to open this up. There are a few tabs here that have options to do with the way Avid Media Composer handles media, what it does with temporary files and caches, and that kind of thing. There's a new option under the video memory tab to enable effects editing video frame cache, and this is really something that you enable and leave on and it improves performance, particularly when you're working with visual effects. Now, we've had the option to add a playback video frame cache for a while, and this just means that when you're working on visual effects, you'll get better performance. There is an option at the top of the window here to change the amount of memory you want to allocate to the cache. We get this huge, long tooltip associated with the option. The more you increase the memory, the better the performance you can expect, because Media Composer's going to store frames of rendered effects work in the memory, and make it easier for playback later on. It won't have to re-render as much, just to scrub through and look at the results of your effects, and you can see here, there's a warning saying that if you push this memory too high, you might get system instability. My money's on leaving it at the default. This is based on the system that you have, and of course it's fine for you to experiment with this, and if you start getting crashes in Media Composer, then bring it back down again. So that's the media cache option for effects editing. Perhaps a bigger new option in 8.8 is the ability to add clip notes in a sequence. I've got a master sequence here in my sequences bin and I've got a number of clips here. This is a really simple sequence. If I want to add a note to this clip, maybe I want to check the copyright clearance, I can select the clip, I can right click, and choose add timeline clip note, and I'm going to click in here and add a note. Let's say, check clearance, and I'll click OK. See, if I right click again and choose add timeline clip note again, I actually open up the same clip note. So it's one note per clip. However, I'm just going to click OK here and go to the tools window, and then I'm going to scroll all the way down here to timeline clip notes, where we've got a window to display the clip notes added to the sequence. Just going to drag this navigator over a little so we can see the full clip name. You'll notice that we've got two notes added. We've got one for the audio and one for the video, and that's because, if I just move this panel out of the way a little, you can see I've got this link selection toggle on, and that meant that when I clicked on the clip in the sequence, I actually selected two, the video and the audio. So you might want to keep an eye on that if you really just want to add a note to the video. If I want to, I can double click to change the words in the note, so I can say, for this clip, OK, and you'll notice that there's this gang option down at the bottom of the window. I'm just going to close this for a moment, and over here I'm going to add another note. I'll right click, I'll choose add timeline clip note, and let's just say I like this. Okay, so I've now got a clip note on each of these clips. If I want to, in the fast menu, I can go in and I can choose clip text and timeline clip notes, and, well, it's a bit of a mess here, isn't it? We're getting the clip name followed by the clip note, but I guess if I zoomed in a little that would improve things. I'll just turn that back off. Clip text, timeline clip notes. And also, if I go back into the timeline clip notes window, you can see with this gang option on, it's pretty subtle but there it's off, there it's on, I can double click on one of these and my play head, that blue line there, is going to jump to the clip. You'll notice that it always jumps to the beginning of the clip. These notes are applied to a specific clip, not to a particular point in time. You could use locators for that, I suppose. And another really useful option here is I can right click and I can export to text, so if I choose this option, you can see this document's going to be created just as a regular text document. I'll click save, and if I toggle over to the folder I just exported this to, I can double click to open this up, and you can see I've got all of my time code references for those clips and I've got my notes. So I suppose this is a quick way to share information about the notes you've added to a sequence. I should mention as well that you can click on these headings to change the order in which these notes are applied, and of course you can select a note and hit the backspace or the delete key and it's going to be removed. So those are my main standout new features in 8.8. There are a few updates to some existing functionality, but those are the ones that might well change your editing workflow.

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