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Video Track Monitor
I’ve noticed this as a recurring “Pain in the A** issue” for years with Avid Media Composer, and last night I saw it happen to someone else on Newscutter with disastrous results. When working on a sequence with multiple video tracks, the track monitor will switch to whichever track you are modifying. This may be limited to just trims, or effect modifications, but in any case, there is no way that I am aware to override this behavior.
Over the years I’ve been personally bugged by making a trim on a lower track, and go to show the result to a director or producer and ooops, the key effects above are “gone!” Well no, not really, they just aren’t being monitored. Last night minutes (not 10s of minutes) before air, an editor was asked to make a fix and a minor tweak on the open tease of a broadcast, and with the control room screaming at him to cue it up for air, he forgot to double check the monitor icon. He noticed some key elements missing as it was airing, realized his mistake, but the big OOOOPS came when the top level full screen animation didn’t play, but a large gap of black made air.
Does anyone know if there’s a way to lock the monitor icon to a given track, to prevent this automatic monitoring change?
BTW, I recommended to him to place his slate/countdown on the very top track of his template, to hopefully avoid this situation in the future. If you don’t see the slate, you aren’t monitoring the right track.
M. Scott Cole
Senior Post Production Editor
60 MINUTES
CBS News, NYC
sc*@*****ws.com
ms*****@*****st.net -
3 Replies
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Can’t remember if this is an option in News Cutter, but in MC on the edit tab, under the timeline setting there’s the option to turn Auto Monitoring on or off. Turning it off won’t lock the monitor exactly, but it should stay where you put it and not move itself between tracks as you edit.
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Timeline settings –> edit tab. Uncheck “auto-monitoring”.
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Michael Hancock
Editor -
Thanks,
I’ll check that first thing tomorrow morning.
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