Finding an edit on Avid

[Shane Ross]

By find an edit, you mean find your SEQUENCE? The cut sequence? Where did you put it if not in a bin? When you first add something to the timeline it prompts you WHERE DO YOU WANT THIS CUT TO GO…and you choose a bin. You cannot have a sequence without it being in a bin.

I’d suggest opening ALL your bins and looking…

[Will Oswald]

Yes an edit- cutting copy, sequence of shots, montage, assembly etc – call it what you will. You are of course right I should have but failed to file it away carefully so I could find it again but I was working really fast and I wanted to quickly experiment with a complex construction of a scene. More haste … And I did find it by ploughing through 80 bins but surely there is a systemic way of searching for an edit. If I was working on a feature, rather than a 50 drama with a fast turn round, I could have hundreds of bins and versions of edits.

[Shane Ross]

Really trying not to be snide here, but this is why you create a bin for the cut and put it there in the first place. Then you know where it is. Editing all willy nilly (OK, that is snide) like this is sloppy. Editors who do that drive assistants NUTS.

Organization is the key.

And no way to find a sequence other than knowing what bin that it is in as far as I know.

[Will Oswald]

Fine. I was asking a simple question that appears not to have been addressed by the software writers. That is all I needed to know. Still it would be nice if they created a nice little database searching tool/disc management tool. I assumed that it was my ignorance of the system that was to blame – I know I made the error of misfiling Doh!!! But to err is human. Thanks for your feedback it is always good to know I treat my assistants badly!!! If they allowed us to have assistants. Best wishes.

Silly Willy Nilly.

[Shane Ross]

That would be a useful feature…

And I mistreat my assistants too, rendering to God knows where, leaving it up to them to clean and shuffle. I was an assistant for 3 years, and it drove me BATTY. Now I do it.

I feel a little like Pat Morita.

[Will Oswald]

Actually I just realised losing stuff is not our fault. We have been brow beaten by software designers into believing if anything goes wrong we are the dumb ones. As professionals we need certain tools to make life easier but it seems sometimes designers would much rather spend time writing code to make yet another useless video transition effect than serious organisational stuff. But please I must stop ranting. Life is short.

Love and peace.

[Michael Phillips]

I agree that “Search across bins” would be a very useful feature. It works great in Lightworks as well as the old D’Vision. Avid uses MediaManager to provide this feature when in a workgroup environment, but not when working standalone.

The workaround for standalone systems it to export the bin contents as a TAB delimited file and create a database in an application like FileMaker Pro. The searches can be done from there. When exporting as TAB, the Avid software automatically adds the BIN name as a metadata field to all entries.

Michael

[Will Oswald]

Thank you for the insight.

[Charley King]

For future reference, I create a bin which I simply call “Sequences” I put every version I am cutting into that and name them specific names that will help me remember which of the 20 or so versions I have made, well maybe not that many that often, but a few. It makes it much easier to find later. I know this doesn’t help for now, but think about it in the future. It will save you many headaches.

Charlie

[Bill Stephan]

I always assign a color to my sequences, as you can search by color in the bins.

Bill Stephan
Senior Editor/DVD Author
USA Studios
New York City