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Tips & Tricks #1…
Well, things are a little slow around here, so I thought I’d post a trick I just picked up from one of my editors.
Click on the red arrow (the segment overwrite mode). While pressing ‘shift’, select several clips. The clips MUST be contiguous, and any black between clips must be selected as well. Now, using the <<, <, >, and >> keys, you can move the clips very precisely.
I thought it was cool – I’ve been driving an Avid for 11 years and thats the first time I’d seen that.
If anyone else has any other tricks, post them!
Jon
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8 Replies
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I posted this on the Avid Forum in response to a question, but it’s a good trick to know for those starting out.
HOW TO MAKE A CUSTOM MATTE USING AVID’S TITLE TOOL.
Say you have an interview you want to put in a little circle or oval over some background footage. You try to use the circle wipe, but it only creates a matte in in the center of your screen and you want your interview to be in the lower right hand corner. What to do?!?
2 Effects–1 PIP, 1 Matte Key effect.
1 Title.The Recipe:
I set up the scenario to get you going. V1 is your Background. V2 is an Interview. V3 is your Matte.Cut your background into place on V1. Cut your interview into place on V2. Apply a PIP effect to your interview, size it until it suits and then move it to the corner you want it in (in this case, lower right hand corner).
Open your Title Tool. Select the Circle button and make a circle over your interview portion of the screen (to make a perfect circle, hold Shift while you make it). Make this circle in the exact size and position you want your interview footage to show when it’s all said and done.
Make the fill of your circle completely black. Now deselect the V at the bottom of the title tool to turn off the video preview–thereby giving your title a solid background. Select the box to the left of the V and choose White. You want it to be a white circle on a black background. When you’ve done this, save the title.
Cut this title onto V3. Remove the title effect. This will leave you with just your fill. You should have a white background with a black circle. Now, apply a Matte Key effect to V3. This should create a circle matte exactly where you want it, keeping just a circle part of your interview and punching the rest out, leaving your background.
2 More Things:
1. I might have the colors mixed up. If it’s giving you the inverse of what you want, either make the background of your title black and the circle white, or choose “Invert Matte” in the matte key effect.2. You’ll have a hard edge on your circle. If you don’t like that, do this: Make your circle as before, then apply a 1 drop shadow. Make the fill completely transparent and the shadow completely opaque and black. Then apply a Soften Shadow (Alt+Ctrl+H on a PC). The higher the number, the softer the edge (choose from 4 to 40). This will give you a soft, gradient like transparency blend on your matte.
Use this trick anytime you want to make a custom matte without having to go to photoshop. The title tool, as backwards and weird as it is, can be your friend.
If you have additional tips/trick, post here!
Michael.
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1-To prevent a clip (or clips) from slipping sideways when you move them from one track to another, hold the shift + control keys when you drag them. This constrains the clip’s movement to vertical only.
2-Use the Fade Effect to fade your fonts and other alpha titles in and out. Unlike a regular dissolve, the fade effect remains on the clip if you have to move it.
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Alright Zanone, now look what you’ve done. You started a avalanche of tips and tricks.
Here are a few of mine.
1. Let’s say you have 8 audio tracks in your timeline. You load a clip into your source monitor with 2 audio tracks, but you don’t want the 2 audio tracks to go onto tracks 1&2 of your timeline. You want them to go to any of the other 6 tracks you have. You could do the old drag to the desired track, or click on the source track and select which track you want to route it to. But why have to do anything when it can be done automatically? Go to your project window and select the settings tab. Then select Timeline, then the Edit tab, then select auto patching. Now all you have to do is click on the track you want the audio to go to and it automatically is patched to it.
YEAH BABY!2. And speaking of automatically, if you hold the Alt key down with Lift, Extract or Clipboard, it automatically loads that clip into your source monitor.
To save a lot of time spent duplicating settings for an effect, try these 2 tasty tricks.
1. After you have added an effect to a clip and have gone into effect mode to adjust the settings, let’s say you have added some keyframes and set one up to where you want it, then you want to make another keyframe have the exact same setup, instead of duplicating all the parameters again, just copy (alt C) the one you set up and paste (alt V) to the other one you haven’t.
2. Then if you think this is an effect that you will probably want to use again with the exact same settings, before you close out of effects mode, drag the effect icon, located in the upper right hand corner of the effect editor window, into a bin and label it so you know exactly what it is. Then next time you want that effect, just slap it on to a clip or transition on the timeline and, wa la, done! Next!
Chaz S.
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This has worked on every system I’ve had the pleasure to cut on:
QUICK TRANSITIONS:
Hitting the quick transition button on your Avid will give you a little dialog box where you can choose dissolve, film dissolve, fade to color, fade from color, and dip to color. But what if you have a custom transition you plan on using a lot, like a crazy circle wipe or 5 frame white flash? Well, you could manually apply it to every cut, adjust the parameters in each, or copy the effect to a bin then drag it to each transition…OR have it pop up in your Quick Transition Dialog Box!
Make a bin and call it Quick Transitions NOTE THE SPELLING AND CAPITALIZATION!
Save any transition effects you want to use to this bin. Then, when you hit the Quick Transitions button and click the pull down menu where you have Dissolve, Film Dissolve, Fade to Color, etc…you will see a list of all of your saved transition effects in your Quick Transitions bin! Best of all–the bin doesn’t even have to be open!
I have a Quick Transitions bin in a project called “The Necessary Stuff”. It includes bars, tone, slates, and my favorite Quick Transitions. For every project I open the Quick Transitions bin–all my saved transitions are there, and when I delete my project they’re still online because they’re in The Necessary Stuff project! Genius, Avid, Genius!!
Mike.
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YEAH YAH!
That IS a good one! But that menu could get veeeerrrrrryyyyy long.Chaz S.
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No worries–just make another bin called “Quick Transitions in Transition” or some other such silly nonsense and put the transitions you probably won’t be using for a particular project in there. Just load up your Quick Transitions bin with those pertinent to your project to keep the list manageable and rock ‘n roll!
Mike.
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So you’re editing audio, but the sample plots are kind of small. You could always enlarge the tracks by selecting them and hitting Ctrl+L, but if you have a lot of audio layers you’ll find yourself having to scroll up and down a lot. So just make the Sample Plots larger!
On a PC select the tracks you want to enlarge the sample plots on and hit Alt+Ctrl+L to make the sample plots larger–Alt+Ctrl+K to make them smaller. I suppose on a Mac it would be Option+Ctrl+L and Option+Ctrl+K, but I don’t have a Mac to test it.
Now you can see more detail in your sample plots without making your audio tracks enormous.
Mike.
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Tips and shortcuts – where would we be without them!!!!
+ Open a project without any bins open by holding down the alt key when you load it. (we’ve all opened the odd project with 90 bins open at the start!!!)
+ Select all tracks by hitting Ctrl + A, deselect them all by hitting Ctrl + Shift + A
+ Switch audio (and video) track monitoring off/on by hitting ALT + (shortcut to V1, V2, A1, A2 etc)
+ Save an effect with its source to a bin by holding ALT when dragging the effect icon (from Effect Editor) into the bin.
+ In colour correction – quickly sort an incorrectly balanced shot by clicking the eyedropper tool onto something in the image that should be white. (may need more correction but gives a good headstart)
+ To find media files easily on your drives type RENAMEMEDIAFILES into the console, this will rename every file on the drives based on the project and the clip names.
+ Rather than copying to the clipboard then pasting into the source monitor, just highlight the portion of the timeline you want and hit ALT and C.
+ Create a folder in the project folder for any graphics/audio files that you import, that way when you back the project files up everything is on the same disk.
Better get back to editing somemore. Hope some of these help.
🙂
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