Avid Editing Tips and Tricks - Part VIII

DV Fanatics

This is the eighth edition of the Avid Editing Tips and Tricks series. This collection again includes some tips for features recently added to the Avid Media Composer. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions, you can reach me through the comments of this blog, through Google+, LinkedIn or Twitter, using the @mBlazeVideo handle.

Keep in mind that I work on an Avid Media Composer on the Mac. If you are using Windows, the COMMAND key on the Mac does what the CTRL key does on Windows and the OPTION key on Mac is the same as the ALT key on Windows.
Using standardized bin names in all Avid projects.

Standard Bin Naming Convention - A great way to keep your projects organized is to develop a standard naming convention for bins in all projects. For instance, I find it helpful to name all of my sequence bins "00-sequences". Doing so makes them always appear at the top of the list in my project window.

Mapping Bins to the Keyboard - I tend to like to use my keyboard more often than the mouse, so I find it helpful to map as much as I can to the keyboard. Recently, I started using a technique to map a particular bin to the keyboard. Now I can select an active bin with a touch of a key. To start, I create a BIN LAYOUT (not sure if this is available in earlier versions of the Media Composer) with the bin I want to select as the active bin. I name the BIN LAYOUT the same name as the bin (it helps to have a standard naming convention of bins for all projects, as mentioned in the first tip). In the COMMAND PALETTE, select the WORKSPACES tab, assign the BIN LAYOUT to one of those WORKSPACES. Now you can assign that WORKSPACE to any key on the keyboard. read more...