EVENT REPORT: VIDEOCRAFT Media Composer 7 Session

Australian Screen Editors

Videocraft hosted a training evening to demonstrate some of the new and more interesting features of Avid Media Composer v7 to ASE members.

Our demonstrators were Drew and James. At Videocraft Drew is the Avid Media Composer person and James is one of the go-to people for all things audio and Pro Tools. The night was a roaring success [if you could describe a hardware and software demo as such]. Videocraft generously provided the class with pizzas and sugary drinks and then began a very informative evening of instruction.

The session focussed on new techniques for audio tools and included a great segment that demonstrated the ease of exporting and importing audio to Pro Tools users. Also featured was some of the new general trickery of MCv7, of which there is much, and we quickly ran out of time.

In no particular order we learned that Avid have done some very interesting things in the audio department. They have created a new audio engine for Pro Tools and Media Composer and there are some very solid audio goodies to use.

Some of these features include a MASTER FADER on the Mixing Tool which, apart from the obvious, also allows you to apply RTAS [that’s echos and compression and all those effects] to the output without effecting the individual tracks; the ability to add a clip gain tool to individual clips in the timeline [with a dB display and the ability to adjust levels with either the mini-slider or numerically – see below]

Opt Cmd L or K in the timeline will increase the size of audio waveforms and the other good news is that the waveforms are now drawn, and remembered by the program, so no more waiting 35mins for a bloody timeline to chug through the waveforms when you accidentally hit waveforms on that three hour assembly! Hooray! read more...