Our good friend and customer Kevin P McAuliffe has put together this excellent series of Avid training tutorials to help Adobe Premiere Editors get going quickly and easily with Media Composer. Great job Kev!

Get Started Fast with Media Composer for Adobe Editors

Welcome to our newest tutorial series “Get Started Fast with Media Composer for Adobe Editors“. The goal of this series is to show you fundamental differences between your Adobe editing application, and Avid Media Composer, so you can get up to speed as quickly as possible. In our first lesson, we’re talking specifically about the project window, and how setting up your project in Media Composer is the most important part of the your editing process, because you’re not setting up how to edit, but you are setting up what the end product is going to conform to. We also discuss user settings, and how they can be created in the project creation window as well. In our second lesson, we’re talking about acquiring media. Whether you’re linking to, importing, consolidating, transcoding or capturing. Media Composer editors, much like Premiere editors, can simply link to their media, and start editing, but the real power of Media Composer comes in how it works with Avid’s proprietary codec DNxHD and DNxHR, to make your editing process as smooth as possible. No matter what your source, whether it’s 4K, 8K or even an unfriendly codec like the Animation codec, converting these files to Avid friendly media means that you’ll never have any down-time due to dropped frames. Another concept that’s important we cover in this lesson is the Proxy Timeline, how you’ll use it, especially in larger than HD project, to ensure you get real-time playback, all the time! Our third lesson is all about Media Management. Now that you’ve acquired your media, you need to figure out what Media Composer has exactly done with it, so whether you need to delete media, or archive a project, you’ll always have control of your media, right at your fingertips. This lesson covers three fundaments for media management in Media Composer. The Avid MediaFiles folder, the Media Creation Settings and the Media Tool. Understanding these core concepts will ensure that if you ever have issues like running out of drive space, or transcoding media to the wrong drive, you’ll be able to identify the problem, and have it fixed in no time flat In our fourth lesson, we’re talking about effects and titling. Effects work in Media Composer is a little bit different than in most other NLEs including Premiere and even Final Cut Pro. We’re accustomed to having certain parameters like Scale, Rotation and Opacity “attached” to our clips. It’s not like that in Media Composer. We have a dedicated tool to handle that, which we’ll talk about in this lesson. Then, we move onto talking about Titling, as one thing that throws new editors for a bit of a curve is that we have three, yes three title tools in Media Composer. Why do we need three? What is the difference between them? Do you need all three of them? Well, the different title tools serve very different purposes, and we’re going to touch on all the basics of each on, so you’ll know which one is when, when you start working! In this final lesson, we’re talking about exporting, and you’ll quickly see that everything comes around full circle to our first lesson, where I mentioned that setting up your timelines how you want to export your final product is critical, as many editors will set up their timelines for the footage they have, and then run into a nightmare, when trying to convert it to the type of file they need to deliver. In this lesson, we’ll cover the three main ways to export footage from Media Composer, Recompressed, Same As Source and AMA File Export, and they all serve very different purposes. The main difference between Premiere and Media Composer is that, in most cases, Premiere relies on Adobe Media Encoder for it’s exports, where as in Media Composer all your exports, including recompressed exports, are all done right from within Media Composer. To continue learning click here.