MC 7 is out! What Avid won’t tell you about Spanned Markers

Spanned Markers, the good the bad and the ugly

Avid Media Composer 7 has actually streeted a little earlier than planned, so I thought I'd spend a couple of articles filling you in on the new features, one at a time.

So, one of the features I saw demonstrated at NAB in April that I thought was pretty cool was Spanned Markers. Markers or Locators (as they used to be called) have always simply provided a mark on a moment of time – a specific frame. But I have often felt that it would be very useful to mark a SEGMENT of time, like an in to an out point, for example.

Avid kind of addressed this a while ago, with a feature that allowed you to “Mark Markers” which sounds like a bad stage name for a kid in a boy band or an artistic mobster nickname. Basically place a Marker at your intended in point and another at your intended out point. You can do this multiple times in the same clip to create multiple in and out marks in a single source clip. Then when you want to convert them to actual in and out points, you simply park your timeline locator in the middle of any of the markers and hit the Mark Markers button and the Avid puts an inpoint at the Marker before the timeline locator and an outpoint at the Marker after the timeline locator.

So Avid decides to up the ante and create Spanned Markers which actually define spans of time in the clip or sequence. This is pretty cool. If you’ve got an interview, for example, you could put Spanned Markers around all of the good answers. This is very helpful visually, as you can see from this example of three Spanned Markers in a Source clip (with some regular Markers as well). read more...