More Avid Media Composer for the Final Cut Pro Editor

The EditBlog on PVC by Scott Simmons

Continuing on an article in the last Pro Video Coalition newsletter, The Basics of Avid Media Composer for a Final Cut Pro Editor, this article will look at a number of other functions and how they differ from Final Cut Pro to Media Composer. One of the main reasons why I’m writing these articles is that Avid offers a free, full-featured demo of Avid Media Composer 4 available for download. When I wrote the first piece that demo was only for 14 days. They have since upped the time for this trial to 30 days. That’s great as it brings this demo in line with most free demos and even affords enough time to try to learn the in’s and out’s of the application a little bit better any maybe even use it on a real job.

Last time I looked at a broad overview of Avid Media Composer and it’s main features. This time I’ll talk about more specific features. Since the first article was written Avid has updated Media Composer to version 4.0. I haven’t upgraded yet so this article was written under version 3.5.

The Project Window, Bins and Bin Column Layouts

Bins are the backbone of a well organized edit project. The more media you stuff into an edit project the more bins you might need. In FCP, bins look like folders and that’s pretty much what they are, folders where you can organize stuff within the project. I never understood why FCP calls them bins when they look like folders. In Avid you have both bins and folders. Creating a new bin creates a little icon that looks like a it has little film strips contained inside. The origin of calling it a bin comes from the days of cutting film when cutting rooms had big, physical bins where editors would store strips and trims of film. All media imported into Avid and sequences created must be stored in a bin. I’ve never encountered anything that can reside in the “top” level of an Avid project other than bins, folders, scripts and a trash can icon that appears if you delete an item from the main project window. (Scripts, FYI, are actual text-based scripts for using with Avid’s script based editing and ScriptSync function) Folders can be created as a way to organize bins. read more...