Three Shorties

Software: Avid Media Composer
Platform: Windows / Mac
Skill Level: Basic

Three of my favourite short tips today:

1.) Copy material to the clipboard and load in the source monitor in one step.

This is a great way to quickly duplicate a section of your sequence.

1. Select the required tracks on your timeline.
2. Set Mark In and Mark Out points.
3. Press CTRL-ALT-C (Windows) or APPLE-OPTION-C (Mac). The selected material is now loaded in your source monitor.
4. Use INSERT or OVERWRITE to edit the copied material into your sequence.

2.) Advance the position indicator repeatedly.

It's pretty common to click on your source or record monitor and then type in a plus symbol and a timecode to advance by a certain number of frames. What you might not know, is that you can continue to move ahead by the original amount by simply pressing enter again. For example, if you type +5 to move ahead 5 frames, hitting Enter again will continue to advance the position indicator by the same number of frames. I use this in the timeline quite a lot to set up edits of the same length, by typing the amount of frames, hitting Enter and then using Add Edit. From then on I can just use Enter then Add Edit until I've created the number of "placeholders" I need.

3.) Another way to remove Match Frame edits.

If you are in trim mode, and you are currently positioned on a match frame edit, you can press the Delete key to delete the match frame.

Disclaimer