Splice Now

Media Composer version 3.0.5 was released this week and, along with some key bug fixes, it offers a couple of important new features.

First and foremost, it allows you to select all clips to the right or left of the blue cursor, or all clips between marks. This makes it trivially easy to open up space in the middle of a complex, overlapped timeline. Just select all tracks, hit the new “select right” button and drag everything to the right. Voila, you’ve got a nice empty space in your timeline, without cutting up any clips or doing any cleanup work. Final Cut has had a similar feature for a long time, but it’s a valuable and nicely implemented addition to the MC.

Select Right makes it easy to go from this:

to this:

You’ll find buttons for these new features in the Edit tab of the command palette.

Second, you can now generate a report with lots of useful information about a particular sequence or source clip. You’ll find this in the “Get Clip Info” or “Get Sequence Info” windows, which have been expanded. For sequences, you can list all your effects or sources, among other things.

You access these reports by clicking in the source or record window and selecting “Get Sequence Info” or “Get Clip Info” from the File menu. You can also use the contextual menu — on the Mac, hold down shift and control and click on the source or record window.

Other changes in this release include a very important fix to the Save All command so that Autosave doesn’t waste time saving unchanged bins (hallelujah!), and a fix to the burn-in tool so it doesn’t crash over black segments when showing source info. There’s also a fix to trim mode so that when trimming two head or tail frames (a new feature in version 3) you’ll hear correct scrub audio. There’s a helpful fix to segment drag sync locks (in timeline settings), and a fix to the locator window so you don’t have to see it every time you create a locator.

All in all, this is a very useful release. Avid says it has only been qualified for OS X 10.5.4. I installed it on 10.5.5 and it seems okay so far.

If you’re using Media Composer software-only and you’ve already got version 3, you can download the update here. As usual, you must uninstall first. Avid really ought to fix that. The system should check for updates and do whatever uninstalling is needed automatically.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, video

This entry was posted on September 30, 2008 at 8:43 am and is filed under Avid Technical Tips. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.