Transcrição 2

Esta transcrição encontra-se em: www.lynda.com/Edius-tutorials/Setting-up-window-layouts/123456/127472-4.html

Getting Started with EDIUS 6 with Maxim Jago

5. Working with Audio: 18m 15s

• Timeline-based rubberbanding: 4m 33s

Key Framing is the mechanism by which EDIUS allows you to have settings change over time. It's a very straightforward process, once you know what you're doing. Very simple principle. And once you've got it for one context, you've got it for pretty much everything. I'm going to show you how to Key Frame using the audio level of this track. This is a piece of music by the artist, Dan Whitehouse. Based in the UK. It's a nice piece of music but it's alittle bit too loud. Because CD music is usually fully attenuated.

And also, for me to be able to adjust the level over time the whole track is alittle bit short for my liking. So the first thing we're going to do, here's my track, is I'm going to hover the mouse over the top edge of the 1A audio track. I'm going to click and drag upwards and as I do, you can see this tracks going to get a lot larger. I'm just going to resize the timeline a bit so you can see what's going on. Now if I right-click, I can also change the height by choosing a number from the list, and if I select multiple tracks, I can change the height of multiple tracks all at once. So pretty straight forward to adjust the height, but I find usually clicking and dragging does the trick.

Now if I just click to the beginning of this clip and I'm going to zoom a littlebit, I'm holding down control. And I'm rolling the mouse wheel towards me. In fact, I'm just going to move the clip on a little bit so you can see right at the start. This clip starts with some atmospheric sound. . That's fine. So what I'd like to do is have that audio fade up from silence right at the beginning. I want a nice slow fade. And you can see from the wave form where the singing begins here. It's not necessary for me to specify the audio level for every single frame of my video.

All I need to so is set the start and the end of the adjustment and that's it. So what I'm going to do is, over on the track header here I'm going to turn on volume. I'm just clicking once, to switch this to volume mode. And now, straight away, I've got the option to add key frame marks. Now, there are quite a few combinations of modify keys that will change the way this so called rubber band will behave. If I just click an drag I'm going to create a key frame. And a key frame is just a point in time, usually identified by a marker, something like this which contains specific settings.

In this case I have the audio level drop and then I've had it rise up. I will just Undo a couple of times. If I hold down the Shift key, you'll notice I get a different icon, and this is a Flat Level Adjustment. And also, as I adjust, you'll notice the very bottom left-hand corner, I get an indication of how much I'm changing the audio level. I'm going to take this down about 10 dB. Now I want to add a key frame that will be the end of my fade up from silence. So I'm just going to click without any modify keys, and there we go, and that's fixed the audio level at that point in time, at that volume. Now it's pretty cut off but at the very beginning of this clip there's the half visible part of an existing key frame.

Every clip has a key frame at the very beginning and very end automatically.I'm going to click that and drag it down to the bottom edge of the clip. Now you'll see you get this curve because these are logarithmic audio fades, rather than linear ones, which is just better, bit more natural sounding. If I now play that back, there we are. A nice, slow, gradual fade up, followed by, the audio being a little bit quieter. > > Is this what it's for? Great. And that essentially is rubber banding.

It's all that you need to know to key frame pretty much anything in the alias interface. The visual effects can have complex layers of multiple settings which change different parameters over time. But essentially it's always going to be the same principal. You're going to, add key frames. And you're going to, change the settings, for them. A classic example would be if you wanted music to dip below say, a piece of voice over, if I get some media. And let's just put this, on my 1VA track.

At about there. So let's say this had some audio that I wanted to be able to hear. I can now hold down the shift key and click between these two key frames and I'm going to create a dip. So I've got my audio playing at full volume and then it drops down under the voice over, plays a bit lower, and then comes back up again. So that's classic rubber banding with audio on the timeline.

• Using the audio mixer: 6m 24s

You can adjust the audio level in EDIUS by using the rubber bands for a clip but you can also use the dedicated audio mixer. If I just click on the Toggle Audio Mixer Display button here it'll come up on screen. You can access this by going to the view menu as well, it's just listed along with the other tools. Now the audio mixer represents each of the tracks on the timeline in Eduius as a vertical control. So here for example, I've got my one V8 track, it's going nothing on it. My 2V track of course won't be represented because it has no audio, and I've got my 1A, 2A, 3A, and so on. I've also got a master output volume.

Now the controls here look a bit busy when you're not familiar with the audiomixers, but if you've seen one and you understand how it works, you'llautomatically recognize any other. Just running down from top to bottom, I've got pan control to send the audio from that track left or right and that gives me a number readout. When I make adjustments, I can mute that entire track or I can solo it, making sure that all the other tracks are turned off for sound. I've got a fader control, which allows me to adjust the audio level over time if I want.

And that gives me a DB reading at the bottom. I'll just resize this a bit. We don't need the slider there to view it. And then at the very bottom I've got these various modes. And I'll just run you through what these modes do.Because once you know what they're for, it all kind of makes simple sense.First of all, let's start at the top with track. If I have the Control set to track. Then the adjustments I make are overall flat level adjustments for the entire track. This works pretty well, for example, if you organize your timeline very carefully so that, maybe, all of your music is on one track, all of your voice over on another and then you can just say, well let's go down to about minus 10 dB for the music. That kind of works fine.

Just undo that with my Ctrl Z. Then equally if we go to clip we get the same result but the clip adjustment is for clip by clip basis. So, I've got a clip selected here. I've got my edit line over it and if I make an adjustment you can see the red rubber band line moves up and down the clip, as I adjust the fader. This the equivalent to me holding down the shift key, and clicking on the rubber band to get a flat level adjustment on the clip. Again, this is for the whole clip segment, or at least when I'm using the shift key, it's for this section of the segment, but if I'm using the fader control, on the mixer, it's the whole thing.

You'll see that all of the level adjustments move relative to one another. So it's pretty handy. Next down I've got off of course this will do nothing at all. Then we get onto a classic latch touch right controls that you'll see on audio mixes of this kind all throughout the industry. To explain what these do, I'm going to start at the bottom and work my way up, I'm going to start with write. If I choose write and position my fader say, down here, I've now got the option of pressing play on the audio mixer, and riding the audio by grabbing the fader and moving it up and down to assign keyframes.

Now this is frankly a bit easier if you've got an external mixing desk which is automated and connected to your machine. Because you can ride multiple faders at the same time and move them in directions. But at least you can do it one by one with the mouse. Or you can use these three ganging controls to connect faders together into groups. So that's one group. That's another group. You can have up to three different ones. And then any movement you make to one, will affect the others in the same group. I've just got one bit of audio so I'm going to stick with that. (music playing) All I need to do is press play.

And start adding keyframes. (music playing) (music playing) And again pick again and it stopped. Now it's bit of a mess, isn't it. If I zoom in to the timeline so we can see a bit more clearly what's happened there. You can see that EDIUS has created very kind of smooth following of the adjustments I made with my fader. And here's where the other modes come in.

So write means that any adjustments I make will be written to a timeline and will create this audio level adjustment. What it also means is that if I have this set to write mode, if I press play on the mixer again, it will just overwrite from the very beginning. It will let me have a starting point for my keyframes, so I don't have to press play and then quickly grab the mouse and move it over to the fader. I can position it where I want it right away. Touch mode will follow the existing keyframes until I grab the fader and then when I let go, it'll go on following the existing keyframes.

So let's have a look at that. I'll click back a bit and press play. (music playing) And you can see the fader moving on it's own. And it can be difficult sometimes to grab, but if I grab this and pull down. There you can see the keyframes being written straight away onto the timeline. And it goes on following afterwards. So that's touch mode. Latch mode is just the same as touch mode, except that once I grab it, the fader will stay where I leave it. So if I press play, you can see the fader's following the keyframes I'm going to let it go upMUSIC and then I'll pull it down and let go. And now you can see having let go, it's still right in keyframes with that level.

So, these all kind of make sense they're the different ways in which you might want the interface to behave. And one last thing to mention about the audio mixer where you can see right away of course that the mixer has.Levels for each of the tracks which is pretty handy, and if I click down on the little menu here it's not easy to see, it looks like an icon but it is a menu. I can toggle between peak levels and VU levels, and in fact I can even apply these kinds of adjustments to the master output which is just great.

If you're in a hurry and at the very last minute you realize the entire project needs to be a little bit quieter, you can just adjust the overall output level for the entire project. Another thing to note here is that the pan control is often grayed out. That's because you can only apply pan adjustments on a whole clip by clip basis or on a track basis. You can rubber band the pan controls but if you want to do it with the audio mixer it's only on a whole clip by clip basis. So that's using the audio mixer in Edius 6.

• Adding audio effects: 4m 3s

Adding any kind of visual or a sound effect in Edius is really just a question of dragging and dropping. And I thought it would be a nice way to start off by looking at dragging and dropping audio effects first. They are a little bit simpler then the visual ones. So we can see where they appear and where the settings are. So first of all I've got a simple sequence here with this music track, Lying Underneath. And let's say I want to do some EQ on this track. So first of all I'm going to go to my Effects pallet and I'm going to expand the audio filters.

And in amongst these, I've got a parametric equalizer, I can apply any of these if I like. I'm just going to drag and drop this effect onto the music. Now before I get into the settings for that, let me just jump back into the effects palette here. You'll notice if I drag say. Oh, let's take a low pass filter. And put this onto this VA track, where I've got video and audio. You can probably see there, if I hold and let go of the mouse here. If I try to put the effect onto the visual part of this head and shoulder shot, Edius just won't let me. I can only drop an audio onto the audio part of a clip. You see I get the highlight there, nice and clear. So now I can let go and I've got a low-pass filter to reply to that clip. If I click on the visual part of that clip, I just get the layout, which is for positioning on screen.

But if I click on the audio, I get the low pass filter. You don't get much of an indication that an audio effect's been applied, but if I just click away onto another clip. You should be able to see there's an orange line along the top of the audio, and that tells me that even if I can't see it, I don't get an icon for the individual effect, I know there's some sound effects on there. And I click on that music now and look in my information palette. Notice that when I apply an effect, Edius jumps me to the information palette automatically. I've got the parametric equalizer listed. And on this list here, I can remove the tick to remove the application of the effect or put the tick back in.

I can delete the effect by clicking on the cross. I'll just Ctrl+ Z to undo that. In fact, I can even remove the effect by clicking and dragging it away from the information palette. You see I get the trashcan icon there, and there it is, I'll just undo. I can also go into the Settings for the effect. If I double-click on this, I get the parametric EQ controls. And here on the left, I've got this control point, in the middle. I've got the center control point, on the right, this is a three band parametric EQ. And effectively if you are not familiar with these.

I've got the low frequencies on the left and the high frequencies on the right and I'm making an very subtle gradiated audio adjustment. So if I wanted everyone to sound like they were on a telephone, I guess I could just drop off the low notes and the high notes, and I'd end up with very very tinny sounding audio. Let's see if I can hear that. (audio playing) There we are, so perhaps not a desirable effect, but you get the idea. And within each of these I've got the frequency, that's the, that control point is set at. I've got the amount of gain or the lack of gain. And then I've got the cue, which is only adjustable in the center point here. There we go.

I can adjust the width of the adjustment. If I turn one of these low end or highend control points into a band control, then I get the cue, you can see here.But the benefit of having this set as a low end or a high end cut off is that istails off the audio level really nicely. There we go. That's primary track EQ. And of course I can apply this effect as it stands, by just dragging and dropping it onto another clip on the timeline.

Notice as well, that if I right-click on this effect, I can enable or disable, that's kind of the same as the tick box. Open the Setup dialog, that's the same asdouble-clicking, or clicking on the Settings button. Or I can delete, and I can also Save as a current user preset. So pretty easy to apply audio effects and get into Setting for them.

• Pan controls and channel mapping: 3m 15s

As well as applying audio effects, and in fact one of those audio effects includes a pan, pot, and balance effect. I just drag this on, look at the settings. I can adjust the left and right balance for an individual clip. I can also specify left and right balance by expanding an audio track. Clicking on the Volume Pan control and then making adjustments to the, here we go, the pan rubber band. It's kind of difficult to see against the wave form there. But if I make this track a little bit taller and re-size the window a little bit, you should be able to see pretty clearly.

Here's my pan adjustment left and right. There's also a project-wide controlbecause what I'm looking at here is a pan adjustment in the context of my 1A audio track. Which is a stereo audio track outputting to my left and right speakers, which may not be what I want to happen, so if I go to my settings and go to Project Settings. In here, I can change my current setting. And over at the bottom right, I've got my track types which show the default track types created when I make a new sequence and my Channel Map. Now, this Channel Map control defines the way that audio channels play out for each new sequence that I create.

And I can change this on a sequence by sequence basis as well. If I click this button, I'll just resize this a bit so it's a bit clearer, I can decide what happens with each of the tracks that I have in a new sequence. If I just move this over you can see that my new sequences are due to have one VA track which has audio and four audio tracks which have audio. And here I can see my system has just two channels, channel one, channel two, that's pretty standard. If I had a system with perhaps eight lines out, using a dedicated piece of audio hardware, or a piece of grass filing hardware. Then I have, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight across the screen. If I take for example, my 1A audio track, I can leave this as stereo. Or I can click and have mono for channel one, or mono for channel two. And I can apply this to every track on my timeline.

So for example I can say, audio one is going to be for channel one, audio two is going to be for channel two. And I can do this right the way down the list at the moment of course I'm just working with four tracks. And this makes it very much more like some of the other editing systems on the market where you'd be used to having left, right, left, right, down the time line. This becomes the default setting for every new sequence created. I just set that back to stereo or just Cancel out, Cancel back out. Go back to my Settings, and choose Sequence Settings.

You get very little in the way of settings here. I can specify a name, I can specify the stop point for the time code. And I can specify a total length if I want but it doesn't actually limit the length, it just gives you a highlight, on the timeline. If I go to my Channel Map now, I get the same control. But again, this control is specific to the sequence I'm working on. So that's channel mapping, which defines the normal way that these tracks will output. But you can also do individual clip based pan controls by turning on the Pan RubberBanding for that clip on the timeline.

6. Effects: 15m 26s

• Adding and adjusting transitions: 2m 51s

Transition effects are applied in Edius just like any other kind of effect. So if I have some clips here in my timeline they all have handles they're all got some overlap. I'll just go into my Effects panel and look in my transitions type of effect, and I've got 2D, 3D, Alpha effects, Graphics Accelerated Effects. These will operate without any impact on real-time performance. SEMT standards, these are important if you're sharing your edits with other editing systems that aren't compatible with Edius project. You can export an EDL and as long as you're using SEMT effects, there's a good chance that they'll translate.

But just for now to keep things simple, I'm going to go for regular 2D transitions. Now, you'll notice that one of these has a little tiny D on it and this is the default transition. I can apply a transition by dragging it straight on. And I'm going to drag this directly between two clips. Now, I'm going to zoom in on the timeline using Control and the mouse wheel so you can see what's happening here. If I drag to the center point, I'm going to make a, this is a cross dissolve that's equally balanced between the first and second clip. Now this is going to be finished by the end of the first clip, and now it's not going to begin until the start of the second clip.

Pretty straight forward stuff. If I then play this through. (music playing) The audio's a bit funny because this is my original sync audio. I can double-click on this effect icon to get the settings for it, and this gives me the option for example of adding key frame points, and I can have this move over time, and then you'll see it kind of goes over a bit, and then it comes back a bit, and then it goes forward a bit. Click OK on that, and that's applied.

I can also trim the edges of the transition, so I can click and drag to within the length of my handles to make that transition last longer. Just going to zoom out a little bit, there we go. Now if I want to apply any other transition, it's the same, I just drag and drop There we are. I can even lasso a whole bunch of clips on the timeline and drag a transition effect onto all of them. And again, you see I can set the position for these transitions, but there we go, it applies to all of them together. If I right-click on an effect inside the effects list, I can set it as the default.

I can also specify a duration for it, so I can make a standard duration for that effect. There's even a keyboard shortcut. If I position my edit line near an edit,I can press Ctrl+P and whatever the default effect is, with it's default duration, is applied. If I want to remove a transition, I select it and hit Delete. Select delete, select delete. So that's how quick and easy it is to add transition effects to the timeline in Edius.

• Introducing the Layouter: 6m 23s

Edius has visual effects that you can drag and drop on the clips, and it hasaudio effects that you can drag and drop on the clips. But also, every visual clip that you have on your timeline has a layouter control. And I've got a simple timeline setup here. Where I've got this photograph in the foreground and a piece of video in the background. If I just turn off the visibility of the photograph there you can see, there it is. So it's a simple composition. You can see I've got two issues here, actually. The first is that the photograph is four by three, and this is really one of the primary functions of the Layouter to fix. The second issue is, if I just look at the properties for this clip. I'm right-clicking an I'm choosing properties.

This is actually 4,000 by 3,000 pixels. It's a very high resolution image. Now a lovely feature of Edius is that the conforming process takes place at thepoint of playback. So no matter what resolution my original media, it stays at full resolution, until it needs to be conformed for output. And this means that I can zoom right in on this image, and pan and scan around inside it and unless I zoom it beyond 100% of its original size, it's going to look super sharp. So, let's have a look at what the layouter lets me do. I'm going to make sure I've got the clip selected, double-click on the layouter and let's have a look at the interface.

Now it looks kind of busy when you first get into the layouter but, let's dividethis interface into three parts. Top left here I've got the image itself and I've got some controls for zooming in around it and cropping and so on. Over on the right, I've got individual settings and controls. And an example would be a left crop if I click and drag, I'm cropping the image from left to right. There's a series of controls along here and if I, if I go to the crop tab, I can achieve the same results if I get my selection tool here. By clicking and dragging on this handle.

There we go. Notice though, that I don't quite as clear visual feedback. Here I do, in the Transform tab, but in the Crop panel, I'm seeing the original image as well. It's kind of useful for seeing what you're leaving out, I suppose. I just pull the window up a little bit here. At the bottom, I've got my keyframing controls. Now, keyframing is pretty much the same no matter what you're keyframing. In this case for example, I can crop, from the left. I'll just, expand out the source crop controls here, an turn on keyframing for the left crop. I'm going to add a keyframe.

Move along a little bit, add another key frame, an then adjust the setting.When I added the first keyframe, if I just go back to the previous keyframewith this button here. I was setting it at 0% because that's what it was at the time I pressed the button. Once you've got your keyframes in place, Edius will interpolate between the two and there's my result. Now if it looks a little bit cluttered inside the layouter, you can just move the layouter out of the way and have a look at your monitor, on screen. Because Edius uses the recorder monitor, to display the output of your effects, live, as you adjust them.

In fact one of the beautiful features of Edius, if I just move over a little bithere, and hit play, is that I can play and while I'm playing I can adjust effects and see how they look. This is just great for comparing colors and seeing how things pan out when you're working with multiple layers of media as well as things like crop, I'll just move that back out so you can see a bit more clearly, I can adjust the opacities, so I can have this adjust over time. That works really well if the image doesn't fill the background I can specify background color as it does here because I don't have the edges filled just yet.

And I can also reposition with some standard options here so I can positionthis left and right. And perhaps most usefully for an image of this shape, I can stretch the image. So at the moment I've got this set to preserve the frame aspect. If I click to match the width, now it's filling the screen. I'm cropping the top and bottom to achieve this. If I go to my zoom control here and zoom out a little bit, you click and drag left to zoom out and right to zoom in. You can see that the outer box, which is the whole image, is now cropped at the top and bottom. But of course the upside of that is that my whole image is filled. If I just adjust that by clicking on the vertical access button, and then turn off preserve frame aspect, and then click to match the width again, EDIUS will just stretch the image out.

And of course with an image like this, it probably doesn't matter. It's very unlikely people are going to say, oh hang on a minute, the bay isn't quite as long as that, I remember it being different. The real power of the layouter comes from the 3D mode. Right now I'm in 2D mode, also by the way I can turn off these guides, let's get rid of those it makes it a bit cleaner. If I go to 3D mode, now suddenly I've got 3D controls. I've got X, Y and Z. So I can rotate on the Z axis, on the Y axis and on the X axis.

And of course I can keyframe that just as I would anything else. If I go to my position controls, I've now got X, Y and Z. You can imagine, I hope, the potential for animation and controls here and picture in picture using the layouter. The layoutter interacts beautifully with other effects inside of Edius, so with a little bit of imagination you can achieve some pretty extraordinary things. I click OK on that, well I've got a rather interesting effects combination. And also like any other effect I can drag this layout or preset on to another clip. Let's move this out of the way so you can see it. No problem at all, and if I right-click I can save it as a current user preset. If I do that on my effects list now I have my layout entry added and you'll notice there is a little tiny V on this item which is my effect preset. One of the beautiful features of EDIUS is that if you have multiple effects or maybe I'll, I'll just randomly grab something like a blur here. Go back to my effects tab.

That's fine. I can now select both of these, right-click and either save them both together as a user preset, or save them as separate presets. If I save them as a current user preset, go back to my effects list, I now have the layouter combined with the blur as a preset. This is so powerful for creating your own unique look and feel for your media. So that's just an introduction to the layouter in Edius 6.

• Adding visual effects and working with effect settings: 6m 12s

I always think with any non-linear editing system, all you really need to know to get up and running with Visual effects is how to put them on. How to take them off, and how to get to the settings. And perhaps, how to change the order in which they're applied. So, let's just get that far with our effects today.First of all, let's say I want to do a little bit of color correction on this shot here. So, I'm going to go to my Effects List, and I'm going to look for my Video Filters. And under this, I've got a separate category called Color Correction. And I think I'm going to put the three-way color correction on here.

So, I'm going to Drag and Drop this onto the visual part of the clip. Of course, all of a sudden, nothing's going to happen. But if I double-click on the settings for that effect in my Information panel straightaway, let's just move this up a bit. There we are, I can see my settings. Now, Edius uses the Recorder Monitor to show you the effects that you're applying. And of course, I'm a little bit short on screen space here. But here I've got my shadow midtone and high tone adjustments, so maybe I can, if we have an orange tint to the sky there. And I can adjust the Saturation of the highlights, and maybe drop the Contrast a bit.

And here, I can limit the color correction. So, I can say I only want to apply color correction to colors within a certain range. This is Secondary Color Correction, or I can do it based on an amount of saturation, or an amount of brightness, amount of luminous. Now, this is perhaps not the best clip to do it. But if I just set these to default, this is perhaps not perfectly white balanced based on the color of his shirt. But if I click on the Color Picker, let's see if I can get this to move off screen a bit.

I can click on White, an then click on something white in the picture. Click on something gray or black. Maybe I can probably get away with his hair there a little bit in gray, maybe his jacket. I can get Edius to automatically adjust the color. These can be pretty subtle adjustments, but it's sometimes the best way to just get a clean image. Of course, each of the effects that you apply in Edius will have their own settings and controls. But the idea is to get in there and start playing. I've got Preview options, here. Maybe if I go again for that orange sky, you can see, because of my limiting and losing some pass of the sky.

I just turn that off. And because I've turned on this Preview mode, I can toggle different parts of the screen to see the application of the effect. And also, just like the lay outer, I've got a Key Framing control at the bottom of the window. Which is exactly the same design as the one that you'll find in the Edius layout with different options of course. This is the grays, the blacks, and the whites, and so on. I can reset the default if I like for each of these settings or for the entire effect. But if I'm happy with that, maybe I will stick with that. I can click OK, and there is my effect. I might also apply another effect, so let's have a look. Perhaps, I'll also apply something like aSoft Focus, give this a really arty look. So, I'm going to Drag and Drop that on, that kind of works. If I double-click, I'll get the settings for this, I can set the Radius. I can set how much blurring is applied.

Maybe I'll put some Brightness on, a little bit of a fogging effect, that can be pretty useful. Yeah, well, something like that I guess, and click OK. Now sometimes, but not always, the order in which your effects are applied changes the result, and that kind of makes sense. Imagine if you crushed out some of the shadow detail in one effect, and then lifted all of the brightness in another, the shadow detail would be gone. If you want to change the order in which effects are applied, just Drag and Drop them on the list, and that will change the order. And this is a prime example because the soft focus adds a white glow to the output.

Changing it around so that it comes before the color correction changes theinterpretation of the look. If I think this is a magic combination look for my film, I can lastly to select both of these. Right-click > Save as Current User Preset. If I go to my Effects List, that's going to popup. Soft focus, plus three-way color correction. I can always right-click and change the name. So I'll call this Maxim likes this look, that works for me. And of course, I can apply it also to other clips on the timeline, let's just drag that on there. If I want to remove an effect that I've applied, I just Click and Drag until I see the trash can, and let go.

It's done. If I just Undo that, I can also do the same thing by clicking on the cross, the top right-hand corner of this panel. So, that's really all you need to know to add effects, get into the settings for them and to remove them again and change the order around. Just so that you're familiar with the type effects available in Edius. Here, we've got System Presets, there's a few, not a huge amount. But they give you some looks like sepia. These could be combined really nicely with things like the old movie film effect.

And I've seen some pretty corny examples of old movie effects, but I have to say this one's pretty convincing. And I've shown some media using this effect combined with, or intercut with 16 mill telesonic media. And persuaded at least one very old school film camera operator that it was consistently the same media. But it wasn't, it was DV intercut with 16 mill telesonic/g. So, there's quite a lot you can do with it. Looking at this list here, there's some pretty wonderful effects. But notice that the key is, which is for Chroma key, which is for making parts of the picture transparent based on the color, Luma key, 3D picture in picture.

To be honest, I think this might be superseded by the layouter. Regular 2D picture in picture, these are all under the Keyers category. We've also got a track map which allows you to put one piece of video behind another. And to use it to define which parts of the upper video are visible and which parts aren't. Give it a go. Blend modes are just like Photoshop. Put one of these on a piece of video, lay it in front of something else, and you'll get a magic combination based on these standard rules. If you do a quick search on the Internet, you'll find lovely descriptions of each of these.

Now, industry standard blending modes for layered video. So, there you go, that's all you need to know to put effects on. Change the settings, and get them back off again.

7. Project Management: 12m 4s

• Organizing your bins and searching: 2m 15s

As well as tools to organize your media into different bin folders, EDIUS has acouple of nice search tools as well. First of all, there's a quick search which is kind of hidden functionality. If you press the F3 key you get a quick find box at the bottom of the current panel. And so if I start typing in the word head here and enter, then Edius will hide any clips that don't have that word in the name.So this is just a quick way of locating things within an existing window. If you want to do a search right the way through your project, you can just click on the search button at the top of the asset bin.

So for example I know there are some clips with the word head in the name. I add that as a search criteria and I can close this and now I've got a separatepanel which contains any clips that match that criteria. In fact while I'm at it, if I just select my root directory again and click on the Search button again I can maybe look for clips also that have the word shoulder in the name so I'll add this as a criteria and close. And notice now I've got two separate Search Results panels and they'll just sit there persistently running inside of Edius.

And this means that I can, for example, look up, media that matches a particular performer or a particular location. And I'm not going to lose this additional organizational system. I'll just get rid of these by right clicking and clearing. Yup. And right-clicking and clearing. In fact before I do that you can also search inside so if I right-click and choose Search in, maybe I'll put in theword walk and add that as a criteria and close. There you go. I've got search results within search results.

There's pretty advanced search tools within Edius, just kinda tucked awayunder this Search button. Let's get rid of that. This means of course that you don't really need to be that organized, provided your clips have got meaningful names. But for all it's worth, I think it's a really good idea to make as many folders as possible at the beginning of the edit, really just fill out the contents with things like a voice-over folder, backup sequences folder. You could have spot audio effects, titles, graphics and so on. And by creating the folders before you need them, you're much more likely to use them later, instead of leaving everything as an untitled file floating around inside your project.

• Consolidating your project: 2m 44s

You may find while you're editing that for one reason for another you need toreduce the amount of media on your hard drive associated with your project, or you might find that you need to transfer your project from one edit system to another. There's a tool built into Edius to enable you to do this and it's under the File menu. You choose Consolidate Project. And the Consolidate Project window gives you a bunch of options, which kind of make sense if you go through them. First of all, are you going to reduce the size of the project in its current location. I probably would not do this, because it means it'll delete media before you've had a chance to check if it worked OK, worked the way that you wanted it to.

So instead I'd probably save the project to a folder and maybe I'll just put thison the desktop. And what'll happen now is, whatever I do to cleanup my project, it's just going to make copies of things. And I can go back to the original and check an confirm. And then we've got these preset settings. So first of all, a cleanup. It tells you what it's going to do. It's going to cleanup the hard-drive. Files that aren't used are deleted automatically and they're completely erased from your hard-drive. Then I can do a backup. The nice thing about the backup is that it pulls everything together. So you might have media dotted all over your hard drive, but when you make a backup it all gets combined together into a new folder.

Notice that the trim margin exists here, just as you can have handles for yourmedia on the timeline. In this case, the files that are backed up are just the parts of them that are used. Here we go. Files in the timeline but not in the bin will be copied to the project folder with trimming. So you need to have an overlap if you're going to add some transitions later on. Backing up without trimming does the same thing. But files already in the project folder are not copied again. It just tells you the description of what's going to happen here.You can also choose Custom, and if you choose Custom you've got the option to specify whether clips that aren't used in a sequence or any sequence will be removed or not, whether you're only going to use areas that are used in the timeline.

You can have a one hour source clip that you've only used five seconds of it and there's no need to have the full hour. And whether you're going to copy the files that are used to a new folder and if you do that are you going to delete the unused files. Now I don't have any proxy media for this project, but I can choose whether both the original high res media or the proxy as well are going to be used. And then I'll get an output log as well, which is probably a good idea because it lets me know if there were any problems creating the files or any corrupt media and so on. If I click OK I'm going to get a folder that contains the results of the decisions I've made. So, essentially you would use this again if you need to transfer your project to another machine and you want to be absolutely certain that you have the media associated with it or if you just run out of storage space and you know you need to get some more media onto your storage drives. This is a way to get rid of the things that you don't need in your current edit.

• The Proxy mode workflow: 3m 24s

Edius 6 has a proxy workflow that is so mindblowingly, amazingly, wonderful that I'm amazed they managed to get it in with such elegance and simplicity at all. And after that big fanfare I hope your not disappointed. Here is a project with some media on a timeline that I'm editing. And I'm happy with the content so far, but I might be working on a machine that's got far, far lower specifications. This machine's an I7 machine. It's pretty powerful. But what if I was cutting on a laptop or some other low spec system and I still wanted to have reasonable playback performance? Well, with version 6, EDIUS introduced a proxy mode, and the proxy mode automatically generates low resolution versions of all of your media.

And it's, actually looks okay especially considering working with HD media, the resolution's so high. And from what I've seen, the files that are created are up to about 50 times smaller than the original files. It's far less work for the system to play back. But what's beautiful about the system is you just literally toggle between proxy mode, just have proxy mode off and on and toggle between the two. So, if I switched to proxy mode now, first of all I'm going to get a message down here at the bottom of the timeline telling me that in the background EDIUS is converting the media to proxy files. If I toggle over to the folder that contains this media, we should be able to see, here we go, dot proxy files being generated.

And these are the same file name, if I just put this in name order, the samefile name as the original media. You'll see here I've got my waveform cache file. There we are. And next to it, I've got the proxy file. And look how much smaller this is. This is an 18 meg file reduced to a little over 2 meg. And it's doing it so quickly, in fact, I think it's done. If I toggle back into EDIUS now, actually the pictures don't look too bad. Looking at the timeline, I get this checker board texture on the clips to tell me that I've got proxies on show rather, than the full original media.

And if I just toggle over a little bit, I'll just zoom in, so I can maybe picksomething with some detail, like you can see there. There's the head and shoulder shot. If I toggle back to regular mode now, you can, maybe make out it get slightly sharper. Not a lot, just a little bit softer in proxy mode. But the effort for the machine to apply effects and give real time performance isjust incomparably less in proxy mode. And in fact, the proxy mode goes a bitfurther than this. Now that I've got proxy files, I can go to File > Field Editing. Again, this was just added with EDIUS 6, amazing feature. I can check out my project, choose a folder, maybe I'll put this on the desktop, create a folder with the project name, I can put comments in if I want, and I can have proxy media generated if I don't already have some. I can also choose to include the high res files if I like. Now, the wonderful feature here is that when I click okay, EDIUS is either going to output into a folder, just the timeline I have open, or my entire project so that it can be put onto a laptop and worked on. When I bring the project back, there's a check-in option that will update my original project.

How amazing is that? An that's built in as standard into EDIUS 6. So, that's the proxy workflow. It's really a non-workflow. Just go to mode > Turn On or Off Proxy mode.

• Autosaves, backups, and restoring your project: 3m 41s

While you're editing with Edius. There is, of course, always just a possibility that, you're going to have a power cut, or a hard drive failure. Or, in some way, your project is going to be corrupted. And as luck would have it, Edius has really, really good facilities for automatically protecting your edits. And it does this in a couple of ways. To explain this I am just going to jump into the settings. I am going to go to settings and user settings, look in the project file settings. Now there's a default Project File folder which is where, by default Edius will offer to store your projects in a default file and that's pretty straight forward.

You've also got a most recently used list how many things are going to be listed on there. But these are the boxes I am really interested in, the back up and the auto save. Now the backup files are copies of your project file and remember project file is just links to media. It doesn't really contain any media. So it's a pretty small file. The backup file is created every time youmanually save. So every time you say yup save, a new copy of the project is created and there's a maximum number of files you could put this on forty, fifty or 100 if you want.

But once it gets to the maximum limit the oldest will start being deleted and the newest will replace it and you can have a copy stored in your project folder and or in a separate folder. So you could have this on a remote serverif you want to just be on the safe side. The auto saves are generated if you have it turned on. Automatically every, in this case three minutes. And you can change the interval and just like the backup files, you can change howmany are stored and you can decide if it's going to go in the project folder and or in another folder somewhere else on your machine.

And I think this is a pretty good idea to have backups stored on a physicallyseparate hard drive just in case the hard drive fails because they do, they just do. And then we have this tick box here, delete all auto-save files when theproject file is saved. If this is ticked, when you manually save your project, and that means creating a backup version of your project, the auto save files will be deleted. Now I don't have this turned on at the moment. So if I toggle onto my project folder, just go up a step. Here's the project we're working on at the moment, project management.ezp, that's the file itself. You see it's just 12 K, it's hardly anything.

Inside of that, I have a project folder, inside of which I have a backup folder.Those are the manual saves, and I have an auto save folder, those are the auto saves. These are all full copies of your project. And if you should have, the situation occur that your project is in some way ruined or corrupted, well it's pretty easy to access the file and just open it. If I just quit out here, I'll just exit this project.

And I can browse to it. Here we are. And into my backup folder and you can see these have got the date. And they've got the time and the name. And here we go. This project is read only. If you want to edit the project, pleasesave it with a different name. So, okay. And what this means is that when the backup files and the auto save files are generated, they're automatically tagged to be read only. This is a standard Windows feature. So, If I want to do anything with this file and save those changes, I need to go to File > Save As, and give the file a different name. That's all.

It's just like right-clicking on any file on your computer. If I just toggle back over, right-click Properties and it's read only. I could, of course just turn off that read only tag but I think it's a pretty cool backup feature. I kinda have to manually create a new copy and I keep my pristine backup. So, that's backups and auto saves.

8. Titles: 9m 42s

• Overview of the Quick Titler: 7m 20s

So here's a very simple sequence, and let's say I'm happy with the contents of my video, but I want to put some titles over the top. And EDIUS comes a standard with a pretty comprehensive Title tool that's, that's actually really flexible. And there's a couple of ways you can work with titles. One way is, if I perhaps, make myself a new folder, I'm right-clicking on the root here, and I'm creating a titles folder. One way is, for me to go to the T button at the top of the Asset Bin. And I'm into the Quick Titler, and I can generate a title that way.

Another way is on the timeline. I can have a track selected. And interestingly, even though I don't have anything in my source player here, I still have my audio and video source track selection buttons. And that's important because when I generate graphic media with EDIUS, EDIUS will use this V button to define where it will go automatically. So if I grab this and drag it to the top, come out of Insert mode so that I'm not going to move things around on the timeline. If I now go to my Title button, which is at the top of the timeline.

I can choose to create a title in the T1 track, or create a title in the videotrack, which is the T key, this is a keyboard shortcut T. It's not that clear from the menu, it really should be in brackets I suppose, but that's actually just the T key. Now, I've got my video set up on my second video track. So if I click on this option in the menu, and I'm just going to move the Titler out of the way for a second. You can see that a title's been generated already on the timeline in position. And it's got the default duration set in my preferences.

If I just the close the Title tool again here, just to show you another feature. If I go to the Title button menu and instead choose create title in T1 track,which is this title track here. There we go, and just move this out of the way. You can see, not only has EDIUS automatically generated the title, which is great, same as it was in the video track. And it will be in front, because title tracks are always in front, even if it's below the video on the timeline. Notice at the ends, I've already got a Fade Up and a Fade Down, which means that if I want my titles generally to Fade Up and Fade Down and that's my default title transition, then I just go into the Quick Title and make the title and come out again and it's going to be applied.

And what tools do I have in here? Well, it's actually pretty user-friendly. First of all, notice that if I have nothing selected, I've got this Properties panel on the right, which is giving me options to do with this specific title. So I can choose whether this is going to be a still title, or if I'm going to have a roll or a crawl. And just for the record, the rolls and crawls have their durations set based on how long the thing is on the timeline. You can trim out to any length you like. And the video settings are specified by my sequence, am I going to have video in the background or white or black, or am I going to browse to a still image? And then over on the left, I've got various tools for generating the content of the title. So this is a music video called, Somebody Loves You. And I'm just going to start typing it.

And it's pretty big, isn't it? It's gone off the screen there. I'm just going to go back to my Selection tool now. And with the text selected, I can now make changes to it. So here for example, I've got the size. I can change that to something a bit more modest or maybe a little bit bigger than that. Maybe even a little bit bigger than that. And there we are. Now that I've got an object selected, I can do things like make it bold or italic or underlined, this is standard word processing stuff.

I can also put in a different fill color so maybe I'll click here, and I'll give this kind of an orange color, there we go. That's pretty intense isn't it? I can also line up the title, so the top part of this toolbar is, I can make squares and triangles and various different shapes and lines, and I can layer them as I wish. But also, once I select an item, some of these will come online. These are grayed out, because I only have one object selected, but this allows meto center my title vertically or center my title horizontally.

And it's just a question of clicking and holding when you see these little arrowmenu button icons. I can have safe action zones. So the outer box here is the amount of the picture that you would expect to be cropped by a regular TV. The inner box is the amount that might be cropped by a really badly calibrated TV. So I want my graphics to stay inside that space. And I can have a grid if I want. In fact, I can have a couple of different kinds of grid. Let's have some dots. Pretty faint, but little bit easier for layout, I think.

Now, down at the bottom of the Quick Titler, I've got the presets, and I justdouble-click to specify a preset. And it's pretty easy to generate your own.Let's say we'll stick with the the orange theme here a little bit. Having chosen that preset, which is actually just a fill color and a stroke on the outside. Gonna go down, where's my font size, let's shrink that back down to 48 point, make it a bit more accessible. Maybe center it in the frame, that works fine for me. You can see here down on the Style panel, if I right-click, I've got a Save as New Style option. I can save that, give it a name, Maximum Style, and there we are, I've now got my own template.

So it's very, very easy for you to generate your own styles and apply them to lots of other titles. If you're going to generate a series of titles, as well as saving, and if you close, you'll be asked if you want to save, but you can also Auto Save As. And if I click this button, I'm automatically going to generate a new title in the bin that I can work with separately. Again, I can double-click on this and open it up, and maybe make a change, maybe I'll add a square here. There we go.

And then I'll right-click on this, and I'll choose Layout > Order. Send it to the bottom of the stack, so I can see the other text in front of it. I'll save that and it's updated. But if I open this up. And maybe I'll select this rectangle and maybe change the color a little bit. So it's got a bit of a gradient on there. And click on Auto Save As. Instead of updating the original title, I've now got a second title in the bin ready to use perhaps elsewhere in my sequence.

Now, titles all have an infinite duration, in theory. In fact, any graphic media does, in EDIUS. So I can stretch this out as long as I like, and I can even stretch out the Fade Up and Fade Down, just as I would any other transition on the timeline. And of course, if I put a title directly onto a video track, it's exactly the same, really. There's no real difference in the performance in EDIUS, it's just that I don't automatically get that Fade Up and Fade Down. Which you may not want. Also, if I look on my effects list over here, I've got separate title mixers.

So just for the record, title mixers are separate from other transition effects.These are more efficient and the only ones that will work on the title track.

• Working with titles and graphics on the timeline: 2m 22s

It's really easy to work with graphic media in Edius because it just let's youwork however you want. Here I've got a title, a very, very simple title generated earlier, and I can click and drag this out to any length I like. There is a default duration as well, if I go to the Settings menu and choose User Settings. Then under the, here we are the durations, so this is the source category. Under duration, I can specify how long any still images are going to be and separately how long any titles are going to be. And here we have got that option to automatically be add a title mixer, this is a transition effect for titles. That's only going to apply though if you add a title. To the title track.

There's also an option to add a title with a duration automatically set on your in and out marks, which is pretty handy. If I cancel out of this, I've got a stillimage here that I created earlier. This is the high resolution 4,000 by 3,000 pixel image. If I drop this on the timeline, you can see straightaway, especially if I go to my Information panel. There we are. My total duration is five seconds.Like anything else, I can stretch this out, and I can use the layout to re-purpose it. Maybe I'll go in, and I'll just stretch this out so its horizontally filling the screen, you can apply any visual effects you'd like to graphics and titles. So, for example, I could put this media, let's get rid of that title for a second, I'm just going to delete it.

Put this graphic on top of my media, that's where I don't have a title. Down on my Effects list under the Blend category I've got a bunch of differentPhotoshop style blend modes. And I can put one of these one if I want to and it'll blend with the video underneath. Now the thing to be aware of, when you're applying any kind of blend modes, as you would have seen there. If I just undo and show you that again. You must apply blend modes to the mixer part of the clip, not the video part of the clip. If you put it on any other part.

It'll fail. It'll not take the effect. And then likewise, if I select the video part, I'm not going to see the blend mode on my Information panel. I have to click on the mixer to see that blend mode or any other effects that I've applied that involve transparency.

9. Outputting: 13m 51s

• Outputting to tape: 3m 23s

Once your edits complete and you've done your titles, you've done your effects, you've rendered any effects that need to render. But then again you probably won't need to render anything at all, then your ready to output. And you can output from Edius directly to tape. You can output directly to DVD, there's a DVD authoring function built in. And of course you can output to files. Let's just have a quick look at outputting to tape. So I've got a simple sequence here, and I've got my deck ready with a tape in it, queued up, ready to go.

All I need to do is click on this Output button. And choose Print To Tape. If I choose Print To Tape Display Time Code, Edius will burn in the time code in to the picture, which is very very useful for review and approval. I'm going to choose Print To Tape. And up will come my options for destination decks.Now you do need to be careful to make sure that your project preset matches the deck output preset that you created in the system settings. And you might get an error message if there's not a good match, so be aware of that.

I've only got one deck available, because of course I only have one deck connected. I'm going to click Next, and now I got my print to tape options.Let's just pull this into the center there. Now the deck I'm using is a regular DV deck. So all you can do with DV decks is a crash record. If you're using something like a DV beta deck or HD cam or any of those formats. You should have the option to do regular, assembly, or first edit or even insert edit records and you just choose the option you want and tick the box. You can also specify a record start point and you can mark up a clip.

If I record the time code from my VCR, its telling me where the deck is now and that's absoultely fine I can cue up if I want to check the frame. Because I'm using DV rather then something like Digi-beater, I don't get to define the time code preset because DV and DV cam decks can't take external time code. If I was using a deck that could do that, I could specify things like the start point for the time code and the user bits if I wanted to, and I could turn on ridge and time code and so on. Because I'm working with a DV deck, all Ineed to do is effectively click Next. And when I do, the system will start recording.

In fact, I'm going to just cancel out and run on a little bit on this tape. There we go, I'll just run past my fantastic presentation there, into a blank bit of the tape, and stop, go back to printer tape, next, pressure cord is fine, and next. And Edius is confirming the settings and I click Export, and off we go. And this is now going to start playing my sequence and recording it to tape. Just abort that, cause I don't want to wait for the sequence, it's quite a long sequence.

And that is it, that's all you need to do to export to tape. Because of the fantastic real time performance of Edius, you'll probably find you don't need to render at all. But do keep a lookout, because you could be in danger of having dropped frames. If you've got effects that need to render and particularly if you're working on a lower specification machine.

• Outputting to DVD: 5m 16s

Output to DVD and Blue Ray DVD is really straight forward in Edius. Here I got a really simple sequence. I'm ready to output to a file and I can define chapter point in the timeline in Edius by adding sequence markers. So, if I just press the V key a few times here. That kind of works for me. And if I want to give the chapters specific names instead of just letting them be called chapter one, two, three and so on. I go to my sequence marker palette here and start typing things in. So, walking along the street, that'll do.

And maybe I'll call this one sitting down. I don't know quite what's in there, but there you are. So, now that I've got my markers in place, I go to my Export menu button and choose Burn to Disc. And this is going to bring out the Burn to Disk menu. So, this is actually incorporated into the Edius interface. And what I've got here is the amount of free space to my disk, I've got the name of the sequence is taken my current sequence. I can add another sequence if I had one you can add a file if I like. If I've got a something that's just as a media file would like to incorporate, maybe an opening section. If I go to the Disc menu here I can chose between Dual layer or Single layer. And of course if I had a blue ray burner in here I'd be able to choose Blu Ray that would be for HD DVD's.

Under the Style tab here, I can choose lots of different pre-built looks andfeels for my DVD. And there's quite a few available. I've got a kind of abbreviated list in my installation here, but with your full installation you should have quite a long list of items available. And I can choose whether there's going to be a menu at all or not. I can auto layout or I can position things. I can choose the aspect ratio. This is all pretty straight forward stuff.Then I've got here an option for whether or not I'm going to have chapters.

If I turn this option off, this means I will have a Chapter menu. If I now go to my Edit tab, I can make changes to these layouts. These are just preset built images with buttons I can re-size if I like and so on. Up here on the right, I've got the menu that I'm looking at. And I can see here that, Edius has created a Chapter menu automatically. Now when I was first learning this application, I found this menu a little bit tucked away. I was kinda looking for it on the stylewindow here, wondering where it was. But it's under the Edit tab.

At the top you choose the menu screen that you're looking at. There we go, it's updated the thumbnails for me. And I can go in and I can double-click on an entry and retype new text and choose fonts. There's quite a lot that you can do really with this interface. When I'm happy with the look and feel of my menus, I go to the right tab. Pretty much the standard settings are going to work. I can just, see if I can get access to the menu for you on the screen here. I can just choose create disc, which of course is greyed out because you don't have a disc in the drive. Couple of things worth noting here is that I can create a disc image if I want, rather than burn out straight away, and that means that I can make duplicates later on easily.

I can also export this as a disc and the files, so I can do both I can verify theburn off after it is completed. I can specify a working folder for the files to be created in, and in fact I can just turn off this menu and burn a disc and not think about any of that stuff. If I want to keep it simple and just make a disc fine. Under the options tab here, I've got to choose what the first play will be. And by default that's going to be the menu, but I might decide I want the viewer to go straight into the movie. And again, after playing the movie, do I want to go back to the menu, or do I just want to play the next file. And this sort of options are pretty straightforward.

Under the Movie tab, I've got a Settings button for the item. That I'm going to output. And this gives me options for my encoding. So, if you want to just let Edius get on with it and deal with it, that's totally fine. But if you turn off the automatic setting here and turn off automatic for video, you can choose to have variable bit rate. You can have an average bit rate for your encoding, a maximum bit rate, same thing for the audio, you can specify Dolby AC 3 if you want. And we can specify whether there's going to be the option to do anything while this is playing or not.

This is a standard feature on DVD's. It commonly apply this tick box forvideos that are played you know like a copyright notice of the star that kind ofa thing. I'm pretty happy having everything on automatic, that will work for me. And if I go to the right menu, all I need to do to burn the disc is click Create Disc. So again, although I've shown you a few details there, broadly speaking, if you just want I'll, just say no to save. Broadly speaking, if you just want to get the contents of your sequence and put it on a disc.

You can go to the export button choose Burn to Disc, go to the right menu and click Create Disc, and it would just do it. If you want to use this for review and approval, go to the settings for the movie and turn on display time code. And that will burn in the time code to the picture as it's making the disc. Pretty handy feature. And it's just built into Edius as soon as you install it.

• Outputting to files: 5m 12s

EDIUS has really great facilities to support the import of multiple file typesand it's got really great facilities for the export of multiple file types. If I go to my Export menu here and choose Print to file, notice there's a Batch Export option as well, I can stack up a lot of exports to be performed one after another. Useful if you are outputting the same project to multiple media. But if choose Print to file, this is going to bring up the Export options. And now, there's only a few options I really need to show you here.

I'm just going to re-size this window so you can see what's going on a bit better. Just avoid the edges of the squeezy interface there. I've got some recently used options. I've got Defaults if I've set one. I can make my own Presets and under the All category I've got all of these different formats. And what's really nice about the way EDIUS handles this media is that it makes proper versions. In some applications, for example, if you make a P2 media file, it doesn't include all of the metadata, it doesn't include quite exactly the right XML information.

But with EDIUS, same thing with any kind of MXF or XD cam, these higher end formats, it really just works exactly as it should. What you'll get from EDIUS will be what you would get from a camera, which is really nice. Just to take an example though, if I, for example, let's say I go for an AVI. Maybe I'll go for a Canopus HQ. This is the Canopus codec that's included with EDIUS.Very good quality YUV native codec. Now, you notice that I don't have a hugeamount of Presets here. I can go in and change these options but there's not a lot of Presets available. Unless I turn on this Tick Box Enable Conversion.

If I turn that on I get a lot more options. And this applies to all of the formats that you'll see, including toggling between NTSC and PAL. So you can have an NTSC project and have EDIUS output a perfectly good quality PAL version. It'll rescale the frames, it'll change the frame rate for you. I've got some pretty self explanatory options here. I can export between the In and Out marks I've put on the timeline. So, the end point will be the beginning of the section I want. The out point will be the end and I can display time codes which will burn in the time code. Now, with all of the options in EDIUS, when you see the choice to display time code, it's important to be aware that what EDIUS is talking about is burning in the time code.

Time code's going to be there anyway as metadata, but if you tick this box,you'll actually have the image changed and you can't remove it. You could potentially fix it in post, you'd end up with a kind of blurry section of the video, but it's going to become part of the picture. I've also got the option here to specify standard 16 bit two channel audio, that'll be 48 kilohertz, 16 bit audio, just to simplify and standardize the output of the audio quality. If I just twirl down here, the advanced options, I don't know if I'm going to have room to show you all of this but I can show you most of it. We've got options here to specify a specific video format and there's a lot more options here than the Presets.

I can chose a different aspect ratio for my media. I can decide whether I'm going to letter box or semi squeeze or do anamorphic adjustment of my image for this new aspect ratio. And I can change the frame rate. I've got all of these kinds of options so I've got quite specific control. I go back to my Canopus HQ format, I've got quite a specific control of what media is going to be produced. And I'll just pull this off screen so I can click OK on it.

I can now either Export or Export to a Batch list. I'm going to choose Export so you can see the save menu here. And I've got some specific settings which are down to the codec. Now this will vary depending on, let's put this in a folder somewhere. This will vary depending on the codec that you've chosen and in this case I'm going for the Canopus HQ Standard and this defines some specific settings to that codec. If you're using Windows Media Video, or Quicktime Movie, whatever the format you chose you'll get specific settings in this window. Click Save and Edius will get to work converting the file. Now if instead, I go back to my sequence and I choose Batch Export, I get a simple Batch Export list where I can create a new item. And I get the same window again, so maybe I'll choose, kind of, a HQ standard, Add to Batch list.

Choose a location, test file will do for me, and it appears on the list. And I've even got the tick box here for whether I'm going to show time code or not.Now when you Batch Export, it is a foreground process. So, you can't set this off in coding and then go back to your edit and continue working. You are going to need to just let EDIUS get on with it. In any case, it's a very efficient way of producing multiple formats from the same sequence. And that's exporting to files from inside of ideas.

10. Important Settings: 14m 48s

• User profiles: 3m 31s

Many of the settings that define the way that Edis functions, are included in auser profile which you can export from your Edis system, carry around on a USB stick and import into another system if you want. Accessing them is pretty straightforward. I go to the settings menu here, I've got a change profile option, which allows me to jump between different profiles. You'll notice that I can't really do anything with it, this is the only profile I've got available on this machine. This is one of those things with ideas that you just need to know.

I can choose between existing profile that's installed on the system but I can't generate a profile from this window. I have to go the settings window and choose system settings. And then under the application setting, there's a profile entry. And here it all begins to make a lot more sense. I can generate a new profile. I can copy an existing one. I can modify an existing one. I'll make a new profile here. Let's say I'll make a Maxim profile. I can choose an icon. That'll do. Okay.

And now, am I going to make this read-only? Or am I going to make it a restricted user? Now read only means that I can make changes to the settings, but when I quit out of Edius, the changes won't be made to the profile. This is great in a educational environment or in an environment wheremultiple users are using the same system and the same profile. And I guess what it comes down to is that you don't want them to mess up your settings.You can talk of this on and off without any special privileges though. So you will have to kind of play by the rules. In fact, those limitations are also for the system setting, so I, I, you know, if somebody wanted to, they can turn this off.

And they can get in and make changes to all of the profiles. You just have to untick the box, so be aware of that. A restricted user can't change the system settings, they can change the user settings, but they can't change the system settings. You've got a double-whammy lockdown there. Still, I'm going to turn these off and click OK. And now I've got my profile set up and ready to go. Now, if I right-click on one of these entries, I get the option again to modify. I've got a button for that already just here, but I also get the option to export the profile into a folder, or a file on a USB stick, or to import ones that have been exported from another machine. Now notice that these export and import options do not appear in the interface. If I right-click, I get the options.

But there's no button to do it. So you do just need to know that there's an option to do that. And then I've got the option to use server based profiles. This is particularly valuable if you're using the Grass Valley K2 server or some other compatible server system. You can have a remote profile. You can specify where that's going to be stored. Now or you can have local copies and remote copies, but you'll probably have someone set that up for you if you're using a server to have roaming profiles in that way. So if I now export this file, let's just do that, selected profile, I'll put this on my desktop, in a folder called Profile.

And you'll see this is an EUP file, save that, okay. And here it is, it's absolutely tiny. It's a very, very small file, 8k, and this will store anything that's specific to users. Things like keyboard shortcuts and all of the user settings that have their own entry. You know back into EDIUS. Everything that you find under the user settings, will be included in that user profile.

• System settings: 5m 21s

EDIUS is a very, very flexible editing system, and the engineers have tried hard to make sure that you can use it in the way that suits exactly you. I want to spend a little bit of time on the settings, not too much, but just to try to bring to your attention some things that are particularly worth knowing about, that you may just prefer to be one way or the other. Let's start off by having a look at the System and Applications settings. So the Systems setting are things that are specific to this physical machine. This is where you have things like the decks that are set up; anything that's not likely to change from machine to machine.

Now let's just have a little look through. Under the Applications settings, well I've got an option to stop play back a Frame Drop. Not too important when you are generally editing and using the machine. But if you are playing out to tape, it's probably a good idea to tick that box. EDIUS uses a chunk of your system memory to play ahead of itself in a frame buffer. This is a wonderful feature because it means that if you get to an effect or multiple layers of video that are just too much for the machine to play in real time, provided the buffer's full, it's a good chance it will make it through without needing to render. You can specify out to half a gig of memory to be used for the playback buffer.

However depending on how much memory you've got on your machine it get's a little bit unstable using the full half gig. The thing to do is probably start with fully half a gig and see what the performance is like and work your way down from there. If you've got a reasonable amount of ram you're probably going to be okay. Under the Capture settings here we've got a few interesting options particularly to do the automatic detection of, scene changes. And this means that if you've got a DV tape, something like that has extra metadata about the recording, EDIUS can automatically break the files up into pieces and give you individual clips in your bin, that's pretty handy.

One tick box worth having here is to confirm the file name at capture, that'svery helpful because otherwise when you do record video from tape, you tend to end up with rather a lot of numbers and letters instead of useful file names.If you should need to render an effect, here are our render settings, then you've got options for the sort of things that will be rendered. And rendering is very straightforward to do in EDIUS. If I get an effect on here, maybe I'll just put Oh, let's see. A mosaic on this guy. Then all I need to do is go to the render menu and choose either render entire project or render this sequence, or render between in and out marks and so on or render cursor area.

It just gives me a number of options for which part of my project is going to be rendered. When I render an effect, a file is going to be created that looks like the outcome of the effect that I've applied. So, you'll notice that I do have some standard keyboard shortcuts for these. I can do the selected region andtransitions with shift G, or I can render and add the output to the timeline as anew flattened layer, with shift Q. This is very, very useful. The benefit of rendering is that no matter how complex the effect, EDIUS is just playing back one flat layer of video, so it may look complex but that's because you're seeing the output of a complex effect.

Very rare that you need to do that for most edits with EDIUS, particularly ifyou're working with standard definition material. Profile we've looked at already, and this allows you to generate multiple users on the same machine, and the project presets allow you to define the project types that are going to be used. And again, this is a bit of a strange one for me, because you can't access these settings from the project presets selection window. You can only do it by generating them here in the System settings. I guess it kinda makes sense if you consider that there are some users who will be restricted users, who won't be able to change these settings. That might not be desirable to you if you are a lone editor working with your machine.

But if you are working in a broadcast environment it can be a real God send.Then under hardware here we have got the device presets for the deck to beconnected, we got preview options for output to a display monitor, again thiswill vary depending on the hardware that you've got connected. And then we've got import to export settings and these are unique to the individual file formats that your working with. My advice is that if you do need to work with a particular format that you do your research for that one format instead of going through every single one that could take quite a while. In fact, you could put many After Effects effects into EDIUS and they will work. And there's a quite a few options for the features that you can use, however, you will need to render all of them.

They're not going to be real time. Down here under input controller I've gotsome options for external faders and jog shuttle devices. There's quite a few devices that are compatible with EDIUS that you could plug in to give you something to get a hold of while you're editing. If I move over now to the project settings just for a moment I just want to draw your attention again and to the option to change current setting. If you change the current setting you can do quite a lot to adapt the media that you're conforming to. Now, the issue for me is of course that I want to be able to toggle between different formats pretty quickly, and you can't do that from inside of the project settings panel.

You can choose existing presets, and you can modify the presets, but there are some limitations. If you want to really make changes, you need to generate a new project preset. It's not that bad to do, but Its just one of those things that you need to go around and about for.

• User settings: 5m 56s

Most of the settings that you're likely to change while you go about the process of editing with EDIUS are going to be under the user settings, so let's just take a little look at these. First of all, starting out at the top, we've got a lot of options for how things snap. So remember, the snapping is things jumping into position on the timeline and you can specify whether everything snaps, or whether just one or two items do. We also have the option to insert a cross fade when you put in a visual cross dissolve, and vice versa, which is kind of a nice option if you're working in a hurry.

We can see whether we're going to have a logarithmic or a linear waveform, just down to personal preference. And whether every clip segment on thetimeline is going to have a thumbnail, if you expand it, or for that matter,whether they're going to appear at the beginning and the end, or just one end of the segment. Match frame allows you to locate the part of the clip that you're looking at on the timeline in the player monitor. It's a really useful feature, and we even have reverse match frame as well, and these are settings to do with that. There are some jobs that EDIUS can do in the background and the generation of proxy files is an example of that.

You have an option here to pause background jobs when you're playing back.It is particularly useful if you're working on a laptop for example, the proxy mode's pretty self explanatory. If you don't have proxy files available, use the higher res ones and the tick box here is what sets the proxy mode toautomatically generate proxy files. If you don't have this box ticked when you switch to proxy mode, you're not going to notice anything change, becausenothing will change. The project file settings we've had a look at already, you can see this is where the backups are made and where the auto save is made, and then we've got simple things like what's going to be shown in the recent clip windows, and will the window positions be stored.

Let's have a look now under Preview and Playback, there are some nice options here for continuing to play back when you are making changes to effects or for example, if you are editing you can continue editing as the timeline plays. I wouldn't want to risk it but I guess in principle you could play out to tape while you are adding clips to the timeline. That would be pretty hairy, but you could do if you want to do. There's also a full screen preview option. Now, I'm operating here with everything on one screen, but if you do have another monitor connected, EDIUS can specify that for full screen playback, and that's pretty handy. And the onscreen display, again we'velooked at a little bit, and this just gives you options for what's going to beoverlaid, either using the onscreen display or the overlay itself, which hasthings like zebra and the safe action zones.

This toggles off and on from the View menu as well. Notice that if I turn this on, I got the title safe view visible by default, and the action safe which is the outer box is currently set to 100%. I probably really want to set that to 90%, there we go. So that I've got 10% for the action and 10% more for the titles.Under the User Interface settings, I've got options to move the buttons around, and it's pretty limited what you can do. You can add and remove specific buttons that relate to the panel that you're working on.

So for example, at the moment I'm looking at the left-hand side of the player,that's this panel over here, on the left and these are the buttons that I can addor remove. There's not that much for it, to be honest on the interface, and they're aren't that many buttons available. But you may well find there's some shortcuts that are useful for you. Now, onto the control, this is more overlay information, but here's what I really wanted to get to. This is the keyboard shortcuts, the keyboard shortcut controls are, they're kinda great in some ways and not so great in others. Here I've got categories of shortcuts, somaybe for example, trimming. I can choose what kind of trim I'm going to get. And let's see if I can find a match frame as an option on here. I'm going to set the category to all and in the filter, I'm going to just start typing match, and here we go.

Match frame, which is locating the frame I'm looking at on the timeline in theplayer window, it's already assigned to F and that's to go from the player to the recorder. If I'm on, and that actually means reverse match frame, that means I'm looking at a clip in the player monitor, and I'm locating the section of that clip in an existing sequence. The same keyboard shortcut is used to go from the recorder to the player. It's referred to as source here, but whatthat means is that as I press the F key I'm going to find that clip. If I want to assign a keyboard shortcut to this, if I here we go, the recorder to player the recent one, I click Assign and I get this kinda blunt looking, but very very clear keyboard layout tool and if I hold down for example the shift key, I get shift key variation, if I hold down control I get control variations, if I hold down alt I get alt variations. And every combination of above.

Now, if I hold on as I am here Ctrl and Alt, you can see some of these are inlighter color, these got a lot of things assigned to them and some of them are dare. I can't assign anything to these keys at all. And looking at the options here, I can see that some combinations are available, so I suppose there we go, Ctrl+Alt+F is already used for delete audio filter on selected clip. Perhaps Shift+Ctrl+F, nope, already used for delete all filters on selected clip. So it can be a bit of a challenge finding a keyboard combination that's not being used by some other function in the system.

My advice is, if there's a function that you want, you take that keyboard shortcut. It'll make your use of the system far more efficient. And I think those are the key settings that you might want to look at as an editor. There's a lot more going on here that you can work on, but I reckon if you get familiar with those settings, you'll be up and running and you'll be able to personalize your editing experience with EDIUS.