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Getting Started with EDIUS 6 with Maxim Jago

Introduction: 1m 25s

  • Welcome: 1m 25s

(music playing) Hi, I'm Maxim Jago. I'm a director, editor, trainer, and author.As a trainer, I've worked with just about every kind of media producer, includingbroadcasters in several countries, independent filmmakers, and educators. I worked with Grass Valley to create the EDIUS prime worldwide certification program. Wrote the course book, and trained and certified all of the original trainers who trained the trainers, who are now training the users all over the world to edit with EDIUS. My creative work gives me a real world view of the tools I'm teaching. And I will be sharing my best practice for cutting with EDIUS. EDIUS is shockingly good to edit with.

The real time performance and format support is second to none. EDIUS is beautifully easy to use. But there are a few core techniques, technologies, and tips that will make a massive difference to your editing experience. That's where these lessons come in. We'll be looking at editing multiple media types, reducing complex edited sequences, and output, to multiple media. We'll learn about the many editing shortcuts, and getting to grips with the combinations of timeline modes that sometimes bamboozle new editors.

All of the media and part made projects are available for you to work with along side. I hope you'll find these lessons fun and super efficient for transforming you into an EDIUS editor.

1. Overview of Editing with EDIUS: 21m 49s

  • Introduction: 3m 0s

Hello, and welcome to this getting started course on the Grass Valley EDIUS editing system. This is going to be a pretty comprehensive overview of the EDIUS editing system, and by the end of the program you should be very confident getting in and producing edits with this wonderful NLE. EDIUS is a comprehensive editing tool, and the big selling points, the big focus of it is the incredible format support and the amazing real time performance.

EDIUS for example is the only system I know that allow you to put NTC on a PAL timeline or vice versa, and it'll just play it. It just says yep, okay. What else have you got? So it's an extraordinary experience if you're working with multiple formats. The main focus of this course is going to be on core editing skills. I'm not going to go into huge detail on every individual setting and every individual option. But I'm going to give you the skills and the understanding for you to be able to self train and to develop your skills later on.

By the end of these lessons you should be really confident to, complete the total NLE workflow with EDIUS. And broadly speaking that means getting some media in. Here's some media. Looking at the media, playing it back, making creator choices about it, and building that media into sequences, potentially, layered, combined, composited sequences. And then output, potentially to the file or to the web or to a disc. And in fact you can burn DVD's from directly inside of a disc if you want to. We will of course be looking at effects, again not so much that you're going to be an effects maestro but it will be enough for you to put effects on. Here's an example of, goodness, what shall we have? say a motion blur.

Put an effect on, get into the settings, make changes to it, click OK. You're done. And then to move the order of the effects around and to remove them if you want to. Very straightforward. We're going to be looking at the Layouter which gives you comprehensive 3D animatable picture in picture controls and can be combined with other effects in EDIUS. And we'll be looking at titles of course. And we'll be looking at how you can use the pretty comprehensive quick title available inside of EDIUS to generate 2D titles, and perhaps even to incorporate them into 3D animations with the Layouter.

The focus for me in creating this course is to give you the skills that you need as quickly as possible so you can jump in and get cutting with EDIUS. So again the focus is going to be on the parts of the interface that I think are particularly important. I am going to touch on some of the settings, of course, and I'm going to look at the core editing skills like track patching, like the different timeline modes and the different ways of editing things together and moving them around and by the end of this course I think you'll be fine. You'll be ready to get cutting.

  • EDIUS system overview: 9m 42s

Before we get into the details of editing with Edius, let's just take a look at the interface so that we know what were working with. Something that you may know already of course is that Edius is Windows-only. And although, that's a loss for people who want to work on a Mac, sorry. The upside is that much of the interface in Edius can be designed very in tuned with the way that Windows operates. So for example, over here, I've got my Bin Pallet, and inside this, I've got a directory structure that looks very much like Windows Explorer. I'll just resize this a bit so you can see more clearly. And if I select an item in here, so here's a piece of audio, I can use the standard Windows keyboard shortcut Alt+Enter or Alt+Carriage Return more precisely to bring up the properties for that item. And this is a standard shortcut for items on your hard drive. Equally, if I just cancel out of that, I can press F2, and that will rename the item.

Again, this is a standard Windows shortcut. And this kind of, sympathetic design that matches the way that Windows operates is all over the Edius editing system. So if you're really confident with Windows as an operating system, you're going to feel right at home using Edius. This standardization, of course, extends to the regular File, Edit, View menus. In earlier versions of Edius, the Edius icon was a full menu. Right now, it's just as it perhaps ought to be, which is a corner menu for any panel that you'd expect move and close and so on.

And there are a couple of things in here, that are particular to Edius of course. We've got Clip options and Marker options that let us put comments into our sequences and our clips. And we've also got specific tools, which we'll get to a little bit later. Things like the Disc Burner for burning DVDs and also a Watch folder, the Edius Watch folder allows you to specify a directory on your hard drive. If anything is added to that directory, it automatically gets imported to your project, a very, very cool feature. The MPEG TS Writer is just a fast way of writing the M2T files that HDV needs.

So it's just a dedicated tool for that purpose. Something I want to draw your attention to though is the Settings menu. You'll notice that the settings are all broken up. You've got System Settings, User Settings, Project Settings, Sequence Settings. We'll be looking at the key options that really matter to the core editing workflow. And also, just to draw your attention to the View menu. It's the View menu that you go to to get access to things like specific pallets or the bin and the source browser and so on. These are all accessible as well via the View menu Window layouts. Here, I have got a layout that I've created through single monitor. And I guess I should apologize right now that I'm recording this at 1280 by 720 resolution.

And of course, with a nonlinear editing system, you'd like to have a lot more screen space. So things are a little bit crushed down as we go resize, so you can see more clearly the tools that I'm working with. All of the media that I'm going to use for these lessons is available for you to download. So you can work along side if you want. So what have got here, the Edius interface is very very efficient. And the emphasis is on speed, and it's also kind of minimalist really compared to some other editing systems on the market.

I'm just going to resize this panel here. This is the player palettes. Let's just resize this a little bit. So these monitor windows have a Source panel for looking at content that I may or may not choose to use in my program. I can play back in here. Not a lot going on it that shot, but there you are. It's a shoe. I can play that back. I get an overlay on the screen that I can turn Off and On under my View menu. And this allows me to see things like my timecode and my volume levels. Notice that the option also includes output to an External Monitor. So if I have an external device connected, either using dedicated Grass Valley Hardware, like a Storm Card for example or just using my FireWire port. My OHCI FireWire port on my machine, connected to a DV or some other kind of FireWire deck to do the output, I can do that too, that's quite useful. And notice, also, I can even have Zebra which shows me with a highlight, there we go, where my picture is burning out.

A really useful feature that you normally only expect to see on a camera. So I can play back, and fundamentally, I can use this panel to mark an in point, mark an out point, and that defines the part of the clip that I want to use. Now, the player monitor gives me access to playback controls and options for editing into a sequence. The recorder monitor gives me the contents of my sequence. So, here is my timeline, and it's in the timeline that I will be building my program with various clip segments.

Essentially, I'll be clicking and dragging and adding bits piece by piece to my sequence to make my program. Whatever is displayed in this palette, the timeline palette is displayed up in the Monitor Window for the timeline and the Recorder panel here. And over on this side, I've got options like go to previous edit, go to next edit. And quite importantly, I've got a button here for output and this button is for printing to tape, printing to tape with burned in timecode, very, very useful for review and approval. Print to file, that brings up a comprehensive encoding application, bad checks port which let's me produce multiple versions of my program, and burn to disk which lets me produce DVDs correctly.

So, these panels actually have quite a lot going on inside of them. You can access a lot of these options by using the File, Edit, View menus and so on. However, the focus in Edius is very much on this middle region of the interface. Most of what you need to do is going to be inside this territory. All the buttons along the top of the timeline and the buttons along the bottom of the player monitors. The bin is the area in which you import your assets, and these are the things that you may or may not choose to use in your program. Here, I've got a series of different items, I've got some multicam material. And if I select an item, I can scroll over here and get varied bits of extra information about it.

I can toggle the views of the Bin into Multiple modes and get access to more condensed information. So if I, put this into a List view, I can see lots and lots of clips and their information right away. I also have an Information panel down here. And if I select a clip segment on the timeline, the Information panel has two functions. The first is to give me information. So, I guess the clue was in the name for that one. I can see, the start and end point and, if there's a freeze frame applied or the codec is.

And remember, Edius is extremely flexible for formats. So you can mix and match pretty much whatever you like in the same timeline. Edius will just work it out and conform at the moment of playback. The second function of the Information panel Is to give you access to any effects that you've applied. Right now, these clips all just have the layout which is a standard option that's available for every single item you put on the timeline, or at least, every single visual item. If I double-click on this, I can make changes and crop and adjust the position and move around this item. And I can keyframe it, which.

Essentially just means animating this over time. I also have here an Effect list and the Effect palette has every effect available inside of Edius. Some of the most power, when it comes to effects, comes from combining them. And the ways of combining effects are just excellent in Edius. There's a good luma key, there's a good chroma key. The 3D picture-in-picture has largely been superceded by the layouter now. You can also apply Photoshop style blend modes, so you can layer items in your image and just get some interesting results by combining the pixels. Next over here, I've got markers.

I can add a marker very quickly. In fact, I can give a marker a duration if I want to. And let's just split that. There we are. And when I do that, the marker has a duration actually on the timeline, into which I can display comments. Let's just type something in here. Hello there. And that comment will appear at the bottom of my program monitor. Now, if I click into the Source Player here.

And now, when I do that the mark up pallet automatically changes to a clip mark up pallet. Notice if I click into the timeline it becomes sequence markers. And so on. And this is again, both of these are really just ways of adding information and making the edit easier for myself. And last of all, here, I have the Source Browser. The Source Browser allows me to access media that would not normally be easy to import. If you're working with things like AVI files or QuickTime movies, everything's contained in the file. But if you're shooting with XD Cam, XD Cam EX, P2, the new XF format from Cannon, you're going to have broken down clips where the video's in one folder and the audio's in another and there's XML linking them together. This tool here allows me to browse those file types and access them as if they were whole files.

So here, for example, I've got the contents of a P2 card. And I've just copied it onto my hard drive, and I can browse and access and look at the media directly. This just allows me to interact as a human being with media that really interpret just by looking at it, it does all the work for me. So that's just a quick overview of the interface in Edius.

  • Creating a project: 9m 7s

The first stage of working with EDIUS is to create a new project. And when you do this, you're going to create a file that sits on your hard drive and contains links to your media files, and any creative decisions that you've made. Now it's super important to understand the distinction between the links that you see inside your project and the media files that they point to. If you move your project file to another machine, you are not going to have any online media. Everything's going to go offline unless you also bring the original media files.

So just to be clear, if you import media into EDIUS All you're doing, really, is creating shortcuts to that media. So, let's have a look here. This is what you get when you first start up EDIUS. You've got the option to choose the profile, I already have one set up here. I can browse to open an existing project and I can make a new project, which is what I'm going to do. I've also got a list of recent projects here. If I click on New Project. Here we go. I have a relatively short list of presets available.

An this is quite a new development with Edius, to minimize the options. And I guess it's a good idea because it simplifies the process. It speeds things up, and especially, if you're working in a studio environment where the machine's been configured for you, and the settings are exactly right. They probably don't want you to change them. So it does keep things a little bit simpler. I'm going to give this project a name. I think it's Thursday today. So I shall call it Thursday. And I'm going to browse to a folder to store this project. And I think, there we go.

That'll do fine. And then you'll see here I've got this option to Create A Folder With The Project Name. So that's going to put the project inside a folder. Just to keep things neat and tidy. Generally speaking with EDIUS, it's probably a good idea to keep your media and everything contained in the same folder. It makes it very easy to clean up your hard drive later. And it just makes housekeeping generally easier. Of course there is an exception to this rule which might be that you have dedicated media drives, or you might have network storage for that matter. In which case it's no problem to have your media anywhere you like.

But by default if you should render, which is the process by which you turn any visual effects into a flattened file, the output file to make playback easier.By default those files that are created will be stored inside your project folder anyway, you can change this of course. Now that I've given my project a name and I'm happy with the location for that folder and I've decided if I'm going to have a folder for it inside that location. Well, I've got four options here. And these options actually I created earlier.

These are preset project formats. And what the presets define is the output.So it's with the project preset that you say, for example here, I've got an HD1080, that's 1920 by 1080 resolution file. It's going to be 29.97 frames per second, which tells me straight away that it's NTSC rather than PAL. Of course, I've written that in the name as well. And I can see that it's progressive media rather than interlaced and so on and so on and so on. So, the benefit here is that there's a simplified interface to choose between the different presets. Now what this means is that whatever media you put onto your timeline into the sequence that you generate.

Whatever the format whatever the resolution or the frame rate or the color system it will be conformed to the settings that you specify here. You can change your project setting inside of EDIUS, but you can't toggle between NTSC and PAL. You're locked into a particular field rate. And effectively this comes down to the power system actually, whether you're in a 50hz or a 60hz power supply. That probably will give you an idea of the formats that you can switch between. So, I'm working here with standard definition material. This is PAL DV material that I generated for a music video a little while ago. And if I click OK now, my project is going to be created and it's going to have these settings as included in my Description panel. But I'm just going to tick the Customize box as well. And if I click OK, this is going to give me more options. So, first of all, I've got the video preset and you can see I've got quite a lot of video presets here including both the NTSC and PAL ones. I'm going to stick with the option I've got.

I've also got audio presets. Now, to be honest, I think it's pretty unlikely you're going to want to create 32 kilohertz audio. It's lower quality and, unless you've got a very, very slow machine an, frankly one that would struggle to playback video at all, as well, you're probably not going to go for this lower quality audio. You might choose 44.1 kilohertz because that's what music CD's are designed to playback at. But generally speaking you're going to want to go for 48k. And by default this'll be 16-bit audio. So it's like DAT quality or DV quality, or, or even HDCAM quality if you set it that way.

It's good quality sound. Now, you'll notice that amongst the 48 kilohertz categories, I've got the option for 2-channel, 4-channel, or 8-channel. And this is to do with the output. If you are going to output to something like HD Cam, or to a format that have multiple channels. Or perhaps if your're playing out via a mixing desk that has eight channels, then you might choose this option. For most purposes, most of the edits that I've seen and worked on, you're going to go for simple two channel. And that means you're mastering out to a left and right audio.

Over on the right, I've got a Rendering format. And again, Rendering is to do with effects. You may or may not need to render. It's quite possible that you won't need to render at all because the real time performance in ADS is quite astonishing. But if you're working with party effects, it's quite possible you will.And when you render, you need to decide what format you're going to use.Usually, the Cannabis HQ Standard is absolutely fine. I've never seen a particularly strong argument for using fine. It's a really high data rate. And the HQX, which is 10-bit for HD.

Well, yep, if you're shooting 10 bit HD, go ahead and use the HQX format.We're talking about a lot of data if you record in the HD 10-bit formats. So I hope your hard drives are fast enough to handle it. You've also even got a lossless format and even there, an uncompressed RGB or two YUV formats. And of course you can even use MPEG2 program stream. Pretty unnecessary usually. The Canopus HQ format is usually fine. Now the Canopus HQ codec is designed originally by Canopus, now owned by Grass Valley, and it's a intermediary codec.

You can record directly into it of course as well. And the benefit of it is that it makes more work for your hard drive but less work for your CPU. And that's probably a good idea because these days its usually the CPU that's the bottleneck more than the hard drive speed. Most of those other settings are fine. I've got default track quantities, if I'm generating a new sequence. One video track, a VA track, a title track, VA is video and audio and A is audio only. These are tracks that you can add and remove tracks later on when you create a sequence.

This is just the default, so those are fine for me. If I expand out the Advanced Controls, I've got options for specifying particular frame rates. These are really the contents of the presets up here. So I can choose the frame rate, the Fuel Order. My advice is, if you know what these are and you want to make changes to them, this is where you do them. If you don't know what these are, take my word for it, the preset is exactly right. So I'm just going to click OK, and I'm going to go into EDIUS. That's how you generate a new project.

Notice that as soon as I create a project, I'm here looking at my timeline.Here's an empty sequence, and I've got an initial sequence in my Bin palette over here. Just for the record, in the bin, you'll notice that there's an initial folder, you've got a folder tree on your left, the folder's called Root. Now, a lot of people wonder why its called that. This is actually an IT term and it refers to the first directory on a given storage medium. So for example, if you open up the C Drive on your computer before you go into any sub folders, you're looking at the Root Directory.

So that's what root means. And when the engineers were producing EDIUS, although some people feel it's better to have it, some people feel better not to. It seem like a good idea to stick with that consistent theme with the Windows terminology. Now that I have created my project, I am ready to start importing media and cutting my movie. Coincidentally, if I go to the Settings menu up here, which is Project Settings. There we go. I can pretty quickly switch over to a different format if I want. This is great if you're working in HD, and then you want to transfer over to SD to produce a standard def version of your project.

Notice though that I've got only the PAL formats here. My NTSC presets have disappeared, because you cannot switch between PAL and NTSC once you've chosen. So there you are. That's creating a new project in EDIUS 6.

2. Setting Up the Interface: 18m 0s

  • Setting up window layouts: 6m 31s

Edius has a really flexible interface. The layout is movable, and you'll notice there's no application frame. This is just a series of separate floating windows. And they snap together really nicely. You can click and drag. I tend to call this squeezy windows, though I suspect that there's probably a more accurate technical term for it. I can click on any of these areas where the panels join and resize them. Once you find a layout for all the different palettes that you're happy with, and by the way you've probably noticed that I'm alternating between using the word panels and palettes and windows.

Frankly they're all much of a muchness to me, just environments in which different tool sets sit. Once you have a collection of these tools that you're happy with, you can go to the View menu, you can go to Window Layout, and you can save the current layout. Now I've already saved a layout, which is this single monitor display. And I've done this because I'm secretly working here on two screens. If I choose normal, which is a layout that even has its own keyboard shortcut, Shift+Alt+L then Edius will take a look at the monitors that I've got and automatically distribute the screens accordingly.

If I do this now you can see Edius has decided that well, I need a lot of space for my media and all of my other contents are off screen. I'll just go back to my single monitor layout, that's a bit better. I think you can see what's going on. Now, the use of layouts is pretty straight forward. You've got the View menu, you go to the Window Layout sub menu. And you can apply a standard one, you can apply one that you've created yourself, save the current layout, you can change the current layout name. And you can delete layouts.

So pretty straight forward stuff. And you can have pretty much any tool on view when you create these layouts. For example Edius has Vector Scopes and Waveforms that you can have onscreen all the time if you'd like for monitoring your color and your luminance. But there's a useful layout that I tend to use when I'm working with a smaller screen area, which I am here, and that's to have my Bend palette and my other palettes, my effects, markers,information and source browser overlapping. Now I'll just show you why this is such a good idea.

Just going to drag this palette out of the way and I'm going to do the same for the bin palette. There we go. This is the Asset bin. And I'm going to drag over here, let's just drag and stretch these out. Now this is a good idea because I don't really have enough room on my screen otherwise to show all of the buttons that are at the bottom of my monitor, as my player windows. And obviously you'll ordinarily be operating on a larger monitor, but not necessarily.

I'm operating at 1280 horizontal resolution here. And if you're editing on a laptop, which Edius is just fantastic for, you might well have a limited horizontal resolution. Now the reason this works out okay is, if I get my Asset bin back here and snap that into the corner. And then do the same for the effects in clip marker and information palettes. Now first of all you'll have noticed that the Asset bin's disappeared, and this is where the magical keyboard shortcuts comes in. Grass Valley knew that people would want the Asset bin and the various other palettes to pop in and out of view all the time. So these two frames if you like, have very, very simple keyboard shortcuts. B is for the bin.

Edius has a really flexible interface. The layout is movable, and you'll notice there's no application frame. This is just a series of separate floating windows. And they snap together really nicely. You can click and drag. I tend to call this squeezy windows, though I suspect that there's probably a more accurate technical term for it. I can click on any of these areas where the panels join and resize them. Once you find a layout for all the different palettes that you're happy with, and by the way you've probably noticed that I'm alternating between using the word panels and palettes and windows.

Frankly they're all much of a muchness to me, just environments in which different tool sets sit. Once you have a collection of these tools that you're happy with, you can go to the View menu, you can go to Window Layout, and you can save the current layout. Now I've already saved a layout, which is this single monitor display. And I've done this because I'm secretly working here on two screens. If I choose normal, which is a layout that even has its own keyboard shortcut, Shift+Alt+L then Edius will take a look at the monitors that I've got and automatically distribute the screens accordingly.

If I do this now you can see Edius has decided that well, I need a lot of space for my media and all of my other contents are off screen. I'll just go back to my single monitor layout, that's a bit better. I think you can see what's going on. Now, the use of layouts is pretty straight forward. You've got the View menu, you go to the Window Layout sub menu. And you can apply a standard one, you can apply one that you've created yourself, save the current layout, you can change the current layout name. And you can delete layouts.

So pretty straight forward stuff. And you can have pretty much any tool on view when you create these layouts. For example Edius has Vector Scopes and Waveforms that you can have onscreen all the time if you'd like for monitoring your color and your luminance. But there's a useful layout that I tend to use when I'm working with a smaller screen area, which I am here, and that's to have my Bend palette and my other palettes, my effects, markers, information and source browser overlapping. Now I'll just show you why this is such a good idea.

Just going to drag this palette out of the way and I'm going to do the same for the bin palette. There we go. This is the Asset bin. And I'm going to drag over here, let's just drag and stretch these out. Now this is a good idea because I don't really have enough room on my screen otherwise to show all of the buttons that are at the bottom of my monitor, as my player windows. And obviously you'll ordinarily be operating on a larger monitor, but not necessarily.

I'm operating at 1280 horizontal resolution here. And if you're editing on a laptop, which Edius is just fantastic for, you might well have a limited horizontal resolution. Now the reason this works out okay is, if I get my Asset bin back here and snap that into the corner. And then do the same for the effects in clip marker and information palettes. Now first of all you'll have noticed that the Asset bin's disappeared, and this is where the magical keyboard shortcuts comes in. Grass Valley knew that people would want the Asset bin and the various other palettes to pop in and out of view all the time. So these two frames if you like, have very, very simple keyboard shortcuts. B is for the bin.

And I can press B. This is B for bravo, B for bin. And I can press it and toggle the display of the bin very easily. And H is for the other palettes, which I suppose is H for hide. There we go. So you can see it's actually very easy for me to have those onscreen, and then just press a key and remove them when I need access to my full-screen controls. So what I'm going to do now is I'm going to save that layout. I'm going to go to View. I'm going to choose Window Layout. Save, current layout.

New, and I'll call this overlap. Here we are. So now I can easily toggle between my overlap layout and my single monitor layout. Another useful feature of the interface in Edius for smaller screens, is that these player monitors that's my source player monitor and my record player monitor. They can be combined into a single window and this is always been the way with Edius right back to, goodness before it was even called Edius.

If I go to my View menu here I can choose Single mode. And now you can see I've just got one monitor for both. And to toggle between them, I've got a Player button and a Record button. And these, these kind of work pretty well if I double-click on an item in the Asset bin, that appears automatically and now looking at my player monitor. If I click into my timeline as I have now, it toggles automatically to the recorder monitor. So, actually, working in single view like this is fine. And if I resize a little bit I can get a better sense of my other palettes. In fact, while I'm here, I might well decide that I want to have my information palette floating separately from my effects.

I tend to have these two on screen a lot. So I'm going to drag the information palette out. And you see it becomes its own floating window here. I'll just resize that a bit. Just go into my effects list and resize that. And you'll see I'm pulling these out of position to resize them because otherwise everything kind of moves together and I don't really want that. I want them to stay separate. Let's just come out a little bit more. There we are. So now, I've got my layouts are accessible with my information and my effects list.

But the reason I want this is because when you add effects to clips, they get added to this list in the information palette, so you kind of need access to that a lot while you're working. Again I'm going to go to my View menu, I'm going to go to Window Layout, I'm going to Save my current layout and choose New. And I'll just call this more palettes. There we go. Edius has a beautifully flexible interface. The layout is moveable, you can shuffle these floating panels around.

And you'll notice that there's no application frame. If I move this out of the way you can see the background of the desktop there. This is really just a series of floating windows.

  • Monitor overlays: 7m 33s

A big part of editing with nonlinear editing systems like EDIUS, is in maintaining your information, knowing what's going on, where your media is,what everything's called and, and just what's happening with the edit. In fact, a large part of the tools that you'll find in any editing system are really just dedicated to that sole need that you have as a human being interacting with technology. You can see along the bottom of the timeline window here, I've got pours and insert mode and information about what status I have for my timeline and even how much disk space I have left.

And also, for my monitor overlays, I've got various different options. So here, in my asset bin for example, so here on the left I've got my folders, my various different containers of media, if I open up a clip by double-clicking on it. I can see there's a shot and at the bottom I can see the current time code.Now time code is just the hours, minutes, seconds, and frames that were recorded in the camera, or in fact that were applied to any media that you create. And the frame rate is quite important. if your working with pal media you'll be operating at 25 frames per second if your operating with NTSC media then it will be either 29.97 frames per second or 30 and if it seems difficult to remember those numbers don't worry it really is just those numbers and your going to see them come up again and again and again the small one off perhaps exception to this is you might occasionally see media that's shot at 24 frames per second to make it more film like and for that matter, if you're working in NTSC, that might end up being 23.976 frames per second, it's 1% slower.

At the bottom of my player monitor here I can see that I've got video and audio available. If I mark an endpoint which is the beginning of the part of the clip that I want, I get an In Mark here. Anytime that you see eight numbers together with colons or semi colons between them you're looking at timecode.I can click further on and mark an Out Point which is the end of the part of the clip that I want, and here we are. Not hours, 55 minutes 25 seconds in 10frames in the original time code. If I then look at my duration, I can see that I've selected 10 seconds and 20 frames of media, pretty straight forward so far. If I go to my view menu, I can choose a few different overlay options, and these are really excellent for letting you know what's going on with your media. Now some of these do clutter up the display and in fact you'll see that they've got keyboard shortcuts, Ctrl+H turns off and on. The safe action zone is the area within which, even on a regular monitor CRT screen monitor, you should see the contents of this white box. In fact on a regular old fashioned glass screen TV. You would expect to have this amount of a picture cropped off to give clean edges. You can also enable what's referred to as the safe title action zone, which is an even smaller box.

Which is the area within which, even on a very badly calibrated monitor, you should still expect to be able to see the contents of your picture. That's where you put your graphics and your titles. I can go back here to the overlay and turn on out center cross. Not fantastically useful in my experience, but you never know. It's one of those things that if you particularly. I guess if you want to lay out four way split multi camera angle shots. I shot something like this very recently. It could have been useful to have a split screen in the center there. But you'll notice that this is actually the sort of thing you'd expect to see on a camera.

I can also have markers on and off and I don't have any markers at the moment. But if I turn that back on, and go to my marker panel here and add a marker. An then maybe, just Drag along and put a comment in. And say, this is a marker on my clip. You'll see that now appears on the screen. If I turn off viewing markers, on my overlay, it disappears. Pretty straightforward stuff, isn't it? If I go back in, I also have a (UNKNOWN) and (UNKNOWN) is a feature that you would normally expect to see on a camera.

And it shows you highlighted, burned out regions of the picture. What this means is that these are illegal levels. These are off the scale for broadcast. And if you're producing things domestically or just internally for DVDs within an organization, a corporation, it's probably not going to matter that much. But if you're producing media for broadcast. You need to make sure that your luminance levels are kept inside this point. And this is my original media so you can see that it was shot with burned out whites very, very common thing to do. A lot of camera operators aim to have a little bit of burn out because it gives more of a sense of.

Highlight some shadows, I'll just turn that off for a second. Now the last thing on this menu is the clip and device information. Now, the reason this is called clip or device, you can see this is a clip named Crossing Street 1. The option there to have a device listed is because the player monitor on this side is actually also the display that's used for capturing from tape. So if you have a video deck connected to your machine and you record onto your computer.You'll get the name of the deck appearing at the top. Not such a big deal if you only have one deck, but if you've got five, it can be pretty useful to know which one you're working with.

Also under the View menu here, I've got my onscreen display, and this is the one that you'll probably going to want to turn off and on a lot. I'll just turn it on so you can see what's going on here. So first of all, under my player monitor, I've got the same time code information that is down at the bottom of the screen. This is not fantastically useful really from that point of view. But it also tells me my playback status. And if I play back at multiple speeds here, you can see it shows me the speed at which I'm playing back. And it also, very usefully, gives me my audio level even if I drag through. And you'll notice when you're dragging through a clip with Edius, that it's really smooth and love playback.

One of the things the engineers worked on really hard, is to make sure that it feels like your in drag team with hardware with real technology. Now I've mentioned that there are keyboard shortcuts for these. And you can see how on a small screen like this, this is taking up a lot of real estate in my picture. All I need to do to toggle these off and on is press Control G to toggle off and on the overlay with the time code. And Control H to turn off the safe action zones. Shift H does the cross hair which to be honest I probably wouldn't have on screen that much anyway. If you're ever in doubt about these keyboard shortcuts, just just go to the view menu, and hover over the item,you'll see there Ctrl+G for the status, Ctrl+Shift+H for the overlay.

Again, a really nice feature here, although I don't have an external device connected, if I did I could have that on screen display on my output as well.And that's the nice this if you're doing viewings and reviews with an editor and so on. You can see the time code and share and talk about it easily. In fact, the engineers of EDIUS, I think, really went for it in a big way when they set up these kinds of controls because if I go to my settings here and go to User Settings and bring up my Onscreen Display settings, this is onto the Preview Category of settings.

I can choose the colors that the audible will be displayed in, I can choose the position of the on screen display. I can choose what kind of information isgoing to be displayed. So this is an enormous amount of flexibility in terms of the information, the applications given to you, while you're editing.

  • Playback controls: 3m 56s

I'd like to take a moment to look at the playback controls here in Edius and show you how analog and natural the feedback is while you're working with media. Before I get into that, just a quick note about playback of 16 by 9 and 4 by 3 media. Now if you're working with HD media, HD media tends to be square pixel. Not always, but it's usually square pixel, and it just is 16 by 9.HD formats are just 16 by 9. They're widescreen. In standard definition you can have widescreen or four by three media, and actually it's the same number of pixels. It's no difference in terms of the amount of work for the editing system to play back that media.

The pixels are just a different shape. Now, in this instance I've got a project,which I've got called setting up Edius, and it's just got some media in it and a few clips, and a very, very basic sequence. Some audio down here, and a couple of clips. But I've got this project set as four by three when really my media is 16 by nine. I just happen to know that it is. It can be difficult to tell but I know that it is 16 by nine media. To change this I'm going to go to mySettings menu and I'm going to choose Project Settings. Now just for the record, it's the Project settings not the Sequence settings that defines this conforming. Now inside these settings I can toggle to a different format altogether. Here's my original standard def four by three eight bit video setting. Instead I've got my current setting selected, and I'm going to click on change current setting.

All I need to do is toggle down the Advance Controls, and under the AspectRatio menu, change this to 16 by 9. By the by, four by three is not square pixels. Four by three is also non square. One to one square pixels, that's what you'd get in most HD format. So, I'm going to choose 16 9, click OK.And there we go that's much more like it. It's also worth just nothing, and you can perhaps see this if I resize a little bit, that this media was originally HDV and you might see a little bit of aberrations in there, but I think, I think maybe it's looking okay. What you will see is some little vertical lines because this was converted to DV and I've got some pillar boxing, I've got some black lines either side of my media. You would not normally see that in the Edius interface. Okay, so what have I got for playback? Well, first of all, here's my source player.

I can drag through. That's fine. I can also use this shuttle controller, which is fantastic. If you've got an external jog shuttle controller, they're a lot better compatible with Edius. So you could have a physical controller in your hand. But an absolutely lovely feature of Edius is the option to click with the right mouse button, that's the right-hand mouse button, and rotate in the monitor window to get jog control.

So here's going forwards. And backwards. And all over the place. So you get the idea. These are very analog, very reactive, very responsive. And you'll notice that the audio, instead of kind of breaking up as you drag through it, is very, very smooth. This is one of the first features that Edius had. And it's still a standout feature right back to version one. Still a standout feature compared to other editing systems on the market today.

In fact, of course, I've got Play, I've got One Frame Forward, One FrameBackwards and a real Fast Forward and Fast Rewind. Fantastic for video editing. I've got a Stop of course and I've got a Loop Play option. So those are the playback controls. They're the same inside the source player monitor as they are inside the recorder monitor.

3. Importing Media: 25m 19s

  • Importing regular media files: 6m 56s

One of the big selling points with the Grass Valley EDIUS editing system, is its performance with different file types. And my experience of it has very much been that if you've got a media file, it is probably going to play inside of EDIUS. And it will probably play in real time. Probably let you put effects on it. And it's just a very very flexible system. You can drag and drop clips directly from Windows into the Asset Bin. Here's the Asset Bin here. I'm just going to resize this a little, so you can see more clearly what I'm doing. And I'm just going to show you how you import items from inside of EDIUS. So let's just look at some regular media files first of all. I can right-click if I want and choose Add File. And I can also click on the Add Clip button.

Now, sometimes you're going to find that the naming conventions aren't 100% consistent in EDIUS. And one of the ones that catches people out, is if you go to the File menu and choose Add Clip. That's not going to import a clip into the Asset bin, its just going to open it directly in the player monitor here. And you can work that way if you like you can take things directly into the timeline. But just to be clear that's not the same result as clicking on the Add Clip button on the Asset bin, or right-clicking. The way I normally import is to double-click.

And so you can see there's a lot of functionality that's repeated in different parts of the application, and this is perfectly normal. You'll find that with nonlinear systems everywhere. So now that I've got my open dialog up here, I can see some media that I've got on my hard drive. If I select a clip, I get information about it. I get a Thumbnail. I can scrub through here and see what I think. And I've got this tick box, show properties. Now again I'm kind of short on screen space here but, if I just show you. If I un-tick this box and cancel out of that.

If I select a clip, nothing happens. If I tick the show properties box, I get the standard clip properties. This is the same information I would get, if I right-clicked on the clip in the Asset bin and choose Properties. Or selected it and pressed the Alt Enter keyboard shortcut. This is a really nice feature I think. It is just one of those little things, but it means that now I've ticked that box, I can click through these items. I can get a lot more information that is relevant to me. This is just window stuff here, you know, that they can format and size and so on. What I want to know is what format it is, I want to know the field order, the aspect ratio.

This is the video information in the Clip Properties panel. And it's cute feature that I can have that pop up automatically. Just come out of that. So I'm just going to select the first item here. Hold down the Shift key and select the last. And you'll notice I've got a tick box here, Transfer to Project Folder. If I tick that box, EDIUS will take a copy of the media, just as it is in the same format. It's not going to transcode it, or convert it, or rewrap it. But it'll take a copy and move that copy into your project folder. Remember when you create a project, there's the option to create a folder for it automatically as well.

Now this is a really good idea if you're importing media from an external device. Maybe someone's given you an asset on a USB stick, or they've given you a CD of some kind with some media. You're not going to want to leave the media on the original drive. But I don't need to do that, I'm happy to just link to the original media, so I'll leave that as it is. And having made my selections, I'm going to click Open. And there we are. So, I've got my media imported, and now I can just double-click and play it. And it doesn't really matter what the format is, it's just going to work. And I can see here, I don't have any additional metadata attached to these. And I know that's to be expected because I exported these from a different format and transcoded them to make them smaller.

So you'd be able to Download them to run through these lessons. Of course, when I exported that created new files, and that broke the link to the original Metadata in the camera. If you have already organized your media. And I'll just remove these items so I can show this to you. I'm going to select them with the Shift key and hit Delete. This is standard kind of Windows file selection thing. If you've got your media organized, instead of double-clicking on the right hand panel of the asset bin. If you right-click on the left-hand panel, you'll notice that as well as making new folders, you can also open a folder.

Now, this is different to opening a media file. I'm just going to browse through to my assets here. And I've got for example, here my video folder has two sub folders. I've got some media of people doing BMX stuff some multi cam shoot and then I've got a little bit of media inside a separate two week rule folder. If I select the top level video folder and then click OK. There we go. EDIUS is going to replicate the folder structure inside my project. Now it's important to be clear, that this replication, and you can see its just put it inside the root folder.

There it is, I've got my BMX media, I've got my two-week rule. This process generates an imitation of the original folder structure. It's not creating a link to it. So for example if I move this two week rule item back to the root folder, and take it out of the video folder, I can just drag and drop to do that. That's just happened inside of EDIUS, this has not updated my timeline. So again if you import folders this way, it's a big timesaver if you've taken the time to pre organize your hard drive, which is a really good idea to do. But it's kind of a one way trip.

This isn't showing me the contents of my hard drive, it's just imitating my hard drive. So again importing, very straightforward. Double-click or right-click and choose Import File or Add File. There is no special treatment, if you're working with graphics media or a video of any particular kind, you can just get to work straight away. Just one last point about importing here. If I go back into the open dialog, there's a tick box for sequence clip.

you might be familiar with this option in other applications. If I have a series of still images that are exported, perhaps from an animation application. Then I can just select them, and they usually have a number extension on the names of course, these are all just different images from video files. But if I had say arrived 001, arrived 002, 3, 4, 5, 6 and so on. I would just select those. Take the sequence clip option and then EDIUS will automatically generate a single clip in my Asset bin rather than however many it is. If this was a ten second sequence, this could be 250 or 300 images. But I'll get a single item in the Asset bin.

So if you're getting assets from animators, sometimes they like to export image file sequences rather than video, which is completely fine for EDIUS.

  • Importing file-based camera media with the Source Browser: 5m 1s

Increasingly, cameras are recording media onto file based storage systems rather than tape. And I think this is a really positive thing. In production and post production terms, it represents a massive time saving. It just makes life a lot easier. But in terms of post production file management, it can create a bit of a headache. I've got an example here. This is some media that was taken from a P2 card. In fact, I've generated some P2 card media inside of Edios. And this is what you'd normally get, so this is shooting with a Panasonic P2 card system, or if you're working with the XD cam EX system, or just regular XD cam, you'll get this MSF file system.

And what you get is a contents folder for each card. And you've got audio in one place. There's often clip information in another. You get icon preview files. These are bitmap files, BMPs. If there's proxies shot you can do that too, this is particularly common if you've shot on XD-CAM. And here's my video, and you can even have a voice over recorded on there as well. XD Cam was set up to support all these different file types in one folder structure, and it was intended to be a kind of standardization of file based media, which in many ways works very well.

The problem is as an editor, which bit do you import? And the early support for these file systems, for editing systems like Edius, usually involved locating the video and then kind of winging it a bit and seeing if you can find the media files elsewhere and connect them together, in particular of course, the video and the audio. In Edius 6 this is very, very much easier to do, and I'll just demonstrate with the Source browser. Let me just grab the Source browser and put it into its own panel here. There we go. And while I'm here, let's just flatten that a little bit. Okay,so here's what we have.

The Source browser is designed to allow you to set up folders that are semi-permanent. They'll stick around inside of Edius for accessing file-based media as if it were single whole clips. So you've got different types, lots of formats are supported, including the new Canon XF format that's just come out. If you want to add a directory, right-click on the type of media, yet on the left, click on Open Folder, and browse to your media. Let's just find this here. There's my P2 card.

And what you want to do to use the Source browser is take the entire contents of the media drive. Don't leave any parts on the original disk.Whatever the camera system you're using, you might be tempted to think, oh, that's just some text. I, I don't need that. I need the video content. You do need everything, because very commonly, you'll have things like XML files that link everything together. And you need all of it. So I'm choosing my card.This is the entire contents of my P2 card. I'm going to click OK, and straightaway, it comes up on the list.

And you'll notice that what I've got now when I select that item is three clips.That's what I have in here. I've got some metadata displayed at the bottom.Notice that the Source browser looks very, very similar to the Asset bin. They really appear similar but they are different. The Source browser is showing me things directly on my hard drive and giving me access to clips complete. If I double-click on one of these, it'll open. I haven't imported this into my project yet, but if I want to I can go to my Asset bin, and I can just drag and drop items from one to the other.

If I right-click on an item, and of course I can lasso multiple items, I can do Add to Bin, which has the same effect, this is just linking to the original media. But if I Add and Transfer to Bin, although I think the wording here isn't quite as clear as it could be, this is very much like the Transfer to ProjectFolder option when you're importing regular media files. This will create a clip that links to the media in my Asset bin, and it will copy the media itself across to my Project folder.

So this is very useful if you've just temporarily plugged in something like a P2 card, or an XDCAM, EX hard drive of one kind or another. You don't want to leave the media on the original storage medium. You can add and transfer to bin. And you're done. You can also just open a clip, which is the same as double-clicking, Show in Player and you can add directly to the timeline. So, just again, Edius doesn't require you to have assets in the Asset bin for you to add them to a sequence to start cutting. So you can see the focus here of this application really is on speed, and it works fantastically. I'll just Add to Bin here, and perhaps put the Source browser, I'm just grabbing the tab and dropping it back into this panel with the Information and Effects palettes.

And now if I look at my Asset bin, there are my clips, and these are linked directly to the original P2 media. There's no need for any kind of transcoding, or rewrapping or conforming to bring media into Edius. It'll play fine just as it is.

  • Capturing from tapes: 7m 58s

In order to capture into Edius, you're first going to need to set up the deck that you're going to record from. This is a system setting, so once you've done it once, it's set for all of your projects. But unless you set up the deck, you're just not going to have the controls to do it. And when you do record, it's the source player here that displays the contents. So let's just set up a deck and see if we can do some recording. First of all, I'm going to go to the Settings menu and I'm going to choose System Settings.

And in my System Settings, I'm looking under hardware and I've got Device Preset. And there's nothing in here at the moment. I'm going to click New and I'm going to give this a name. I'm going to call this DVDeck. I can choose an icon, and there's loads of different icons to choose from to make it easier to choose between multiple decks later on. And of course I've just got one deck connected. But you could easily have several and this just makes it easier to toggle between them. I'm going to click Next and now I've got my settings.Now I've just got a regular deck connected via OHCI so I'm going to choose that.

I'm going to choose the video format because of course OHCI allows for quite a lot of different kinds of deck. I've just got a regular PAL 50 I deck, so this is 50 fields per second. Interlaced it's regular 25 frames per second video, and the codex find DV, I'm not using DVC pro, I don't need a proxy file to be created. This is a low resolution copy of the media to be created to toggle between in the Proxy mode. I'm pretty happy with all the standard settings here. I'll click Next. And then equally for output, if I have this deck connected, what format am I going to output? And you'll see there's lots and lots of formats supported by Edius.

I'm going to go for the 720 by 576. Again 50 I 16 by nine. And that's fine. The audio format two channels, 16 bit. Click Next and I'm done. I get an overview of my settings and I can click Completed. And then there's a little short cut you can do here that's not very clear from the interface. But if you Right Click on an entry for a device preset you can make duplicates and copy and make adjustments. You can even export and import these. So if you're working with multiple Edius machines you can transfer the settings but if I go to Assign Input Preset I can choose Input Preset One and nothing appears to happen. If I apply and OK, now when I go to my Capture menu, I've got DV deck listed as my input preset one.

Now you can actually add these Input Preset buttons to your player monitor in the user settings so if you're coming in and out a lot using the same deck, you can have a button at the bottom of the player monitor here. A little bit difficult to see with this smaller interface, but in fact, I've already got this set up DVDeck. I'll just reposition this. If I want to toggle to view the contents of my tape, now I've got a tape already in the deck, I can either go to the Capture menu here and choose DVDeck, and by the by, if I haven't set up the input preset, I can just go to Select Input Device and I'll get any devices I've got set up.

Now for me I think the interface here is not super intuitive because if you don't know that you need to go into the Settings menu and set up the deck, you could be forgiven for wondering well, what do I do? Where do I go? How do I get my deck? You can't right-click in this menu. There's nothing you can really do if you don't have a deck connected already. So there you go. Now you know. You have to set it up first of all. I can go to the Capture menu but I can equally just click now on my Input Preset button here. And this is going to switch the player to showing me the contents of the tape. And I get to choose a real number.

This is my tape number. For what it's worth, the tape number is not important if you never intend to be able to automatically rerecord your media from tape, but if you think it's possible that you might need to re-cut your program, if at some point in the future you might need the computer to re-find all of the original media, and this reel number's very, very important. Some cameras will put user bit data in which is an extra bit of time code. So the time code is the hours, minutes, seconds and frames of content of your media.

It's just counting time, but you can also put user bits in, and these are sometimes used to identify the camera operator for example, or occasionally they're used to define the tape number. I'm not using that, so I'm going to uncheck the box and I'm going to type in this is Presentation Tape 001. It's a good idea to use the three digit numbers, cause it helps the system to keep everything in order. I click OK now. I'm now looking at the contents of my deck, and this is me trying to look moody and doing a presentation about staying organized with your editing system.

Now back in my Asset bin, I've got the root directory selected, and that means that if I record this is going to be the container for my new media but again the media itself is going to be in my project folder. It's just the shortcuts to the media that will appear in my Asset bin. So I can press Play, choose a bit that I like, and hit Record. Immediately now Edius is capturing. When I'm happy, I press Stop.

And then, if I resize a little bit here we are in my Asset bin. That's the clip. Now when I double-click on this I'm getting the contents of the clip in my source player. I'm now seeing the caption name one two and three, zero, zero, zero. I can rename that, of course. And there is the video. I was kind of going for a Steven Seagal look there. I think that kind of works. If I just go back into the Capture mode there, there we are and Play. Fantastic.

Now under Capture I have the option to change the reel name at any time. So if I decide I've got a different tape in then Edius should pop up automatically when you put a new tape in, but you can always change your mind later on.As well as capturing, if I just resize this panel again a little bit, so you can see, here we are. As well as capturing I can instead, add to a batch capture list, so this is an off line list of clips that I, at some point in the future, might want to capture. So if I play I can mark an in point, which is the beginning of the section I want.

I can mark an out point, which is the end of the section I want. Now this is telling me I've got a three second four frame duration, it's pretty short. Then I can click to Add to Batch Capture List. Having done that, if I click on the drop down menu here and choose Batch Capture, there we go. I've got my Batch Capture list, and this can be a whole list of stuff from multiple tapes. You could have a hundred clips on this list if you like. And select the items that you want to capture and click Capture. And Edius will go off and automatically record the items that you've chosen.

And this is just a way of pre-organizing your media before you even record it onto the computer. Frankly, these days hard drives are pretty cheap, and if you are going to capture from something like DV or HDV or even regular XDCAM EX, the data rate's pretty low. You can probably afford to just capture the entire tape and bring the whole thing in. Course I'm saying XDCAM EX. That's a far based system anyway, but you get the gist. If I now go over and Right-click on this item that I've created, let me just resize the window so you can see, there we go, when I select this I've got a fair bit of meta data about it, and if I Right click and choose Explorer. There's my file recorded onto my hard drive and it's inside my project folder. So capturing's pretty straight forward.

Effectively Edius just behaves like a tape recorder.

  • EDIUS media handling: 5m 24s

When you import media into Edius what's actually happening is Edius is creating shortcuts to your media files. Edius is not really importing any media into your project. But when you're cutting, when you're working with everything, it just feels like you've got the Media files there and you're playing them back and you're making changes to them. But it's important to understand that this is really not what's happening. Here I've got my Asset Bin. I just resize this a bit. You'll see if I perhaps toggle the Asset Bin over to a Text View.

Here we go. I'm getting all this information about the media, the aspect ratio, the size and so on and so on and that's fine because I need to know that stuff but although it appears that the information I'm seeing about these clips is the clip itself, it's really just pretending. It's nothing more than a shortcut to the media. So if I right-click on an item here, you'll see there's an Explorer option and if I click on this, I'm going to see a folder that contains my original media.

And in fact here I can see this Head & Shoulder follow two shot is a Quicktime movie, 69.7 meg on my hard drive. And in fact the location of this media is completely different to the location of my project file that I created when I started out with this project. It can make a huge difference to your learning experience when you start working with Edius. If you're very, very clear about this distinction between the clip shortcuts inside of Edius and the media files that those shortcuts point to on the hard drive.

And here's one very simple example of why it makes things very different.Here's a clip. In fact let me take this straight from the Asset Bin. Here's a clip that I have in the Asset Bin, and down here I've got a sequence that I'm building. If I want to put that clip into my sequence there's a few ways I can do it. One way is just drag and drop and there it is. I'm just going to zoom out a little bit so you can see more clearly what's going on. So here is that clip and I know I've got the whole clip because I can see triangles at the beginning and end of the clip segment that tell me it's on the last frame. So I've got the whole thing down in my sequence.

If I want to, I can take this clip, again and again and again. I can tell you that if I really were working with 69 meg files, and these can often be very, very large files indeed, if you're working with fully uncompressed HD, you get something like maybe nine seconds of media per gigabyte of storage space.There's no way a regular computer could handle that quantity of information this fast. But it can handle, if I just resize this a little bit, it can easily handle five shortcuts.

But again, I still only have one item on my hard drive. I've now got the same clip again and again and again. And all Edius needs to do is play the clip.Play it, play it, play it, play it. It's the same item. If I remove that item, this is the head and shoulders shot here. If I go to my Explorer and, for example, if I rename this, I'll just change this to .old. Are you sure? Yep. If I go back into Edius, straight away all five copies have gone offline. And this is what happens when clips are offline.

You get these diagonal lines across the clip and you get the checkerboards in the monitor. And in fact, if I look in my Asset Bin, you can see the icon changes as well. Let's just toggle over to a thumbnail view. You can see I get this broken link icon. If I go back I'm just toggling with Alt+Tab to my video folder if I just select it and rename it .mulfigan. Yep, I'm sure. Go back into Edius, there we go we're back online. Now the words offline and online are used in multiple ways in the media and it can get a little bit confusing because you really need to know the context in order to understand the intent.

In this context online means the media is connected to the shortcuts inside of Edius. Offline means the media is not connected. If you lose the connection, you can always go and click on the File menu, and restore offline clip, and Edius will give you options to browse to a new file to link. One thing to be aware of is that you can link to a different file if you want, and you can update your media accordingly. It works really, really well. However, you can't link from a PAL clip to an NTSC media file and vice versa.

There's a divide between NTSC and PAL. Or more broadly speaking, between 50 hertz and 60 hertz. Again, understanding this relationship between shortcuts inside of the project and original media files actually gives you quite a lot of flexibility. You can apply different effects to multiple instances of a clip, because although you're working with a shortcut to the same original media file those shortcuts themselves are independent. So I can do different things with different instances, and I'm still using the same media on my hard drive which is very, very efficient in terms of storage space.

4. Timeline Edits: 47m 43s

  • Timeline track types and controls: 8m 57s

EDIUS has a unique combination of track types. And once you get used to them, they can be really useful for speeding up your workflow. First of all, we've got video only tracks and that's pretty straight forward. You can only put video on them. Then you've got video and audio tracks combined. And if I just skip the T track for a second, we have audio only tracks. So, those three, they kinda make sense. Audio tracks always play at the same time. However many audio tracks you've got, you'll hear them all together.

And with any kind of video track, the higher the video track, the more in front it is. So, that's all pretty straightforward. The T tracks are dedicated title tracks. And broadly speaking these behave very much like video tracks. One slightly confusing difference is that whatever you put in a title track, although it's underneath the video tracks, it will always be in front of them. So, any graphics that you put on this layer here will automatically appear in front of video one, two, three, four, and whatever. And they have their own numbering system as well.

So, if I right-click, add T track to below, one, that's fine, I'll just re size this a bit. There we go, I've now got two T tracks. So, you'll notice that the video tracks count upwards, one, two, three, four, five, the title tracks count downwards just like the audio. So, in a slightly weird way the lower I go on the list of title tracks, the higher I'm going in terms of which layer is in front of what. Perhaps even more confusing is, there's no reason why I can't put video onto a title track. It'll function the same way.

The magical benefit of title tracks is, the way that EDIUS can automate adding something simple like the fade up and a fade down to titles that you generate on this layer. That's pretty much it really. You can automate the duration pretty straight forward by using a standard shortcut, but the T track lets you automatically have a fade up and fade down. And again if you're in a big hurry and you want simple titles that fade up and down, that's pretty useful. If I grab some media and put it onto these tracks, I'm just going to, delete that selected track to slim things down a bit.

I'm going to re size a bit so you can see the tracks more clearly. If I grab this shot straight out of my Asset Bin and put it into a VA track, well that's pretty straightforward. I get the video and the audio separately. It's really important that you're clear about the distinction between the video part and the audio part of a clip. This is especially clear when you're applying effects, because you apply video effects to the video part and audio effect to the audio part. If I expand down this track, I'm just going to re size a bit, so you can see what's going on.

I've got two expansion triangles for this VA track. One is for the video, and one is for the audio. But the video expansion triangle is for the mixer and the mixer is the Opacity adjustment. I can use this control to adjust how visible a shot is. If I clicked in the middle here, and turn on Mixer adjustments, I can click and drag and you can see I'm fading the shot out. I'm actually making it more and more transparent. This is rubber banding for video. Equally for the audio, there's not much audio on here. Let me see if I can find something with a bit more sound. There we go, let's just flatten the mixer.

If I have the audio expanded, I get a waveform. Now when you first import any audio to EDIUS, it generates waveform cache files. And it takes a few moments to do this. It might take a while for you to see these waveforms appear if you've got a lot of media. Once you've done it, once though, it's very very quick to draw the wave forms from then on. So, it's well worth letting it get on with it. Right now I'm seeing the waveform, but I can't make adjustments to the audio level. If I turn on the volume adjustments, I can now click and adjust the audio level, very, very easy to make changes. If I click again, I'm now seeing Pan Controls, so I can click and Pan right and left with my audio.

This is direct on the timeline control of the audio output. I can also decide whether or not I'm going to hear track or whether or not I'm going to see the track. But this is a track based change, this isn't clip by clip. This makes the entire track visible or audible. You'll notice that, for example, on my V2 track here, just zoom out a little bit and stretch out a little bit. Here we are. You'll notice that I only have the video mute as its called. And these are just the options to do video equally for audio, I just zoom up a little bit. Same thing, I only get the audio adjustments.

It'll kind of make sense once you're clear about these distinctions between the video and the audio parts of your clips. If I just collapse this a little bit so we can see a few more tracks. If I drag a shot I'm just going to drag it over a little bit here. If I drag a shot from the Asset Bin and put it on a 2V track. You'll notice that I get the audio as well automatically on another track. Equally if I take the same clip and put it on an audio only track, same thing, I still get the video. This is pretty useful for dividing things up.

And many editors prefer to cut just with dedicated video and audio tracks. And that's totally fine. You can just select a track, Delete it, OK. Do the same thing for the title track, Delete it, and from now on, you're operating just with video and audio, and let me just do my patching there, I'll just undo with Ctrl+Z. There we go, turn that on and there you go I've got my video and audio on separate tracks.

When you add media to a timeline, you can do that by dragging and dropping as I have just done or you can use buttons and in and out locks in the source player. Just, have a quick note. Something to be aware of is that on the timeline these buttons, this stack of buttons here, these are my selection header buttons for the tracks. I can hold down the Control key and select multiple tracks to do things to those tracks all together. I've also got Synch lock controls that will stop the individual tracks getting out of whack with one another. If I have a piece of video here, for example, and I'll just add a video track, if I have another piece of video just over it. If I edit something into one of these tracks, and I have my Sync locks on all of the tracks will move together and their relative positions will stay the same.

If I turn these Sync locks off, and I edit into single track, I may lose the relationship in time between these clips, and that's a bad thing generally speaking. You want the relationship between the clips on the timeline to remain the same. Another little note about the track selections is on the left here. I've got the source available tracks. Now right now, I'm seeing the available tracks for the clip in my source player. That can change, you may have clips that have no audio or no video. If I right-click on the Source Audio button, I can toggle on and off, Audio Source Channel Stereo.

Now, the wording is a little bit weird here. This menu always says Audio Source Channel Stereo, regardless of which option you choose. But look what happened, I turned this Off. Right now I've got an Audio one and an Audio two. So, if you're working with separate audio, you're going to want to have this independent. You know, maybe you've got a time icon, a subject and a short gun on a camera and you want the audio levels to be independent. If I right-click on either one of these I get the same menu option, but I'm toggling it on, and now I get the single item.

If toggle it off, and grab a shot, put it in my timeline. I get, two separate audio clips. On the top of the timeline here I've got a shortcut to turn off the video or the audio for my source. Again it's the same colors, but try to keep really clear in your mind that this column of buttons are just for your source available clips. And the middle section is the track selections for the timeline. And in the right section, is the Sync locks that just, they're kind of good idea, they protect you from accidentally losing sync.

Up at the top here, I've got a Zoom slider. And I've got a menu from which I can choose specific zoom ratios, maybe two seconds, or ten seconds, and so on. I can also hold down the Control key on my keyboard and scroll with the mouse. If I just move in a bit, if I just roll the wheel on my mouse, I can zoom in and out with that, which is probably the quickest way of all to zoom in and out of your time line.

  • Sequences: Adding clips: 10m 13s

So here we are in a project. And we've got some media. I've got a little bit of audio. Some P2 media I've imported, and some video clips. And these are all PAL DV 25 frames per second DV clips. I've also got a little bit of material of some people doing BMX stunts. I can't stress enough how important it is to organise your media before you start cutting. It can be very very difficult to stay on top of where your media is and which sequence you're working on. If you have a lot of media and complex project.

One of my little rules of conduct is that I make a folder for myself, so I'm going to right-click, New folder. Call this Master Sequence, into which I right-click and choose New Sequence. And I just call this new sequence, Master Sequence as well. And this just avoids any possible confusion about what I'm working on and which sequence is which. Now, you'll notice that if I rename the sequence in the Asset Bin, I can double click to reopen it. Let's just get rid of this one.

My Master Sequence has not renamed the tab. It's still called Sequence 2. And this is just one of those things with EDIUS that if you want to update both, you can do so by right-clicking on the sequence tab. And my menus appearing off screen here but I'm choosing Sequence Settings and in here I can type in a new sequence name. Let's say I'll call this just Sequence so you can see what happens. If I press Enter now, that's updated but the bin entry still isn't.

There's a shortcut that I can take to rename the sequence in the timeline as well. And that's to right double-click, not left double-click, but use the right-hand mouse button to double-click on the tab. And if I now name that Master, there we are, we're updated. So there is this discontinuity between the item in the bin and the item on the timeline. But they are the same item, they are the same sequence. Now that we have a sequence into which we can put some clips. And the sequence is our program, it is our output, we can start work.

So I'm going to go to my video bin here, my folder in the Asset bin. And I'm going to pick a shot and maybe. Maybe I'd just go through this shot here from the ground. This is the opening of this music video. Now, one way I can do this is to drag and drop. So I can grab the clip, drag it into for example a video audio track and if I just Zoom Out a little bit, you can see I've got the whole clip. Now normally, the way you'd edit, if I just move along a little bit. Is you would open the clip by double clicking on it, or dragging and dropping it into the Player Monitor and then you would have a look at it.

You would play backSOUND or you can use the Job Control or the Shuffle Control to. A large part of the editing process is just going to be looking at things and making creative choices about it. If I decide that I'm happy with part of this, maybe from about here, I'll mark an in point. Now, I'm just going to resize my monitor windows here,so you can see all of the buttons at the bottom of the display, there we go. So, I've got a mark in and a mark out button set in and set out.

You'll notice that throughout the EDIUS interface, there are buttons that are also menus. And you can tell these because that got a little downward triangle next to them. If I go to the Set In Point drop-down menu, I actually get a couple of other options. I can set an in point which sets an in point for both the video and the audio, or I can set a video only in point or an audio only in point. And the idea with this is that you can have offset edits where you're taking, perhaps one section of the video and another section of the audio. To be honest I think I find it easier to do this on the timeline.

I don't usually have the patience to click on the drop-down menu and choose that extra option. Of course you could assign a keyboard shortcut if you wanted to, but maybe I'm too lazy. I'm going to mark and in point and then let's scrub through near and about there, I'm going to mark an out point. Now that I've done that, I've identified a region of the clip that I want to use in my sequence. The darker gray portion is the unused section. Lighter grey portion is the used section. Now, when I edit this into my sequence. I'm not going to be completely rejecting the unused portions.

Their not lost, their still connected and available via process called Trimming. Another little thing here is I've got a Zoom Control. This is really useful for long clips. If I click this on. Now, the distance between the left end and the right end of this little navigator panel is the distance between my in and out marks. If I click it again, I'm back out, I'm seeing the whole clip. Right now, this is a pretty short clip. It doesn't seem like that big of deal. But take my word for it, when you are working with an hour of media in this window, it can be very, very useful. Now if I grab, from the center of this picture, and drop this clip into my timeline, there we are, I've just got that portion. And you'll notice that at the end of the previous clip, the little triangles on the video and audio.

That's telling me that I'm at the end of the clip. I've got all of it on my timeline. The version I've just added to my sequence doesn't have those triangles. And that's because I've got some media still available. If I want to access that media, I'll just drag over to the right here a little bit. I can easily add it by hovering over the edge of the clip, clicking and dragging to the right. Or, for that matter, I can drag to the left and remove some more of it. If I drag right out to the end here you see I can't go any further. If I let go and click, now there are my triangles under the end of the clip.

So, this is real simple trimming on the timeline. Now, If I drag and drop, I'm just going to open another shot up here. I'm just going to choose a small portion of this. I'm pressing the I key on my keyboard and the O key on my keyboard to mark an out point. If I drag that shot into the center of this clip, you can see I get a highlight to show me how long a clip is, and how much it's going to displace media on the timeline. There are two ways that I can do this. If I just drag and drop using the mouse in the way I'm doing now and let go. Everything moves out of the way.

What I've done is insert this clip into the center of the existing clip. I've dropped it into the timeline, and it's pushed everything out of the way. Now, because I've got my Sync Locks turned on for all of my tracks, that's going to move every track together. And I'm going to keep sync throughout my sequence. So that 's kind of a good thing, that's an easy way of doing it. If I undo that I'm just going to press Ctrl+Z or I can press the Undo button on the timeline, or the Redo button on the timeline here. Let's just go along the time line I'm going to move my edit line my current time indicator a bit further forward. I can change this behavior by toggling the time from insert mode to overwrite mode.

Now, you need to be really clear about these two modes. You can edit things in this way, you can drag and drop things in this way, and you can remove things this way. If I now grab the clip and drop it into the timeline. You'll notice that I don't get all of those triangles telling me the things are going to be pushed along. If I let go, you can see the clip hasn't got any longer, my timeline has stayed the same duration. And I've actually overwritten this segment of the original from the ground shop. You'll notice also that whenever you do an operation of this kind, you split the segments into pieces. So I now have three separate segments on the timeline. Not an original segment and one new.

I'm just going to undo a couple of steps to get that back altogether. Now, what we're looking at here is a pretty simple example of this kind of editing process. There are more complex versions particularly when you're moving things around in the timeline. It all comes down to these mode buttons here whether things are linked or not and what the insert mode is and so on. If I just Undo another level so I'm back to having a single clip, you can see that at the bottom of my player monitor, down here I've got an Overwrite to Timeline and an Insert to Timeline option.

So all I need to do to overwrite is click this button, and it's done. If I just Undo and Insert, it inserts. Now, you'll notice if I just Undo again, that if I hover over these, I get a keyboard shortcut in brackets. You see that's the right square bracket, that's the left square bracket. And I think this is a little bit counter-intuitive because of course, the buttons are on the left and right but it's the right-hand and left-hand keyboard button. That doesn't kind of make sense to me but I can press a bracket key to achieve the same thing if I just Undo as I would with those buttons. And using the keyboard for this kind of editing is far and away the most efficient way to edit.

One last little keyboard shortcut that's extremely useful is J, K and L. Now, you can get external jog shuttle controllers to control playback of EDIUS, both in the source player and in the recorder player. But in the source player here, if I press the L key on my keyboard, I get one times forward. Press it again I get two, again I get three, and so on. If I press K, the video pauses. If I press J multiple times, I get multiple times playback in reverse. Now, when you're first learning EDIUS, it can seem like there's an awful lot of keyboard shortcuts.

And I would probably just recommend for now that you start by knowing the Spacebar is play and stop. And J, K, L plays at multiple speeds. A really, really useful keyboard shortcut is J, K, L. So there you are, that's adding clips to the timeline. Essentially, most of the time your going to be positioning your current time indicator, pressing a button or a key to put a clip into the timeline. You'll notice that the edit there is lined up ready for next clip choose another shot. Take a look at it. Mark it with the I and the O keys and drop that one into the timeline and keep going all the way through. My last little tip is to avoid having really specific targeted In and Out marks on your clips.

It's much easier to make changes to the precise timing of your edits in context in your sequence on the timeline. Then it is to try and pre guess the flow and the rhythm of your edit from the source player. So my recommendation is to be very, very loose and wide with your In and Out marks. Be really generous with them and don't worry about the duration until you get into the Edit proper.

  • Sequences: Removing clips: 5m 21s

Removing clips from a sequence in EDIUS, is very much the same as adding clips, but in reverse. So, if I select a clip segment here, for example, and hit the Delete key, it's gone. Well, that's pretty straightforward. If I just undo that.Up here, I've got two Delete buttons on the timeline. One is a regular Delete and the other one is a Ripple Delete. Now, you'll notice that the Non-ripple Delete button, has a orange strike through the arrow going backwards. The Ripple Delete one doesn't. And just to compare the two. If I have the clip segment selected and hit the Delete button, same as pressing Delete key on the keyboard.

I'll just undo that. If I then do a Ripple Delete, notice what happens to these two clips further down the timeline, further later in time. They get moved up. I'll just undo that again. And I can achieve the same thing with the keyboard by holding down the Alt key and pressing the Delete key. And there we go, I've got the same thing, the same Ripple Delete. I'll just undo again. So, removing whole clips, pretty straightforward. I can also use In and Out marks, the same kind of In and Out marks that I would use to mark a section of a clip to include in a sequence.

I can use those marks to remove part of the sequence. And if I do this, it's based on the track selection buttons. These track headers on the far left of the timeline. So, first of all I'm going to mark an endpoint with the I key, and an outpoint with the O key. And if I just re size my playback monitors here a little bit so you can see, I've got the same controls in the player monitor here. This is, well the recorder monitor as it's called in EDIUS. This is my timeline contents. And all I need to do is have No Clips selected and then click on this.

This is the Scissors icon, and this is a cut. Notice this is Ctrl+X on the keyboard. And you might be familiar with Ctrl+X as a keyboard shortcut. This is the Cut command that you would have in Windows normally. And it behaves exactly the same way in EDIUS. So I'm going to click on the Scissors and I've got a gap. And I'll just Undo that. Now the question is, how do I remove part of the clip and not leave a gap? And this comes down to the Timeline mode which is this button at the top left-hand corner of the timeline.Right now I'm in Overwrite mode which means that things don't move around on the timeline. If I turn this into Insert mode and Deselect any clips. I've got my track selected.

I've got In and Out marks on the timeline. Doesn't really matter where my current time indicator is. If I now click on the Scissors, I get no gap. So, removing items from the timeline's pretty straightforward. I'll just Undo that with Ctrl+Z. If I have a clip on another track, let's just move this over and I've just taken a piece of audio off of that clip by moving it onto the Video Only track. This is a neat shortcut if you can't be bothered to separate the items out when you're editing. You can just put clips onto a VA track and then split them later.

Now, I've got two layers of video. You can see here I've got my foreground video, and if I drag left a bit, there's the background. So, I'm putting in a cutaway here. If I Deselect again and I'll just put this into Overwrite mode so you can see the gap left behind. If I now click on the Scissors, I get a gap just on the VA track. And the reason for that is I did not have the 2V track, you can have all of these tracks turned off and on easily enough, I did not have the 2V track turned on. I'll just Undo again with Ctrl+Z, turn on the 2V track only, click on the Scissors.

now what's happened? Well, what's happened is, I did not Deselect the clip. And this is an interesting feature of the way the timeline functions in EDIUS. And it'll catch you out a few times as it just caught me out. I'm just going to Undo again. The timeline has clipped segment priority. Which means that because I have this clip on, you can see I've got it highlighted, just as I can click on this one. That selection, the entire clip segment selection, overwrites the In and Out mark selection. So, there you are, now you know. If I click to Cut now, I loose that crossing shot, even though I've got In and Out marks.

And this is a little bit different to pretty much every editing system I know on the market. I'll just Undo again. So, if I want to make sure I remove just that part of the clip on the second video track, I click away first, and then click on the Scissors and I've lost that bit of a clip. Question is, how do I remove a part from more than one clip, more than one track cuz I want to leave a gap for the entire timeline. Well, if I just Ctrl+Z again to Undo, I can hold the Control key down.

So, I'm holding the Control key and click and now I've got both of these tracks selected. Now if I Deselect, because I had the, second video track clip selected there for a moment, and now click on the Scissors, everything is removed. In fact, that Control, selection option is standard in Windows. And another standard option works to, you can hold the Shift key down and selectLists of Tracks. So, if you select the Top Track first of all, and then hold down the Shift key and click on the Last Track, you'll get every track in your sequence. So, just Undo to bring that back.

And in fact there is a keyboard shortcut to remove the In and Out marks on the timeline and that's X, nice and easy to remember. So, that's removing items from a timeline.

  • Track patching: 3m 48s

Adding clips to a sequence and removing them again is pretty straight forward when your working on a single track. And that is what I've got here, four clips one after another on a video audio track and pretty straight forward to add things to that. By the by you can right-click on a track header and choose Rename and EDIUS will let you call a track anything you like. It's pretty handy when you're learning at least to begin by leaving the track name as it is. It helps you to see what kind of track you're working with. But what if I want to move things onto separate tracks. Perhaps I want to put the video from this source clip onto my 2V track and I want to put the audio down on the 1A track.

Well, I'm first of all just going to remove this title track because I'm not going to use titles in this sequence. So I've selected it with the Left Mouse button.I'm right-clicking and I'm choosing Delete Selected Tracks. There we go. Just going to resize my interface a little bit. So you can see more clearly what's going on. And I want to have, just focus on these Source Track buttons. At the top I've got a V button to turn on and off any video tracks and an A button to turn off and on any A tracks. And you might wonder, well why have I got the V button I only got one down here anyway. Well that's because if I want to, I can put a sequence in the player monitor here and I can then have potentially five or six video tracks.

I can turn them all off and on with this button. Now, if I want to drag this clip into the timeline to separate it onto different tracks, that's fine. I can click and drag onto this 2V track and automatically EDIUS, if I zoom in a little bit.Oops, the other way. Automatically EDIUS puts the audio onto the 1A track. Now if I wanted to do this with the keyboard, it would be a rather different affair. All I need to do is click and drag the source V button, which is the source video channel, up until its next to my 2V track.

There we go. And if I want to bring the audio down to my audio 1 and 2 tracks. I can click and drag that down and if I want to split the audio so that it is across those two tracks, I need to right-click and choose audio source channel stereo. There's not much difference on this menu when the buttons are split or when they're together, but you'll notice I've got a stereo icon there.If I select that and then right-click again you'll see it's a mono icon. It's a pretty small difference but you can see it. Now I've got my source audio one and audio two split to different tracks.

And if I click one of these buttons, there we go, straight onto the timeline as separate tracks. Now you could be forgiven for thinking, what's the point? Surely it's easy enough for me to just use the mouse and drag and drop things everywhere, and that is completely fine, it's a perfectly good way of editing. But you'll find as you become increasingly familiar with the audio interface, that it's quicker to use the keyboard shortcuts if you possibly can. And so in this case for example, I could use the right bracket key and there we go, I've added the clip. And using the keyboard in this way really is a dramatic time saver.

Another thing about track patching is of course, I don't have to have my audio tracks lined up with the equivalent timeline tracks. I can bring my audio one down here if I'd like, or for that matter if I click to turn off audio two and now I edit the clip onto the timeline I'm just getting the audio one. Now you'll notice here, I think, that I just clicked the button to add the clip to the timeline, but my number four audio track was switched off. And there are other edit systems on the market that use the track headers as a sort of record enable.

And that's not the case with EDIUS. With EDIUS, it's the track, selection buttons for the source that define whether or not something is added to the timeline. Conversely, the track headers are used for removing items from the timeline. So that's track patching. A nice, simple example here, a source video clip with two audio tracks and quite a small timeline. But it's exactly the same principle when you work with more complex sequences.

  • Moving clips in a sequence: 2m 40s

In just the same way that adding clips to your sequence and removing them depends on this Insert, Override mode at the top of the timeline. The same thing applies when you're moving things around. So here I'm in Override mode. If I grab this crossing shot. And drag this over the, from the ground shot. Now let's look at a highlight and you'll also notice that the clip snaps to the edges of things. This snapping is if I just put this back. It's a feature of this button up here. This turns on Snap To event.

And if I put the user preference. There are options for what will and won't snap.If I turn this off I can just drag this very, very gradually across anything and it doesn't jump into position. Sometimes you're going to want it, sometimes your not. And if I want to have it switched off generally as I do now but temporarily snap, I can hold the shift key down and I get the same feature. So a lot of editors like to have that off anyway because there's no great cost to hold the shift key down every now and then. But generally speaking I think I'm kind of lazy I tend to have this turned on.

So, I am going to turn on snapping and I'm going to grab this shot and drag it onto the clip. And as you can probably guess, this is just going to leave a gap where it was and overwrite the shot that's there. I'm just going to undo that. Now, if I instead turn on the insert mode and do the same thing. Now everything shuffles around, and I've moved one shot into the space and pushed the other one out of the way. And that means there's no gap, and I can shuffle things around to my heart's content this way. When you're working on your assembly edit, which is the first phase of your edit generally, you'll be using this option a lot because it's a very quick way of moving things around.

You can still separate them out. They're not tied together. But if you do drag things around, it'll all shuffle around quite neatly. You can of course very easily move things to other tracks. And you'll notice though if I put this back down of course I've lost the audio because I put that clip on video only track. I can also Lasso clips and move them around together. But notice if I move this clip up to the V2 track, I leave a gap. Which is not quite the same as I would expect if I was removing it perhaps by clicking on the (INAUDIBLE) delete button.

Now if I just put that back again I've lost the audio. See what happens when I do the same thing without my sync locks turned on. If I click and drag the clip up. Everything moves along and this is because the sink locks are there to prevent you losing the relative positions of the clips on the timeline. I'll just undo that.

  • Timeline modes: 5m 46s

Just to finish off getting used to using the timeline for our editing, let's have a quick run over each of these buttons at the top left-hand corner. We know that the Insert Overwrite button here toggles between things moving around each other, or things not moving around each other, but what about this one, Set Ripple mode? This is kind of interesting. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit more, so you can see I've got a shot here called, Standing at Bridge and three more clips after it. I've also got a piece of music running along the bottom of this for this music video.

First thing I'm going to do here, is turn off the audio from the sync sound, cuz that's just going to get very muddy and confusing. Now, while I'm in overwrite mode, if I grab this Standing Up Bridge shot. Let's move my timeline marker out of the way for a second. If I clip this and drag it up onto my two v track.Well I should expect, I get a gap left behind. But I drag this back into position, that's fine. If I now go into Insert mode and do the same thing, well, I still get a gap.

Now, in this instance, the reason I'm still getting a gap is, because althoughI'm in Insert mode, and I would expect these clips to shuffle down to fill the gap, I'm also in Sync mode. I have got my sync logs on for all of my tracks.You can turn these off and on individually, but it's easy enough to turn them off and on altogether with the button at the top. If I Undo, let's just go back and back and back. There we go. If I turn off my sync clocks, and now move the clip, everything moves. So the Insert and Overwrite modes affect everything, and the sync clocks can prevent some of the Insert mode behaviors.

They can stop things sliding around. In fact, the same would apply whether I had the music underneath or not. This isn't just about maintaining sync between items that go beyond the clips you're working on, but just every relative position of things on the timeline. You can remove whole sections of the timeline, but not just a part. Just going to Undo to put that back. And this is where the second button comes into play. This is the Set Ripple mode, which I can toggle off, I can toggle on. So, if I'm in Insert mode, this has no bearing on the Overwrite mode, but if I'm in Insert mode, and I have the Ripple mode turned on and my sync locks are off. Now I get this behavior that we'd expect.

If I turn off Ripple mode and move, I don't get things moving down the timeline, even though my sync locks are off. I can still shuffle things around. Here's a clip. It shuffles things around in position, but what won't happen, is that gaps will not be automatically deleted, and that's all this Ripple mode really does. If there's a gap, will it, or will it not be deleted? If I just Lasso a few clips here and drag them over to get them out of the way, you'll see I also have a Delete Gap option, there we go.

By right-clicking. And that achieves the same effect as the Ripple mode. Very, very straightforward really. What confuses some people, I think, is that it's the combination of these two modes plus the sync locks that defines the behavior of the clips on the timeline. So if you find that the timeline is not behaving as you expect it to, just double-check what's going with these two buttons. And whether you've got your sync locks on or off. I'll just Undo again, let's get this all back to the way it was, my sync locks on.

The last thing to show you with these is this button here. This is the Set Group Link mode. Right now by default, this clip for example, has video and audio, although I've got the audio turned off, let's turn it back on. And it has this mixer track, which is for adjusting the overall visibility of the clip. Now, if I click away so I've got nothing selected, and then select this clip, you'll see I'm getting the video and the audio, and I can move them together on my timeline. Fine. I'll just click away and turn off this Set Group Link mode button. If I now click on the clip, you'll notice that I'm getting just the video and if I move it, it still moves together, but I can make adjustments just based on the video part of the clip.

Like, for example, here's the audio selected. Hitting Delete just removes the audio. Just Ctrl+Z to Undo that. Jumping back to my position of my edit line.Now this might not seem so significant, but it becomes more significant when you begin trimming your clips. If I just turn that back off again, and select my clip, I can click on the edge and drag and adjust the end point of that clip on the timeline. That's great. But what if I just want to trim part of the clip? Well, if I turn this mode off and click and drag, now I'm just working on the video.

So this is a mode that I don't tend to toggle off and on that often. Even with it on, I can hold down the Alt key as I am now, to achieve the same effect. But you do need to be careful when you do this, that you don't keep the Alt key held down as I have done here, because the result is you're just adding the other part of the clip. I'm just doing an individual selection I suppose, of part of the clip and I've just added to that selection. You need each time to click away, then hold the Alt key down as I am now, then click and drag. And you're working on individual parts of the clip. So that's Insert and Overwrite for the overall editing mode, the Ripple mode to deal with any gaps that are left behind.

The Set Group Link mode that automatically selects or does not automatically select the whole part of the clip, and the Snapping is for having things jump into position frame accurately on the timeline.

  • Trimming: 10m 58s

As well as being able to add clips to sequences and remove clips from sequences and move clips around sequences, we can also make changes to the in and out marks that we've assigned. The magic of shortcuts that are used in here as clips is that they're not really necessarily going to point to the entire item on the hard drive. They could also selectively show parts of a clip. Now here I've got an example on the timeline. I've got our singer, and we are just going to turn the audio off so that I can scrub through this, and you can hear. So he's moving right to left on the camera and there he is. And I know I've got the entire clip because I've got these little triangles at the ends to show me that I'm on the last frame for that piece of media. Now, I could have put in and out marks in the source panel, and I could have therefore had just part of the clip on the timeline to begin with. But I have to say that, particularly for file-based camera systems where you're only going to get a bit before the action and a bit after the action anyway, I very often just put the whole thing down on the timeline to begin with. Now one way I could remove part of this clip would be to press I for in point, and o for out point, and deselect, so I don't have the whole clip selected, and then I could extract with this scissors here, and, and lose part of the clip. That's why we're doing it that works.

I'll just Undo that. And there's a little shortcut tip here by the way. That if you double-click on the time code bar along the top of the timeline, this is the hours, minutes, seconds, and frames of the sequence. If I double-click above a clip, I get in and out marks that exactly cover it. I can then press I to mark an in point, or I can click on the mark end button on my recorder monitor here, and again then I can cut this and again, I've had the whole clip segment selected, I need to undo, Ctrl Z, click away, and now I can use the in and out marks.

Now if we just Undo again. It's very easy to get caught out by having the clip segment selected when you really want to use the in and out marks. And what will catch you out the most is that, even if you deselect when you make adjustments on the timeline, very often Edius will automatically select a clip.And then you'd be stuck again. So keep an eye out for that. Of course, you've always got the great power of Undo to fix things. I'm just going to press the X key to remove those in and out marks. And I want to show you trimming in a little bit of detail here, so you get a sense of what's going on. First of all, here's my clip segment playing from beginning to end and if I just want to just very quickly adjust where this clip ends, I can click and drag, and there you go.

I've now got a shorter portion of that clip. Now, the media hasn't gone anywhere. I still have access to it and if I want to, I can click and drag again and there you go, I've got the whole clip again. Really, I think this is the most powerful single feature that non-linear editing systems have to offer. If you look at film editing and linear videotape editing, this is just particularly unique to nonlinear editing systems. It's a really powerful feature. It just lets you change your mind very, very quickly. Same thing happens at the beginning of the clip. I can click and drag, and I've adjusted the contents. So this is making an adjustment directly on the timeline. Now, as you would imagine, this feature depends upon your timeline mode for its functionality.

So I'm just going to drag this clip over so it connects with the previous clip, so you can see what happens when I'm on an edit. Now right now, I'm in Overwrite mode, which means that the Ripple mode's not going to do anything. If I click and drag to the left, I'm going to shorten the clip on the left of the edit, and extend the clip on the right of the edit. That makes pretty good sense, I think. And it's worth noting that I am extending the beginning, I'm not moving this second clip. I'm unrolling a portion of the clip that wasn't previously available.

Notice if I do the same thing to the right, there's a limit to how far I can go, and that limit is set because I don't have any handles left. The leftover media that you don't include from a clip in a sequence is called handles. It's a very old term now for nonlinear editors. Now you'll notice, perhaps, that as I'm clicking, I'm clicking exactly on the join here and I'm getting a two-way handle icon, this orange icon. If I click and drag, I'm trimming the edit. And let's just go back again. If instead, I click just to the left of the edit, you'll see I get a bracket that's just going in one direction.

This is a kind of minimalist version of a film cutting symbol from the old film editing days. If I click and drag now, I'm just editing the end of the first clip. And I'm leaving a gap. I'll just click and drag back. Now, if I go back into Insert mode and do the same thing, everything moves down the timeline. But now, moving this second shot to fill the gap I'll just move back again. As you will probably guess, if I turn off the Ripple mode, which is all about removing unwanted space, even though I'm in Insert mode, if I click and drag, I get a gap. So, Ripple mode only really behaves in that way if both the Ripple mode is on, and the Insert mode is on.

Let's just move this back. Oh, but I can't, because Ripple mode also pushes gaps out of the way. So if I just Undo, by having Insert mode and Ripple mode on, if I click and drag, I'm going to push everything out of the way together, which is no good at all. If I go now into Overwrite mode, of course the Ripple mode becomes irrelevant, and I can close the gap. Now if I want really detailed control of my trimming, I can go into a dedicated trim window. And I can get there either by going to the mode menu and choosing Trimming mode. And you'll notice there's an F6 keyboard shortcut for this. Or just by double-clicking on an edit.

Now this might catch you out. The Trimming window looks very, very similar to the source and record monitors, which have been replaced by it. But it is very different. You'll notice straight away that my cursor is now this big kind of orange high beam thing and as I click and drag, I'm now trimming the edit. There's a limit to how much I can trim here because of the handles. I can't trim all the way to the right, but I can trim to the left, that's because I don't have any handles beyond the edit for the first clip. I do have them for the second clip.

And I can change mode very, very easily by clicking on these buttons down here. So I can trim the right side of the edit. There you go. That's fine. And I can trim the left side of the edit. Well, within reason. There we go, and I'm leaving a gap of course, because I've got my Overwrite mode on. Let's just close that gap again. Good. Now, the benefit of using the dedicated Trimming mode window like this isn't because you can click and drag, because you could do that anyway.

The real benefit comes in these small incremental adjustments. You can make small adjustments here, you can loop player for the edit and watch the cut, see how it looks. If you're happy with it, fine. If you're not happy with it, make an adjustment and it'll loop play and loop play indefinitely. You can also go to the previous edit. And the next edit. There's also a couple of very special modes here, which are absolutely unique to nonlinear editing systems.

Here, I've got Slip mode, and if I click on that, you'll see I get these trim handles, these markers, on both ends of the same clip. If I click now and drag, you see I get a four way split. There's nothing in the fourth panel here, cuz I don't have a clip after it. Over on the left, I've got the previous clip. The second item is the beginning of this clip. The third item is the end of this clip. And then the beginning of the next clip. If I now click and drag, what I'm getting is an adjustment of the contents of this clip, but no other changes on the timeline.

Equally, but in reverse, if I do this roll trim, and now click, I'm going to adjust the position of the clip on the timeline. And I'm replacing. You can see down here, where it's moving the clip over the top of the previous clip. I'm moving this in time. So this gives me very, very detailed control of the position and the endings and beginnings of the clips I have on the timeline. To be honest, you'll probably get the most from the Trimming Window by opening it up yourself and clicking on everything, and seeing what the results are in a sequence, so I'll leave you to do that.

The one thing that you really need look out for is this. If you click on the X at the top right-hand corner of either the monitor windows or the Trimming tool window, you're going to exit the application. You see I get tool tip there to tell me. If you want to close just the trimming panels here and go back to the regular source player and recorder player, you click on the large X at the bottom right-hand corner. And now we're back to our regular interface. So that's just an introduction to Trimming in Edius.

Look out for what happens if you have clips on multiple tracks. It's easy for you to Lasso and Trim multiple clips all at once. Let me get my tracks selected here. There we go. You just hold down the Ctrl key and select the ends of the clips. And you can select them if they're off-cut. This is an L cut. You can select them. There we go. With the Ctrl key.

In any direction. In fact, you can add Trimming handles anywhere you like with the Ctrl key. I can click and click and click anywhere I want. And also note what happens if you are in Insert mode. If I just move this clip over a little bit. There we go. If I have my sync locks on and I extend the clip by just hovering over the beginning of the clips, so I've got single direction trim here. If I click and drag, see what's happening to the other clip there, the follow head and shoulders shot? The reason that's moving is to maintain the relationship between the end of this clip and the beginning of this clip to make sure that they maintain their relative positions on the timelines. The sync locks have kicked in and they're introducing a gap. Now the sync locks are a great idea, because they protect you in this way. But they could also cause problems, because you might not want a gap there. So keep an eye out for them and as you get further into the editing process, you might decide from time to time to turn them off. So that's trimming with Edius 6.