You can still edit predominantly with the mouse, but if you take the time to familiarise yourself with the keyboard layout, you’ll appreciate the benefits in the long run. So much so in fact that the keyboard itself is fully mappable and customisable. In our experience, this really depends on how powerful your computer’s CPU is, but it is a welcome addition nonetheless.Ī lot of the navigation and editing seems to work better via the keyboard. Put simply, you can playback your sequence while working on other sections of the interface, such as creating bins, moving windows around, or soloing or muting audio tracks none of this should stop playback. Media Composer has a feature Avid calls Live Timeline. Media Composer grants you access to 24 video tracks and 64 audio tracks, enabling you to create quite complex sequences.
EditingĪs you’d expect, all the tools you need to cut your movie are available to you, and the experience is similar to other video editing software. From there, you can double-click on a clip to preview it, set in and out points and add your selection to the Timeline.Ī quick peek at the main editing interface, looking pretty much like any other video editing application. You can put your imported footage into bins (aka folders), helping you organise yourself as you gather up the resources you need to create your project. Media Composer also handles EDL imports as well as layered Photoshop files, among many other formats. Transcoding/converting the imported footage can take a while though.
Any media already stored on one of your drives can be added to Media Composer in the same way, although you can choose to either import the footage or merely link to it - the latter saves space but you need to make sure that drive is kept connected in order to edit with your chosen media (which is why linking is never recommended when importing footage from a camcorder - for this software or any other video editing package). If your camera records to an internal hard drive, hook it up and use the Source Browser to import the footage.
If you work with a tape deck, you can connect it to your computer and log and capture the footage. Importing media can be done in a variety of ways.