Organize your Avid Media Composer Project by Story Beats

Every week, Frame.io Insider asks certainly one of our knowledgeable contributors to share a tip, software, or method that they use on a regular basis and couldn’t dwell with out. This week, Chris Tennant shares how one can optimize your Avid Media Composer mission by story beats.

Organizing your Avid Media Composer mission by story beats

By default, Avid kinds footage alphabetically in bins, which is probably not the simplest method to set up your scene bins. Instead, you may need to take into account organizing your bins by story beats to extra simply perceive the circulation of a scene and the way it all goes collectively.

First, change your bin to Frame View Mode utilizing the management on the high of the bin. You’ll see thumbnails for all of your clips. You can zoom in or out on the thumbnails utilizing the slider on the high of the bin, or through the use of Ctrl/Cmd+Okay or L.

If you’ve simply introduced on this footage, you’re in all probability taking a look at a bunch of slates in your thumbnails—not very useful! Advance your clips’ thumbnails by deciding on all of them and holding the keyboard shortcut for Step Forward 8 Frames. (By default, that is the two key.)

Get organized

Drag these clips round into clusters that match your scene’s tough story beats. For instance, my scene begins with an establishing shot earlier than going into shot/reverse shot protection of two actors. A 3rd character seems in direction of the top of the scene, and the scene ends with a large tableau shot of everyone.