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More Avid Media Composer for the Final Cut Pro Editor

EDLs and lists

Believe it or not there’s still often the need to generate an Edit Decision List today. If there’s a way to use a more modern and robust list to move a job from offline to online then by all means forget about the EDL but on occasion you may need to generate one. In FCP it’s File > Export > EDL. A pop-up dialog box give you options like what type of list to generate, what types of information and comments you want to include, what the starting timecode should be if it’s different from the sequence timecode and how to handle the audio.

In Avid an EDL is generated via the Output > EDL menu and that launches it’s own application, the EDL Manager:

The Avid EDL Manager displaying a small, 3 clip edit

Avid has always been strong at it’s metadata managment and offline to online workflow and you can see that the EDL Manager is a very feature rich application with quite a few more EDL options that the FCP EDL export:

The EDL Manager settings display one of the four tabs

If the EDL manager crashes upon trying to open it directly from within Avid, one option is to open the EDL Manager from the Finder and then choose File > Open Bin. Navigate to the appropriate bin and the EDL Manager will prompt you to open a sequence. This has pretty much always worked when the EDL Manager crashed from within Media Composer.

There’s also the option to create an Avid sequence from an EDL via the EDL manager under the File > Create Composer Sequence. In FCP this is handled with the Import > EDL menu command but if you’re exchanging FCP sequences you’re going to use an XML if you can’t exchange a project directly. Avid can also generate AAF and AFE files for sending to various online work stations. The are created by the File > Export and then clicking the Options button:

There you can choose an AAF or AFE as well as any number of different outputs.

Deleting media

When you’re done with an edit and you want to clear off all of the media and renders to free up drive space it’s usually a step through several different tools or command in FCP. The Render Manager is where you can clear off old renders on a per-sequence basis. To delete the media from master clips the editor might select all the clips in a project and use the Modify > Make Offline command that will allow you to delete the media from disk, leave the media on the disk but take the clips offline or move the media to the trash. In Avid these tasks are accomplished through the Media Tool; Tools > Media Tool. The Media Tool is kind of a central clearing house for all of the media you bring into Avid. Unlike FCP, Avid will copy all media into its designated media folders on the media drives, unless you are using the new AMA architecture. The media isn’t kept in individual folders per project like FCP so there’s no way to dig into the media folders in the Macintosh Finder to delete media. It might seem like a very hap-hazard way to manage media by throwing everything into a single folder or two as opposed to organizing media by project but Avid uses a very sophisticated database to track the media.

When you open the Avid Media Tool you specify what Avid projects you want the Media Tool to load media from and what hard drive volumes:

Then you can choose what media to load; media from the master clips, pre-computes which is Avid’s term for renders or Media Files for the individual media files. The Media Files option will really break the media down. For example, a video clip with stereo audio is really 3 media files; the video track and two individual audio files. You can choose to load all of these different media files at once or, say, only the pre-computes. The Media Tool is a very organized overview of all of the media that lives on your Avid media drives, being able to view by project, drive or both. Once the Media Tool has found the media you can load and edit media right from the media tool or drag clips into the bin of a project. It looks just like a regular bin with the title Media Tool and you can use your saved column headings to examine the media. It can be particularly useful to sort by the Drive and Project columns while in the Media Tool to see where a project’s media files are located and what project clips are associated with.

Once you’ve found media you want to delete then you select it and hit the delete key. You’ll get a pop-up dialog box that looks like this:

This is a handy thing to have in that you can delete only the audio associated with a clip (and vice versa) and leave the video behind. This isn’t possible when deleting clips right out of a bin via the delete key as you only get this option:

As you can see, deleting directly from the bin won’t allow you to only delete the audio or video from a clip but it will allow you to leave the offline master clip behind, handy if you need to recapture later. The offline clip is only a tiny pointer file anyway so there’s not really a good reason to delete them as you never know when you might need to return to a project.

You can also use the Avid Hardware tool (Tools > Hardware) to get “fuel gauge” type view of all your hard drives and how much space is available:

Wrap up

If you’re coming to Avid as a completely new user, you can see that a lot of the tools, functions and commands are very similar. Often they are somewhat similar commands with buttons and menus in different places. Some functions Avid handles better, IMHO, and for some it’s FCP. It’s great to have the free 30 day Avid Media Composer demo so a new user can download the software and hopefully find some use in this guide as well as the first Avid Media Composer for Final Cut Pro Editors article when trying to learn the basic of Media Composer. Happy editing!

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