ProVideo Coalition by Steve Hullfish

Tips for Avid Editors

One of the most useful things I ever did as I began to master the Avid user interface was – I know this will be hard to believe – read the manual. Actually I read EVERY word of EVERY manual. The folks at the Avid Technical Publications department can confirm this, because I sent them many pages of corrections for which they sent me an actual one-of-a-kind “Deputy Tech Pubs” badge. Geeky? Yes. Should YOU actually read the manuals? Of course not! That’s what this series is intended to prevent!
Anyway, when I read the manuals, I was already quite proficient at editing on Avid and thought that I knew pretty much everything I needed to know. I was mistaken. There were all kinds of little timesavers and tips that I found in the manuals. I called them “Hidden Gems.” While many people know some of these gems, there are a lot of people who may benefit from some of them, so to start out, I’ll go back to a list of my favorites from the old manuals. I’ll start looking through the latest manuals for tips to share about the most recent release of Media Composer as well. I’ll try to write a new “Avid Hidden Gems” column every week. I’ll keep each article to five “gems” so that you can try out one a day. read more...