Little Frog in Hi Def by Shane Ross

OK, here’s a little follow up to my Media Composer 6 review.  In that review I mentioned that you could label your clips via a small palette of colors.  Well, there is actually a way to open up that choice of colors…to get to the full color palette including the Color Wheel and Crayon options.  All you need to do is Option+Command+click (or Opt+Cmd+CNTRL click if you use a trackpad) to have access to the full color options:

So now you can make clips a putrid split pea green if you wanted.

NOW, onto the AMA tip.

So, you might want to bring in some footage via AMA and work with it natively…alongside your other Avid media. (People have indicated that they have done this, or plan on doing this…so they don’t waste time transcoding). So you now have a mixed bag of Avid media and AMA footage. And then you get to a point where, for some reason, you need to transcode only the AMA footage. There are several reasons for wanting or needing to do this. There are some things that don’t quite work right with a timeline full of AMA footage. Avid has fixed a bunch of these issues, but others might still be in the wings.

ANYWAY…so you’d like to track this footage. How can you tell which footage in the sequence is AMA, and what is not? The answer to this is simple…Color all the AMA clips a certain color. Make it that ugly split-pea color if you want to…or bright pink so they stand out. Just give them a unique color, and then they will appear in the timeline with that color. Even if you do this after you edit them into the timeline:  read more...