ftp://support02.avid.com/KCAvid/XPDV_QR_WIN_3_5.pdf
These were posted on the Avid board, some will help, some will be forgot.
1 . In the timeline, when you select a clip and press ctrl and alt and c, it will copy the clip to the clipboard and automatically load it into the source monitor
2. You can move the order of tracks around in the timeline by holding ctrl and dragging on the icon for V1, A1 etc. I've moved my timecode track in bewteen the video and audio tracks, very useful.
3. By stepping into an effect using the step in/out arrow buttons you can easliy change a shot without having to re-create the fx again that was applied on the old clip.
4. By stepping into an effect using the step in/out arrow buttons you can more easily build nested effects and manage then. I had always used the double click method of nesting, this other way I find to be allot more useful.
5. Slipping in trim mode. I had never used this before, very good method of changing the in point of a shot without having to load it into the source monitor with match frame, find the in point, etc.
6. Sliding in trim mode. Easy way of moving a shot while looking at the new point it will be in in real time.
7. In the source or record monitor, when you type a number, for example + 30 to go ahead 30 frames, it will remember the last amount entered. If you want to go ahead or back in the same amount again just hit enter.
8. In the FX editor, you can restore a paramenter to it's default by alt and clicking the monitor icon for the effect.
9. If you want to use a template you saved but just want the scale paramater for example, open the fx editor for the new clip, grab the icon from the bin and drag it to the scale section of the effect on the clip. Then just the scale keyframes will be added. VERY sweet!
10. The TAB key will move down to the next slider in the FX editor. Shift tab will move up.
11. To open the setting for a particular area like the timeline, enable the timeline and press ctrl and =, it will open the setting for whatever the active window is. Nice.
12. Use the fast forward and rewind buttons to jump to the next keyframe in the fx editor.
1. When in the FX Editor, hold ctrl to get the magnifying glass.
2. In the FX Editor, when moving a clip around, holding alt will give you a live update, as opposed to wire frame.
3. Transition Corner Display - excellent way to see all the needed frames to adjust a transition without guessing.
4. You can move one field at a time in the timeline, there is a step forward and backward one field icon in the command palette. I've mapped this to my shift 3 and 4 keys. Previously I always went into the FX editor to view fields.
5. Hold down the alt key while dragging an effect icon to auto-nest onto a clip that already has an effect.
5. alt and Step in or Step Out button will enter expanded nesting in the timeline.
6. Using the Fade Effect (rather than a dissolve) will add keyframes to your shot to fade it up and/or down. This great! I would usually open the shot in the FX Editor (it would usually have a 3D Warp on it) and add the keyframes manually. With Fade Effect you don't need to do this, and you can add it to many tracks at once, just have them enabled and your position indicator over them.
7. To add a track number higher than what would come next (like going from V1 to V4) hold alt and ctrl and y, you will get a dialoge that asks what track number you want to add.
8. Too add comments in the clip on the timeline (this is NOT locators), select the clip in the timeline, goto the composer monitor and click, choose add comments and type away. You might need to expand the track to see the comments. Make sure in the timeline fast menu you have selected clip text > comments.
9. A quick way of expanding tracks, hold ctrl and your mouse will turn into arrows, click and drag to change the size.
10. Do you hate it when you zoom into your timeline and it wraps around to show 3 levels? In the timeline fast menu, deselect wrap around.
1. When in the title tool, you can toggle between the the selection tool and the text tool by hitting alt, much better then going down and re-selecting each tool with the mouse
2. In the title tool, place your courser between 2 letters of a word and hold alt while tapping on the left or right arrow keys to change the spacing between characters.
3. In the title tool, you can save "styles", which are different than templates. A style is a font size, colour, drop shadow, etc. You can apply the style before or after you type.
4. Holding down alt while dragging clips to another bin will copy them rather then move them.
For a long time I've had trouble getting a clean chroma key from Avid, I've used After Effects to get a clean key. Well, here's how to get a nice clean key out of Avid.
1. Use the keyer in the 3D Warp rather than the regular chroma key (sorry Xpress DV users). Start by selecting the colour to key out.
2. Adjust the s-low until you see no change, at that point stop moving the slider, don't go past where no change occurs, this priciple is relevant to all of these steps.
2. Adjust the hue tolerance until you see no change.
3. Adjust the s-low again to get as clean a key as you can.
4. Next enable erode expand, change the filter to 7 to start with. This tool will erode/expand the edge of the key, adjust the center and softness it to your liking.
5. Probably there is some green (or blue) spill on your subject. Enable spill supression. Select "use key color" in the first section this is the colour that will be replaced. Then select "replace color" and pick the colour you want to fill the spill with. Increase the gain and softness as desired and voila, a nice clean key.
During any of these steps you can select "show alpha" in the initial window to see a good b&w view of how clean your key is.
1. Using the mouse shuttle and mouse jog keys (; and n, both mappable) while moving the mouse is a good way to have a VTR like style of scrolling through footage.
2. While ctrl and click will snap to the first frame of a clip, ctrl and alt and click will snap to the tail of a clip.
3. ctrl and m and click and lasso in the timeline will zoom into the selected portion.
4. ctrl and j zooms out of the timeline.
5. alt plus click and dragging on an in or out point allows you to move them freely in the source or record monitors, doesn't work in the timeline.
6. Holding shift while scolling in the timeline gives you an audio scrub.
7. In trim mode, shift clicking will add or remove rollers in the timeline by clicking on the appropriate trim side.
8. In the trim settings, intermission is the amount of time it will pause in between playback loops.
9. To trim on the fly, when the trim is playing back mark an in or out and the trim will update.
10. To solo a video or audio track, ctrl click monitor icon in timeline, it will turn green.
11. In the timeline, the audio tracks that have a "golden speaker" in the monitor tracks are the ones that will playback when scrubbing. To change which ones you are listening to in the scrub alt click the audio monitor icon.
12. When in trim mode, if you hold ctrl while dragging it will snap to the next edit in the timeline.
13. When in trim mode, double click on the clip to enter into slip mode.
14. When in trim mode, alt and double click to enter into slide mode.
1. In the various timecode views, abs stands for absolute. This indicates the beggining of the clip to the position indicator, regardless of in and out points.
2. In the various timecode views, rem stands for remaining. This indicates the end of the clip to the position indicator, regardless of in and out points.
3. When in bin frame mode, you can edit right from the bin. Click and shift and drag a clip will edit it into the timeline.
4. When in bin frame mode, if you want to select what tracks will be edited into the timeline using the storyboard editing method, alt and click the clip name to select or deselect tracks.
5. To splice a clip into the timeline using frame mode, select the clip(s) and press alt and drag the clip to the record monitor. When the cursor turns into the yellow splice icon, release the mouse.
6. To overwrite a clip into the timeline using frame mode, select the clip(s) and press shift and drag the clip to the record monitor. When the cursor turns into the yellow splice icon, release the mouse.
7. Pressing ctrl and ' on a selected window will restore the window back to it's original position, be that a timeline, bin, monitors, etc.
8. For individual clip info in bins, press ctrl and alt and click on a clip to see the info available for it. Drag the window to a new location to leave it open.
9. For a quick way to ake the timeline fill a window, right click the composer monitor and choose "hide video". The timeline will expand to fill the window. To get the monitors back right click again and de-select hide video.
10. You can map top/tail edit to your keyboard, ti's a good tool. What this does is extract either the top or tail of a clip from the position indicator. No need to mark and in/out or cut. Sweet!
11. There's a bin heading called colour. If you turn it on, clicking under it for a certain clip will allow you to make the clip icon be a certain colour. I've been using this alot lately, instead of using a ~ or notes to make a sequence that needs to be checked I make it red, if it's approved I make it green, much easier.
12. Along the lines of using clip colours, say you make a clip to be green. In your timeline, if you select clip color > source, every place you use that clip in your timeline it will show up as the colour you marked it with! So if you want to see all of the places you used Johnny's interview, mark it green in the bin and select source colors in the timeline settings and you will see all the times that clip is used as green clips.
13. In the composer settings, there is a selection called "undo only record events". This means that the undo list will only record things pertaining to the timeline, so that your list of undos won't be used up by non-essential events.
14. In the timeline settings, there is something called "show marked waveform". This means that where ever you mark an in and out in the timeline the audio waveform will display.
15. In the timeline settings, selecting "show position bar" will change the display of the bar in the lower right of the timeline to show where in the whole timeline you are, rather than having the scroll bar.
16. In the timeline settings, turning off "auto monitoring" will make the timeline not change the track you're monitoring when patching video tracks.
1. Site settings. These are used when you want a setting (like deck confguration) to be applied to all users. Open the site settings window in the "special" menu and drag a setting into the site settings window and the it will be applied to all users.
2. The default control for the space bar is stop. Well, if you map the play command to the space bar it will become the play and stop bar, very handy.
3. You can map menu commands (like render in to out, video mixdown, etc.) to the keyboard. In the command palatte choose "menu to button" click a button the keyboard or screen and the pointer will change to a small white menu. Choose a command from the menu and it will be mapped!
4. In the timeline settings, turning auto-patching will automatically patch enabled source tracks to the tracks enabled in the timeline.
5. If you hold alt while you use the matchframe command the in and out marks in the source won't change.
6. When you use the "mark clip" command (the T key) if you hold alt it will mark an in and out around the shortest segment you are parked on rather than the enabled tracks.
7. With the timeline active, pressing the esc key will toggle between record and source monitors in the timeline.
8. You can have a maximum of 1023 locators per clip.
9. Locators can be made invisible (timeline settings) but will still be searchable.
10. You can link a user setting to a toolset. Say you want a specific keyboard layout for the effects editing toolset. If you choose "link to" you can select any setting with term effects in it and link it to that toolset, so when you switch to it your keyboard will switch as well. The same goes for workspaces.
11. Under the batch digitze settings, you can choose "log errors to console and continue to digitze", so it won't stop when it gets an error.
12. When you hold the alt key and click in the source or record monitor menu, the menu changes from displaying the clips/sequences used in alphabetical order to chronalogical order.
13. If you drag a clip from a bin to the in/out times, all of the info will automatically be entered.
14. In the digitze settings, if you turn off "activate bin window after digitze" you can execute all digitizing commands from the keyboard without having to mouse back to the digitze tool. F4 is begin recording and Esc is stop.
15. When you hold alt and use add edit, an edit will be added to all blank tracks as well as enabled tracks.
16. In trim mode, hitting delete will delete match frame edits.
17. Hold alt while dragging in trim mode to put black on the otherside of the trim.
18. Using replace edit will sync up your shots. Say in your record monitor you have a shot of someone drinking a from a cup and you want to replace it with the same shot from a different angle but you don't want to screw up the action you've synched with the previous shot. Park your position indicator at the moment her lips touch the glass in both the timeline and the same moment in the new angle shot in the source monitor. Hitting replace edit will use the position indicators as sync points and will backtime your clip to fill the duration of the segment in the timeline. This can be used instead of mark in and out (T) in many occasions. I've mapped replace edit to N on my keybaord, right beside splice and overright.
19. To turn on sync point editing right click on the overright icon in between the source and record monitors. Or use alt overright to do a sync point edit instead of an overright.
20. Hopefully I can explain this one properly. Say you want to use replace edit, but you have a video/audio split edit. Park your position indicator where you want the material to be synced and select the tracks you want to be replaced, hit replace edit and it will replace the tracks selected with the in sync video and audio.
21. Pre-computes that aren't referenced by a sequence or clip are reffered to as "orphans".
22. Using decompose will display all of the clips used in a sequence. You can then see all the tapes used, durations, etc.
23. You can see all the tapes used by a sequence by chooseing "set bin display" in the bin menu and selecting "sources". A small tape icon will show all of the tapes used for that sequence.
24. Duplicating and copying a clip are different things. Using copy will ghost the original clip, including if you change marks in one of them or modify it, using duplicate doesn't do this.
25. Shift and tab to move backwards in bin menu items, shift enter to go up.
26. In the project window goto the info button. Choose the memory tab to see how much your system is using and how much is left over. You can also see the number of object in memory, the more object the system needs to track the more memory it takes.
27. Each bin you have open is an object, each clip in it is an object, each link to a media file is an object, the media files themselves are object, in a timeline each segment is an object, adn the media they link to, etc. It adds up pretty quick. Close bins you aren't using to reduce the number of object being tracked which will free up memory.
