Category: External Articles

This won’t be new for some of you, but it’s a hidden feature and I use it so often that I thought I’d make mention of it. Say you’re created a sound effect, or piece of music — anything you want to use again elsewhere. In other applications you’d Option-drag the clip in question, creating […]

It’s the end of a long day and you’re working on a complex timeline: eight or ten audio tracks, many video tracks. You’ve been patching your source material all day long and the patch panel is scrambled. Now you want to cut something straight across. Maybe you’re assembling two sequences together, maybe you’re integrating part […]

Avid’s venerable Title Tool has come in for a lot of criticism over the years, but despite its limitations, it’s often the best way to get a simple titling job done, and it has many hidden features that many people don’t seem to know about. Here are a couple of my favorites. First, when you’re […]

Return to Previous Trim As my sequences get more complicated, I set up more complex roller combinations in order to trim them. I’ll trim something, drop out of trim mode to check a cut in context and often want to return to the previous trim and make an adjustment. We’ve been asking for “return to […]

Avid’s new Smart Tool  promises a more intuitive, drag-and-drop approach to timeline editing and is designed to compete head-on with Final Cut and Premiere. But for many long-time Avid editors, the first response is, “how do I turn it off?” The dilemma is a classic one and goes to the heart of how we learn […]

Avid has quietly released some important improvements to the Smart Tool — features that go a long way toward making Trim and Segment modes function the way they did in Version 4. The updates are incorporated into recent “patch” releases, and therein lies a rub. Patch builds are designed to quickly solve specific customer problems, […]