Tricks for editing VII: Use colors

 

 

 

 

 

Today ends this series of tutorials called “Tips for editing”, in which we have been giving you small tips to organize better and above all save as much time as possible in the handling of editing systems.

Finally, I would like to talk about the use of colors in the clips and in the timeline. If we associate certain ideas or concepts with colors, at a glance we will be able to recognize what type of clip we have in front of us without having to open it and see it.

In both Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro, setting these colors is very simple and there are many ways to use them to speed up our workflow. One of them is to assign a particular color to clips coming from the same source, as a way of marking them for further processing. This can be very useful when color correcting (from the editing system itself, not taking it to a DaVinci or similar), for audio effects or future visual effects where we will have to insert signals such as “VFX 1” and the effect description.

In Avid Media Composer

To assign a color to a clip in a bin, select the clip and, from the menu Edit > Set Clip Color…

Once this is done, if in the Fast Menu of the timeline I click Clip Color > Source, each clip in the timeline will be displayed with the original color assigned in the master clip in the bin.

We can also modify the color of a track in the timeline, from the Fast Menu of the same > Track Color.

In all these possibilities Default always appears, which is used to return to the default colors of the system.

In Final Cut Pro (7)

Select the clip with the right mouse button and click on the Label option, marking the desired color.

To change the names assigned to these colors we can do it from the Final Cut Pro menu > User Preferences > Labels.

There is also the option to disable them in the timeline to see these colors only as a method of recognition in the Browser.

If we are doing color correction from Avid or Final Cut, the idea is that once we have corrected the first shot (of an interview, for example), thanks to the colors we have set we will be able to easily see the other shots that correspond to the original master clip and need the same correction. As we saw in the previous tutorial, we will save this correction as a template in a bin and from there we will apply it to all the other clips. They may need some minor adjustments due to position or light changes, but most of the work will already be done.

There are also many editors who use a single color to mark which is the last sequence they have been working on or which is the assembly given as valid.

Another way to use colors, when we have a lot of material, is to identify good, bad, average, etc. shots.

If you gradually educate yourselves to apply these little tricks, you will see that you will save a lot of time and the whole process will be more comfortable.

If you want to see the previous tutorials you can do it from this link.

I hope you found them useful! 🙂