This post is a favor for a journalist friend of mine who every six months or so will work with a new editor and need me to explain how to set up a sequence in Final Cut Pro with split audio channels. When editing and delivering a news feature or segment, the delivery specs usually require the piece to be output with split tracks. What this means is the station or producers want a mono mix of all voiceover and non sync dialogue (for example, a dubbed translation) on channel 1 and a mono mix of all sync and natural sound, with no voiceover, on channel 2. There are two reason this is asked for.  One is...

The one thing I’ve found I had to teach assistant editors more than anything else is the proper set up for a sequence in a professional edit. For every new project I start, this is the first thing I do. This is not the setting up of the project or the naming of the bins, which varies from editor to editor and project to project, but the creation of a basic timeline template that all cuts will begin with. 1) The first thing is to create a sequence with the working specs of the project.  Usually this decision is made when creating the project, but this the time to check and absolutely make sure...

One of the hardest parts about learning to use Avid Media Composer is that many users fairly quickly find themselves in the gulf between beginner and expert in using the program. Especially if you are using the software professionally, and even more so if you are coming from another program like Final Cut Pro or Premier, there will be moments when you know exactly what you want the software to do, and you know the software can do it, but you simply cannot figure out how to make those two resolve. For the simple issues, you can check the manual or do a web search. Oddly enough, sometimes the more...

One of the frustrations of WordPress is that some html tags work as expected and some don’t. There are various plugins out there that return some html functionality back to a WordPress install, but I dislike this approach. I worry about having too many plugins on one site as well as the difficulty of updating them and worries about compatibility among the plugins I might be using. It’s not that I’m against plugins, but I try to avoid them when there might be simpler or more elegant solutions out there. Case in point: the line break. If you use html on WordPress, you’ll quickly...

Keyboard shortcuts are one of the things that make you a faster and better editor. With that being said, one of the most useful shortcuts I know is not one I see used as frequently as it should — the keyboard command to adjust the volume of a clip in the timeline: <CTRL and +  > This will increase the volume of a clip by 1 db <CTRL and –  > This will decrease the volume of a clip by 1 db <CTRL and ]  > This will increase the volume of a clip by 3 db <CTRL and [  > This will decrease the volume of a clip by 3 db Using these commands to adjust the volume of a...