Editing the Me, Myself, and I, Pt. 2

I can proudly announce that I finalised the rough cut of my three minutes!

I started by changing the order of a couple of cutaways since they did not work within my film as I intended them to do. What was now missing after that were titles and slugs.

Since I have not yet applied any of those in Avid MC8, I decided to go on the internet in search for tutorials on how to do so and found a wealth of Youtube-videos with helpful explanations and visuals.

At first, I wanted to start off with the titles. As I was already dangerously shy of the three minute mark by just one frame and since I already had the idea of overlapping the opening title with the actual footage, I decided to do the same with the end credits. Both clips at the beginning and the end have been framed in a way that allows the overlaying of a title, so I looked for a tutorial and found this one.

After opening the title tool, saving it into a bin and dragging it onto a new activated video track (much like I did with the background picture for the green screen exercise), it looked just as I had imagined it. The only issue was, that I had a typo in the actual credits and thus needed to correct it.

Searching for a solution, I finally ended up right-clicking the credits in the timeline and found an option saying 'add/edit title'. As I clicked it, I was directed to Avid Marquee, a nice handy tool with which you can edit your title and either autosave it within the timeline or create another title template that directly goes into your bin. Which is a nice little feature to have and to hold.

Now to the slugs: This following video is really helpful in learning the three different ways of applying fillers at the beginning, middle, and end of the timeline. You can either - the timeline and add a filler at the start.

Or you can add a filler at the end of the timeline by adding a new video track on top, deselecting all the other tracks click 'add edit' within the new timeline and extent the filler to the right before deleting the new video track again. While this may sound cumbersome at first, it actually worked when I experimented with it. Although I would just personally have added a blank title at the end of my clips to achieve the same result.

However, with adding a slug within the timeline, I encountered a problem. The video suggests, that you go to your source monitor, click and open the dropdown menu at the top of it and select 'load filler' before marking in- and out-points and dragging the filler down to your timeline.

I have tried applying this trick, but the software would not allow me to drag the selected filler down to the timeline. Looking at the fact that the video is designed to help with Avid MC 5 and that I currently work with Avid MC 8, I chalked it up under a difference between versions and instead selected all the clips after the point I wanted to fill with a slug and pulled them out far enough to the right until I received my desired slug length.

References:

Avid Media Composer Tutorials (2014) Avid Media Composer 5 - Adding Video Filler/Black/Slug to Timeline [online]

FitzTVProduction (2013) Creating Titles in Avid Media Composer [online]