CINGHE GROUP

In order for your Edius interface to respond in the same way that we will be working with in the tutorials found here at Edius Tips, I would like you to take a few minutes and set yours like mine. Once you become familiar with what Edius can do, according to my workflow, then you are always free to go back and change the setting to your delight and make Edius work the way you are most comfortable with. One of the great things about Edius is that it is very flexible and can be set up to emulate a number of other video editing programs. This makes it very easy for editors who are used to working with other software, to sit down, change a few settings, and create a interface environment with which they are familiar. The slight drawback to this flexibility is that when we try to do training, long distance, if your settings are not like my settings, then the things that I show you on my computer, may not necessarily work the same on yours. And, unfortunately, some of these crucial settings, that make significant changes to the way the Edius functions, can be changed inadvertently by accidentally hitting a keyboard shortcut. 

To make sure that we at least start out on the same page, I would like you to take a few minutes and make your settings match mine.

The place where we will make most of settings is in the Application Settings dialogue box. You can find this under Settings/Application Settings.

The first time you open this box, the “Application settings" and "Customize"may be collapsed, and you may think that this is the only options available for change. But if you expand this you will see that there are many more options available.
Let’s go through these, and note some of the most important settings, and how they will affect the edit process. Let’s start with timeline settings.
Timeline
Extend Clips when applying transition/cross fade: I like to have this box checked. The wording here is a little confusing, and you may actually find this problem in more than one place in Edius. It might be of interest to mention that Edius is a program that was born in Japan and now lives in France, so if some of the terminology here and in some of the help manuals leaves you scratching your head at times, it could be that some things have, gotten "lost in translation”. That’s why we are here… to help you sort it all out. Even though it says “Extend Clips when applying a transition/cross fade” having this box checked means that the duration of your clips will NOT change when you apply a transition. It is when you have this box unchecked, that the duration of your clip will actual change, when you apply or delete a transition…. And we almost never want that, so keep this box checked! I think what the programmers meant to say was that when you have this box checked, you will “extend” the two clips into one another, without changing the duration … Let’s go with that…
Insert Default Cross fade in transition
Take note of this setting and where to find it because, depending on what you are editing, you may want to change this back and forth. I use the dissolve transition a lot in my projects, and when I am dissolving B-roll, or illustrative cover shots, I want an audio-dissolve to be automatically placed on its corresponding audio track. I don’t want to have to perform the action of transition twice for the same clip. Having this box checked will do that for me. However If I am editing together interviews, I may want to put a dissolve between two spokespersons, but I will NOT want a dissolve or “cross fade”, on the audio track. I find myself coming back and changing this setting, depending on if I am working on narration or B-roll. For now, let’s go ahead and check the box.
Insert Default Transition in Cross fade:
Presumably this setting is designed to do the opposite of the one above, namely when you apply a cross fade to the audio of two clips, it will automatically add the default transition to the video portion of the two clips. Not that I can think of a scenario when I might want that, but it doesn't seem to work anyway. The help files says that it is designed to work with the old VA tracks, so let’s just leave that one unchecked and move on.
You can leave the next two items unchecked.
Apply clips to mapped track:
This refers to a style of editing that is quite restrictive and exacting. If you have this box checked, you will have to stop and designate, or “map” the tracks where you want your video to go. If you are coming from other video editing software, such as AVID, that forces you to do this, and you have become accustomed to this kind of editing, then you may want to keep this box checked. If you are new to video editing, or coming from a program such as Premier Pro, that is more of a “free form” style of editing, a kind of drag and drop approach where a lot of the editing happens on the time line rather than in the Play window, you should keep this box unchecked. For the sake of following along with our tutorials, we will have this unchecked most of the time. On rare occasions I might find it helpful to turn this on, but for the most part I find that this just slows me down, adds many mouse clicks, and simply adds to the tedium of editing.
Snap of Event:
Having these boxes selected affects how things "snap" together in Edius. What this refers to is how different elements, such as clips, curser, ruberband, markers, etc. will be attracted to, or shall we say, "find an easy resting point" on important sections of your timeline. I find it helpful to leave all of these on.
Clip Timecode:
You can leave all of these checked.
Default:
These are your “mode” settings. These are the settings that that make the most significant changes to the way the Edius timeline responds to your action of placing clips on the time-line. We will devote a whole lesson on “Modes”, what they do, and when you might want to have these various modes turned on or off. For now, let’s set the default settings to having the sync and ripple mode unchecked, and the "Overwrite Mode" selected. There are convenient icons above the timeline that let you change these important settings, as well as a whole top menu option dedicated to “mode”, so that you do not need to always come back to this box to change your “mode”. The setting that you choose here, will determine how things will work for each new project or sequence, by default. Once you have figured out how you like the timeline to behave, to emulate another video editing program that you have worked with in the past, you can come back here and set these default setting to meet your preferences.
Waveform:
This refers to how the waveform generated by Edius, will appear in your audio tracks. I find the “Log” wave form much easier to work with.
Clip Thumbnail:
For each clip that you place on the timeline, Edius can be set here, to generate a thumbnail of the clip, to give you a nice visual representation of the video. You have the options here to have this turned on or off, and having a thumbnail at the beginning of your clip, the end of your clip or both. I prefer to have all of these checked.
Render:
This box allows you to set what Edius will render when you choose to “render your project” These portions will be denoted by a small orange bar at the top of your timeline. What you decide to have checked here will depend somewhat on the speed of your processors. If you find that your computer has absolutely no problem playing back through your timeline with transitions or filters in place, then you could uncheck these. By default, Edius has all of these checked, and lets leave them that way for now.
Duration:
Here you can set what default length of still images and graphics will be when they are placed on your timeline. Of course, once they are on the time line you will always be able to change the length to suit your needs by dragging out either end of the clip, however, I find that a 1 second duration to often be much less then I need, and, depending on how I have my timeline extended, may be too small to easily grab hold of one of the ends. So I like to set both of these to 5 seconds. You can leave the V-mute at 1 second
Deck Settings:
For the way that I capture video, I like to have the Confirm Filename on, set to “Before capture, and Automatically divide files at timecode break and when the recorded time data changes. We have an extensive tutorial on the eccentricities of the Edius capture utility, so if you are having problems getting your footage into Edius, be sure to check out the tutorial: How to Get video into Your Computer for Editing
Restore offline clip:
The default settings here are all good.
Playback:
When I am editing, I don’t want Edius to stop if it happens to drop a frame, so I leave that unchecked. There are times when you are reviewing your timeline and can make a quick change, even while keeping your eye on the progressing playback. This is just one more thing that can speed up an edit. If I really want the playback to stop, I’ll hit the space bar.
Same goes for the next box.
And I like to show the correct frame when scrubbing. For those new to video, scrubbing simply means that operation of quickly reviewing the timeline by dragging the time-line curser quickly back and forth, by pointing to the timeline curser with your mouse and with the left mouse key held down.
Buffered frames before playback. For slower computers you might want to change that to something more then 5 frames.
The rest of the settings are good.
Match Frame:
The default settings are fine here.
Application:
Recent Files: I like to have the recently used files set to 10.
Settings: all of these are fine. If you would like to change the length of time that goes by between the intervals when Edius will automatically backup your project, you can do that here. I hardly notice this happening, so I don’t mind leaving it at the 3 min interval. That way, should I encounter a power failure or system crash, I will only ever lose a maximum of three minutes of work.
Project folder: I find that the C drive works for me. I usually create a folder called Edius Projects. However, it is a good practice to be sure that this is backed up at least once a week, in case of a system drive failure. Some like to back these up every night.
OK, if it is not already, go ahead and expand the “Customize” folder.
Button:
Edius gives you the ability to add or remove button icons from your various windows. To select the window that you want to make changes to, use this drop down menu. And for a quick example of how this works, lets choose the “Timeline window” and add an icon that is really helpful to have on the timeline, but is not there by default. The left hand column shows all of the available buttons for the selected window. The right hand column shows the currently active buttons being displayed on the window.
The button that I would like you to add to the time line window is, “Create a freeze frame”. Click on the button in the left hand column by that name, and then click on the top double arrow button that separates the two columns. This sends the button to the right hand column to be included on the timeline. Hit “Apply” to confirm your action.
Control:
All of these settings are fine.
Overlay:
When you first started using Edius, you no doubt noticed the time code of the clips,among other things, being displayed in your play and record monitors. You were probably asking yourself, how can I get rid of these annoying and distracting displays. Well this is one of the places where you can do that. To get rid of all overlay displays while you are editing, Uncheck all of the boxes in this dialogue box. The one box that may actually be helpful here is if you want to send a preview copy of your edit to your client, and you want them to be able to say, "we don’t like the cover shot that you use at time code 00:04:30". Having this box checked, you could send them a copy of your edit with a time code displayed. Personally I feel that the client is going to be just as distracted by the timecode, as I am, if not more so. What I usually do is send the client a Windows Media Player version of the project over the internet. This has its own time display under the play window rather then as part of the display, which gives them the client the same ability to suggest changes. To work with the same time code as the client, simply refer to the WMP file that you sent to them.
Display Bin Details:
These settings are easy enough to change from the window itself, so go ahead and leave those as is for now. To learn how to work with the Bin Window in detail, check out the tutorial, Organizing your Media.
Keyboard shortcut:
For a separate tutorial on changing your keyboard shortcuts, see, How to Customize Your Keyboard Shortcuts.
Window Color:
If you find the default color of the Edius Windows not to your liking, you can change that here. Go ahead and open this window and play with the slider bars a little and notice a small window change color. If you see something that you like, hit apply, to change the color of your interface.
Ok, That’s it for our application settings.
Hardware Settings:
You will notice that under the Menu option "Settings" that there is another selection that you can make for Hardware Settings. If the video in either your play monitor or your record monitor is not showing up properly, you can go in here and try out some of the options to get the video card of your computer to play better with Edius.
Plug In Settings:
What is displayed here will depend somewhat on what plugins you have purchased that work with Edius. But there are some that come by default. If you are having problems importing media from DVD, or some of your cameras, you might want to check the options here. But there is one setting that we can visit now. Open up “Still Image”. I like to have this set to "Capture frame", and save to a "tiff" file. If your still images that you try and capture from your video clips look a little jaggie, you might want to play with these settings to see if you can get a better result using a different combination of these settings.