Apple Color makes extensive use of your system’s onboard graphics card, which can cause odd problems. For instance, if you have a custom color calibration applied to your monitor, the video preview may vanish, leaving a black empty space instead of an image.

To work around this bug, do the following:

1. Exit Apple Color
2. Using System Preferences / Displays, turn off custom color calibration by selecting the top, default calibration
3. Re-launch Apple Color
4. Re-select your custom calibration

As long as Color has already been started, it’s safe to turn the calibration back on.

By default, Avid chooses the first frame of a clip for the Frame View in the bin. Often this is good enough but sometimes the first frame is black, or a slate of some sort, or otherwise just not helpful. Luckily, there’s a secret way to change which frame is used as the thumbnail — this method is also a way to preview footage without even loading it in the source monitor.

Here’s a bin with a clip, and since this clip was captured from a tape, the thumbnail is a worthless countdown slate. We’d prefer to see some of the footage in the thumbnail instead.

All you have to do is select the clip and push the L key like you’re playing the footage. And, that’s exactly what happens — the footage starts playing, sound included, and if you have an external monitor you’ll even see the footage on the screen. Just hit K to pause the playback, and that frame will be the new thumbnail.

With this method it’s not possible to instantly jump far ahead in the clip, so if you had a very long clip it might take a long time to find just the frame you want. Thankfully, you can multi-tap the J and L keys to rewind and fast forward at higher speed, just like in the timeline.

Replace Edit is a tricky feature to grasp at first, but is extremely powerful. I find it most useful in online editing, where I’m often replacing temporary footage with final, high resolution footage. The images are the same, but I can’t just recapture the footage with Batch Capture or Batch Import.

For instance, if I’m replacing stock footage, I often have to perform an “eye-match.” That’s where I choose a frame on the timeline as a reference, then find the corresponding frame in the high quality version. I want to replace the low quality version in the timeline with the final version. Without Replace Edit, this would be slow:

1. Copy any transitions on the timeline, because they will probably be lost when you overwrite and trim
2. Find matching frames with the playheads (so the source monitor looks like the record monitor)
3. In the sequence, mark from the matched frame to the end of the sequence
4. Overwrite that part of the clip with the new source
5. Put the playhead back on the cut where the matched frame is
6. Use Trim Mode to stretch the new source from the matched frame back to the beginning of the clip

Replace Edit is much easier:

1. Find matching frames in source and timeline with the playheads
2. Clear the in and out points on the timeline
3. Perform a Replace Edit

The footage in the timeline will be replaced with the source, starting at the matched frame and extending out to each nearest cut. Transitions will be maintained, but effects will be lost. If you want to keep your effects, step into them and perform the replacement there.

If you want, you can set in and out points on the timeline and Replace Edit will overwrite everything between the points. In and out points have no effect on the source side.

Trim Mode is one of the great Avid innovations, but there are cases when you don’t even need to launch trim mode to make a change. For instance, in this example, we have audio and video that have fallen out of sync by 7 frames:

To fix this issue, we’d like to slip the video back seven frames to put it back in sync. You can do this with Trim Mode, or you can do it right in the timeline. First, make sure only the layer you want to work with is highlighted:

Position the playhead over the clip you’d like to change, and just tap the Trim Left key (usually ‘,’) a few times. You’ll see the out-of-sync indicator decrease until it reaches zero:

It can be somewhat confusing at first to predict which direction the slip is going when you tap the keys. The best way to think of it is, “I am pushing the footage to the left,” and tap Trim Left. If you’d like to push the footage to the right, Trim Right. This is a great trick for eliminating flash frames (one tap and it’s gone) or fixing lip sync issues.

If you’re looking for more great tips for Avid and Final Cut, Scott Simmons over on PVC is posting a tip every day this month.

Getting information about a clip in the timeline, such as what drive it’s on, what its format is, or figuring out where quicktimes were imported from is a complicated process. This is the usual method:

1. Place the playhead over the clip in the timeline
2. Use Match Frame to load the clip in the source monitor
3. Try using Find Bin to locate the clip in the project
1. Oh wait, Avid says it can’t find the bin, so go to the bin with the sequence you’re working on
2. Go to the hamburger menu and select Set Bin Display
3. Enable Show Reference Clips
4. Try Finding Bin again
4. Play with the Headings in the bin, or use Clip Info to try to figure out what you want to know

Luckily, there’s an easier way to get clip information, although you would never ever discover it on your own. First, load the clip in the source window like you did before. Then, and I am totally serious, click and hold on the invisible space between the timeline of the source window and the video image itself, on the far left end of the window:

If you do it right, you’ll see an info box magically appear, with data about the clip’s format.

If the clip was an imported video file, it will even tell you where it was imported from originally!

This can be a lifesaver if there’s a clip on the timeline and noone can figure out where the original file is.

Update:
After a little clicking, it looks like you don’t have to be on the left side of the source window, you can click anywhere on that thin bar. And, if you click on the Record side, you’ll get some info about your sequence too.

Normally, when you move a clip using red-arrow segment mode, you lose any transitions that were on the edges of the clip:

If you want to keep those transitions, there is a way around this seeming “bug.” In Avid, empty space is actually a clip, called “Filler.” Since you didn’t highlight the empty space, Avid assumed you didn’t want to move it, so it had to get rid of the transition. If you put slices in the filler on either side of the clip, and use segment mode to bring those clips as well, you can maintain the transitions:

[caption id="attachment_274" align="alignnone" width="320" caption="The dissolves remain"][/caption]

It’s ugly, but it works.

Difficulty: Easy

Normally when you click and drag on the timeline in Avid, the playhead slides easily over everything. Sometimes, though, you’d like to be able to snap to an edit so you can insert something. Other times, you want to snap to the end of an edit.

Snapping to the head of an edit: While dragging, Hold Command (control on Windows).
Snapping to the tail of an edit: While dragging, Hold Command (ctrl) and Option (alt).

This also works in Segment and Insert mode too, so if you want a clip you’re dragging to snap to the tail of an edit instead of the head, hold Command and Option and it’ll do what you want.