Edius Pro 4 Tips and Tricks

Tips and Tricks for Edius Pro 4.01

Note: If you are working with the free trial version of Edius Pro, you are working with the original 4.0 release. Some significant improvements were made to the .01 patch and therefore some of the tips, tricks and tutorials may not work the same with your version.

Adjusting Audio Levels on Clips
If you have come from another program, you are no doubt use to selecting a tool and using that tool to adjust the audio of a whole clip up or down in one sweeping motion with your mouse. In Edius, there is no tool and when you point your mouse at an audio rubber band to make your move, Edius adds a key frame. When you move you mouse up or down you end up moving a key frame instead of the whole clip. No worries... Just hold down the Alt key before you make your move.

Slip Trim Mode - Making fine adjustments to the in or out point of your video clip
After placing a video clip, you may often wish to make a slight adjustment to the clip, especially after placing a transition that has introduced unwanted frames. Rather then go back to the play monitor and pick a new in and out point, try out the new trim tools of Edius 4. A lot of Edius users are having a struggle getting used to the new trim tools, and are especially annoyed that Grass Valley has taken away our beloved "Alt+mouse scrub" for slip trimming, myself included. It almost made me uninstall version 4 a couple of times and go back to 3.6. However, I have come up with a solution that seems to work fairly good and if you have no problem changing a few keyboard shortcuts, I offer the following suggestion for easy slip-trimming.

1. Set up a series of keyboard shortcuts that are easy to hit in rapid succession, lets say 4,5,6. (To see how to change key-board shortcuts, go Here)

2. Set 4 to be the shortcut for "Trim - Select Slip"
3. Set 5 to be the shortcut for "trim"
4. Place the timeline curser in the area of the clip you want to slip-trim
5. Hit your 4,and 5 keys one after the other.
6. Place your mouse up in in the monitor areas (Note cursor turns into trim symbol)
7. Scrub mouse left and right.

Experiment with the other trim methods by selecting them from the group of blue buttons in the trim window.

Making audio clips "dissolve down" to the timeline
When you start a new project, create a color matte, doesn't matter what color.(Color bars icon at top of Bin window). Drag the matte to the timeline. Notice that it also has a track of blank audio. Put that audio on the track(s) where you will want to have audio dissolving to the time line. Right click on the matte, select "remove group" and delete the matte, leaving only the audio. Stretch out out the audio as long as you like. Now when you place clips on the time line you will be able to place a audio dissolve to the track, by simply using your keyboard shortcut for dissolves. Drag a small portion of the audio clip back to your bin for future use.

Editing long audio files
Editors new to Edius sometimes express frustration that the audio wave form is not available in the play preview window. In other programs that they have worked with they have found this expandable waveform very useful as they pick in and out points from music, long interviews or raw narration recordings. One work around that I have found very easy to work with is to simply drag that long audio file down to an audio track, turn on wave form, expand the track for better viewing and cut the audio right on the track. Raw narrations can now be edited easier with the visual clues provided by the wave form. Selections from music files are easily cut and pasted or moved into place.

Effect Many Clips At Once
Lets say you need to do a panpot to 100 audio clips on the time line, or 50 need the same CC filter applied, you do not have to apply that filter one clip at a time. Once you have got the perfect filter defined on one clip, you can save that filter as a new personal preset filter and then apply that filter to all selected clips in one drop. To make a preset, select the clip that you have used to make the filter you want to use, right click on the filter in the "Information Palette", save as a preset, and note where that preset ends up in the "Effects Palette". Now select the group of clips that you want to effect with a lasso or if they are sprinkled through your timeline by clicking on them with the Ctrl key pressed. Once you have all of the clips that you want to effect, drag the new customized effect on to any one of the selected clips and your done! Note: If you still have your original clip selected, that one clip will now have two effects on it and you will want to delete one.

Keep the tips rolling!