EDITING

The biggest pitfall for CS majors who want to make movies is editing. Broadcast 2000 treats editing like a text editor, hiding the EDL management and presenting tracks as sequential sequences of frames. You select footage by highlighting regions and cutting and pasting.

This was the conventional wisdom for audio up to 1996. Today the trend seems to be exposing the user to the EDL and future interfaces may reflect that.

The editing functions have been optimized for precise, rapid editing of large files. None of the changes you make ever touches a source file.

The editing functions on Broadcast 2000 are split between the Edit menu, buttonbar, and the timeline. You'll eventually do most of your editing using keyboard shortcuts.

SELECTING REGIONS

You know how to highlight regions of text in a text editor. The second problem is determining which tracks inside your highlighted section are affected. The record button to the left of each track protects the track from any operations you may do on it. Only when it is highlighted is the track affected by editing operations.

The shift key extends whatever end of the selection you're closest to.

Double clicking selects the entire range of the edit your pointer is over.

When working with video, you should always activate Settings->align cursor on frames unless you're only editing the audio tracks.

CUT AND PASTE

The cut, copy, paste, and clear functions do what you'd expect them to do, with X, V, C, and backspace doing the equivalent actions. Only tracks with a highlighted record patch are affected.

SHIFTING REGIONS HORIZONTALLY ON THE TIMELINE
In Broadcast 2000 horizontal positioning of tracks is accomplished by pasting and deleting data before the region you want to shift. First disable recording on all but the tracks you want to shift. To shift the tracks right, select a region of the duration you want to shift by and select edit->paste silence. To shift the tracks left select a region of the duration you want to shift by and select edit->clear

If you have silence before a scene, you can drag the out point in the region of silence to move the scene around.

IN/OUT POINTS

Go to View->Show Edits and make sure it's checked. You should see in/out points on the tracks.

Because when you edit, you really change numbers in an EDL, Broadcast 2000 is able to mark the boundaries between different edits. Clicking on an in/out point positions the cursor exactly on the edit boundary. Dragging edit handles either shrinks or extends the boundary of an edit.

When you drag the starting and ending point on one track of a freshly loaded stereo file, it adjusts both tracks. If you do the same thing after appending a second file of different length to the current project, you'll still only affect one file. Broadcast 2000 automatically decides which tracks are affected by an edit handle by which edit handles are lined up on the same sample or frame.

You can force tracks to be ignored by deselecting record toggles on the patchbay.

Double clicking between two edit points selects the entire region between those points.

THE 3 EDITING MODES OF IN/OUT POINTS

In Preferences->interface 3 behaviors for the in/out points were bound to the mouse buttons. The three editing modes cause different things to happen when you drag an edit and by default were assigned by their invasiveness.

Drag all following edits repositions every edit after the cursor.

Drag only one edit repositions only the boundary selected. All the other edits stay in place.

Drag source only locks all the edit boundaries and repositions the source material instead.

LABELS

While editing, you're going to want to mark specific points on the timeline which you can precisely align selections to or seek to. The lbl button or the L key toggles a label on or off at the cursor position. If you selected a region, it toggles labels at both ends of the selection. Usually you'll scrub through a region and hit lbl at some cue point. Alternatively, you'll zoom to single sample level and label a starting point for a cut.

Double clicking on the timebar between two labels selects the entire region between the two labels.

The seek buttons: seek to the next or previous label. Shift extends the region to the label you click on.

Edit->Clear labels clears all the labels in the selected region.

Settings->Labels follow edits determines whether cuts and pastes also cut and paste labels.

THE PATCHBAY

Before every track is a patch with buttons clearly delineated to indicate their functions.

In it's simplest role, the play button determines whether you hear a track or not but fundamentally it also determines whether CPU time is devoted to rendering that track. You should disable playback on any tracks which don't contain footage you want to see.

The record button determines whether the track is affected by editing. The A button determines whether the automation for a track is on or off. The D button determines if a track is drawn or left blank on the timeline. You'll use the D button a lot for large video projects on slow computers. Clicking on the title allows you to enter a new title.

TRACK MANIPULATIONS

Broadcast 2000 has features for shuffling the hundreds of tracks you're likely to encounter in your post production career.

Go to Audio->add track or Video->add track to add a track.

Delete all the recordable tracks using Settings->delete tracks.

Move the recordable tracks around using Settings->move tracks up or Settings->move tracks down.

You could just type a D to delete the last track on the timeline.

There is theoretically no limit to the number of tracks available, but if you run out of memory you'll have to give up.