Importing Your Project’s Media - Autodesk Smoke Essentials: Autodesk Official Press (2014)

Autodesk Smoke Essentials: Autodesk Official Press (2014)

Chapter 3. Importing Your Project’s Media

Before you can begin assembling your masterwork, you must first import the media that you require and organize it in a way that makes it easy to find what you need. The Autodesk® Smoke® platform provides a media-browsing interface in the MediaHub that lets you navigate and browse media files on various volumes connected to your computer. The Media Library then provides the organizational structure where all of the clips imported into your project reside.

Topics in this chapter include the following:

· Importing media with the MediaHub

· Organizing media within the Media Library

· Using folders with thumbnails

· Closing libraries and locking clips

Importing Media into a New Project

The first thing you’ll do is to create a new project that you’ll use to work through all of the remaining exercises in this book. You’ll then learn how to import and organize all of the media that you’ll need in order to access it quickly as you work your way through:

1. Open Smoke. If necessary, choose a storage volume and click Open.

Ordinarily, you’ll want to set the Cache and Renders tab to a high-quality codec, such as ProRes 422 (HQ) or ProRes 4444, but choosing ProRes 422 (LT) saves space on classroom computers.

2. Click New to create a new project. Type Smoke Essentials Tutorial, and then choose 1920×1080@23976 from the Config Template pop-up menu. Next, choose 1920×1080 and select 10-bit from the group of Resolution pop-up menus, and select ProRes 422 (LT) from the Cache and Renders tab. When you’re finished, click Create.

3. Select a user (choose Student, which you created in Chapter 1), and then click the Start button (see Figure 3.1).

FIGURE 3.1 New project settings

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Now that you have a new, empty project file, you’ll add the media you need to work on.

Importing Media with the MediaHub

The first step in any project is to gather and organize the media you’ll need to use. In Smoke, this is done using the MediaHub in conjunction with the Media Library:

1. Open the MediaHub, and then open the volume on your computer in the Local Devices list, where you stored and organized the downloadable media that accompany this book.

When you downloaded the media following the instructions in the Introduction of this book, you ended up with a single folder of clips containing two subfolders named Opening Graphics Elements and Portal Graphics Elements. You’ll be using all of this media throughout the various chapters of this book, so you’ll need to import all of it.

2. Right-click the Media Library, and choose New image Library from the context menu.

3. A new library appears in the Media Library with its name highlighted. Type Unsorted Media, and press the Return key. The resulting library is similar to a folder into which you can place clips (see Figure 3.2).

Figure 3.2 Creating a new library

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4. With the new Unsorted Media library selected, select one of the clips in the file browser and then press image-A to select all of them.

5. Now look at the General tab underneath the file browser, and make sure that the Cache Source Media button is turned off (see Figure 3.3). Turning this button on results in the imported media being transcoded to the selected media drive. Turning this button off leaves the media where it is and places a reference of the media inside the Smoke directory of the selected media drive.

Figure 3.3 Turn Cache Source Media off.

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All media are transcoded as file sequences using the format specified by the Preferred Format setting of the Project Settings — either as DPX image sequences or as Apple ProRes files created as a sequence of one-frame ProRes files.

6. Click the Alpha Channel Processing pop-up menu, and choose Ignore Alpha Channel. None of the clips you’re importing have alpha channels to define transparency for compositing operations, so setting this option to Ignore prevents unwanted alpha clips from being created for the ProRes 4444 media that you’re importing.

7. Click the Import button to add all of the selected clips in the Media Browser to the selected Unsorted Media library. If you click the disclosure triangle at the left of the Unsorted Media library, you can see a hierarchical list of every clip you’ve imported.

8. Next, click the Opening Graphics Elements folder in the sidebar, and then Shift+click the Portal Graphics Elements folder that’s underneath it and click Import. This imports both of those folders and whatever media they contain into the selected location of the Media Library.

Keeping Your Media Organized on Disk

Because Smoke relies on its database to keep track of all media and project correspondences, you must not move, delete, or rename media after you’ve imported it into a Smoke project. Doing so may cause considerable problems. Because of this, make sure that the media you want to use in Smoke is where it’s supposed to be prior to importing it. If there are clips that you need to eliminate, remove them from your Smoke project first by selecting them in the Media Library, right-clicking them, and choosing Delete. Afterward, you can remove those clips in the Finder.

Organizing Media within the Media Library

Now that you’ve imported all of the media you’re going to use, you need to organize it to make it useful. First, you’ll log each clip’s scene, shot, and take number. Then you’ll use that information to quickly organize each set of media into folders.

1. Open the Timeline panel, and set the View mode to Player (press Option+1).

2. Click the View Mode pop-up menu at the bottom-left of the Media Library, and choose Details to expand the Media Library to the full width of the screen.

3. Drag the heading of the Notes column (all the way to the right) so that it’s next to the Name column.

4. Move the pointer so that it’s right on the border of the Name and Notes columns, and then drag the border so that the Notes column covers most of the Clip Name column, leaving only each clip’s thumbnail.

5. Click the View Mode pop-up menu again, and turn off Details. Then click the Name column header to sort by name again, and set the View mode to Player. At this point, you can clearly see the Notes column within the Media Library (see Figure 3.4), so you’re ready to start typing the logging information into the notes field of each clip.

Figure 3.4 The Media Library showing the Notes column at the right, covering the clip name column

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6. Next, select the first clip in the Unsorted Media library, and scrub around the beginning of the clip to a frame where the slate for that clip is clearly visible. The slate contains Roll, Scene, Shot, and Take information for each clip. In this production, Roll, Scene, and Take are numbered, while Shot is lettered.

7. Click the Notes field corresponding to the first clip, and then type the scene number, an underscore, the shot letter, another underscore, and the take number with a leading zero. It should read 13_A_03, as shown in Figure 3.5. When you’re finished, press Return.

Figure 3.5 The slate of the first clip in the Unsorted Media library

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8. Select the next clip in the Media Library, repeat steps 6 and 7 to identify the slate information, and enter it into the Notes column. It’s good practice to use a leading zero whenever a scene or take number has a single digit. The result should read 06_A_01.

9. Continue this process with all of the other clips in the Unsorted Media library. If a clip has no slate, type none into the Notes field. If the clip is audio, type wild. Don’t type anything for the folders.

10. Click the header of the Notes column to sort the Media Library by the notes you’ve just entered. The clips are now sorted by scene, shot, and take.

The Notes column is the one place in the Media Library that you can use to enter custom information about each clip. Media for highly organized projects like this narrative short benefit from the structured data that corresponds to the script notes. Other projects could use other notation schemes, but keep in mind that metadata entered into the Notes column works best when it’s sortable.

Organizing Clips Using Folders

Now that you know what clips correspond to what scenes, you can organize your media even further using a combination of folders and libraries.

1. Right-click the Unsorted Media library, and choose New image Folder from the context menu.

2. When the new folder appears, its name is selected to make it easy for you to rename it, which is recommended (see Figure 3.6). Type Office Media and press Return.

Figure 3.6 Entering a name for a new folder

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3. Create three more folders, named Lab Media, Living Room Media, and Hallway Media.

4. As narrow as the Name column is, Living Room Media isn’t clearly legible, so click that folder’s name once to select it, type Visit Media, and press Return.

5. Now that you have four folders to use, click the first clip, which reads 01_B_03, in the Notes column. Then Shift+click the clip that reads 01_L_01 to select it and everything in between, and drag the selected clips into the Office Media folder.

6. Select all of the clips that start with 03_, 04_, and 08_ and drag them into the Hallway Media folder.

7. Drag the clip with a note reading 13_A_03, as well as all three of the clips with notes that read “none” and two of the folders you imported (Opening Graphics Elements and Portal Graphics Elements), into the Office Media folder, too.

8. Next, select all of the clips that start with 06_ in the Notes column and drag them into the Lab Media folder, along with both of the audio-only clips (identified by their waveform icon), identified as “wild” in the Notes column.

9. Drag all clips that start with 07_ in the Notes column into the Visit Media folder.

Now that you’ve organized all of the source clips, it’s time to organize the assets for each scene into separate libraries and add individual sequences for each.

10. Right-click in an empty area of the Media Library, and choose New image Library. When the new library appears, type Lab Scene and press Return. Then drag the Lab Media folder into the Lab Scene library.

11. Create two more libraries, name them Office Scene and Hallway Scene, and drag the appropriate folders into each one. Drag the Audio and Opening Scene Effects Clips folders into the Office Scene library.

12. Click the Unsorted Media library to highlight the name, type Visitation Scene, drag the Visit Media folder into it, and open each library to view the folder inside. The resulting library structure should look like Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.7 All clips organized into folders according to scene

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There’s no one right way to use libraries and folders, but a good way to think about how to use each of these organizational tools is that libraries are useful for larger collections of media that you want to browse and access all at once, while folders are useful for subdividing groups of clips that you know you want to use together within the same scene or montage.

Using Folders with Thumbnails

One of the benefits of organizing your clips into smaller groups using folders is to take advantage of the thumbnail view of the viewer. If a single folder or library has too many clips, the thumbnail view can be too cluttered to be useful. However, when you place a smaller set of clips into a folder, opening that folder results in a more manageable number of clips being exposed as thumbnails, making it possible for you to organize your clips visually in preparation for editing.

1. Double-click the Lab Media folder. Its contents appear as thumbnails in the viewer. Right now, each clip is probably showing the slate to which you referred while logging.

2. Use the scrubber at the bottom of each clip thumbnail to reveal the action at the beginning of each clip so that you can see how they all fit together.

3. Drag the thumbnails in the viewer to arrange them in a plausible order — from the wide shot where the woman opens the door, to the close-up of her at the whiteboard, to the long dolly shot of her walking toward the desk, and to the medium shot of her standing in front of the green screen. The final assembly should look something like Figure 3.8.

Figure 3.8 Rearranging the clip thumbnails to reorder them

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By using folders, you can combine the column-based organization of the Media Library with the visually based organization of the thumbnail viewer while you prepare your clips for editing.

You can automatically organize a messy set of icons in the thumbnail viewer using two commands in the Arrange submenu of the gear menu in thumbnail view: Clean Up All and Fit All.

Closing Libraries and Locking Clips

While libraries and folders both serve as containers of clips to help you organize them in different ways, there are two important differences. Libraries can be closed such that the contents of that library are temporarily released from your computer’s active memory, taking no resources. This lets you create projects that contain an enormous amount of media, so long as you distribute the clips sensibly among a series of libraries, each one of which gives you access to a subset of clips. Additionally, the contents of a closed library are protected from changes or modifications.

To close a library, right-click it and choose Close Library from the context menu. In Figure 3.9, the Office Scene library has been closed, and its icon appears disabled in the Media Library panel. To open a closed library, right-click it and choose Open Library, or just double-click the library icon.

Figure 3.9 The Visitation Scene library is closed, and it appears disabled.

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Additionally, you can use the Lock Clips command in the same context menu to prevent sequences or clips from being removed or changed, while allowing the contents of a library or folder to be browsed.

The Essentials and Beyond

Organizing your clips is one of the most important parts of preparing to edit a project of any kind. It’s important to take advantage of the Notes column, and of library and folder organization, to keep the Media Library from turning into a chaotic mess of hard-to-find media.

Additional Exercises

· Delete the Default Library that appears at the top of the Media Library, since it’s not in use.

· Set the View mode to Player, and play through each of the clips in the Lab Scene library to familiarize yourself with the media.

· Use the View Mode pop-up menu at the bottom of the Media Library to set the Media Library to Details so that you can see all of the columns. Use the column information to find the three 12-bit files in the entire collection of media you imported, then create two new folders called12-bit Clips, one in the Lab Scene library and one in the Office Scene library, and put the 12-bit clips into the appropriate folders (the mirror and desk shots go with the Office Scene, and the long dolly greenscreen shot in the lab goes with the Lab Scene). Turn Details mode off when you’re finished.