OK, here’s a little follow up to my Media Composer 6 review.  In that review I mentioned that you could label your clips via a small palette of colors.  Well, there is actually a way to open up that choice of colors…to get to the full color palette including the Color Wheel and Crayon options.  All you need to do is Option+Command+click (or Opt+Cmd+CNTRL click if you use a trackpad) to have access to the full color options:

So now you can make clips a putrid split pea green if you wanted.

NOW, onto the AMA tip.

So, you might want to bring in some footage via AMA and work with it natively…alongside your other Avid media. (People have indicated that they have done this, or plan on doing this…so they don’t waste time transcoding). So you now have a mixed bag of Avid media and AMA footage. And then you get to a point where, for some reason, you need to transcode only the AMA footage. There are several reasons for wanting or needing to do this. There are some things that don’t quite work right with a timeline full of AMA footage. Avid has fixed a bunch of these issues, but others might still be in the wings.

ANYWAY…so you’d like to track this footage. How can you tell which footage in the sequence is AMA, and what is not? The answer to this is simple…Color all the AMA clips a certain color. Make it that ugly split-pea color if you want to…or bright pink so they stand out. Just give them a unique color, and then they will appear in the timeline with that color. Even if you do this after you edit them into the timeline:

FYI, the clip colors don’t show up in the timeline automatically. In fact, the option for this is defaulted to OFF…not showing any clip colors. You have to enable this action. To do that you go to the little “FAST MENU” (us editors still call it the “Hamburger” menu…because it looks like a small hamburger) on the lower left of the timeline and choose the option CLIP COLOR:

In there, you will need to check the option for SOURCE.

That will enable the color you assign the clip in the bin to appear in the timeline. I also enable OFFLINE, so that I can see at a glance what media is offline or missing. And you see that you have options to show mixed media in your timeline. Useful stuff.