The Asset Tree
The entire gamut of Library assets is organized into a folder tree whose structure and general usage should be familiar from file-system tools like Windows Explorer. When you select a location in the Asset Tree, the folder name appears on the caption of the active location tab, and its contents are displayed in the neighboring Browser.
In the Main Library, shown here, the Asset Tree occupies the left-hand pane of the workspace. In the compact view of the Library used by Avid Studio’s project and media editing tools, the Asset Tree is presented instead as a dropdown list on the active tab.
The four main ‘branches’ of the Asset Tree are All media (video, audio, photos); Projects (your Avid Studio movie and disc projects); Collections (custom groupings of assets); and Creative Elements (auxiliary media such as titles, and effects). These are introduced more fully, along with the subsections they contain, in Understanding the Library.
The Group By menu
The header line of the All media branch offers a small dropdown menu of options to control how the groupings within each subsection of the branch are created.
When you group by folder (the default), the folder structure corresponds to actual directories on your hard drive, flash drive, or other file-system device. Some standard folders are included by default; you can add others at will using the watch folder system. Grouping by folder is shown in the Main Library illustration above.
When you use another grouping, by rating, by date or by file type, exactly the same asset files are listed within each subsection as with the by folder grouping. However, instead of classifying them by the file system folders in which they are stored, the Asset Tree groups them into ‘virtual folders’ according to the chosen property.
Grouping by rating, for example, divides each subsection into six virtual folders. Five of them display media files to which you have given star ratings; the sixth is for those you haven’t rated yet. See The Browser for more information about file ratings and their uses.
The Main Library with grouping By Date selected in the All Media branch of the Asset Tree. The bottom-level folders in the Asset Tree are displayed in the Browser (right). These ‘virtual’ folders each represent all the photos whose file date falls within a particular month.
In the illustration above, the Photos subsection of the All Media branch is shown grouped by file type. The virtual folders have names like bmp, gif and jpg – one virtual folder for each recognized file extension in the subsection’s media files.
Under group by date, the folders represent the year of the file’s creation; within these, the files are further grouped by month.
Grouping in other subsections
The Projects and Creative Elements branches of the Asset Tree also provide a group by menu, so it is possible for branches to be in different grouping modes. The menu commands are the same as described above for the All Media branch, except that the by file type option is not needed and doesn’t appear.
The add collection button
The Collections branch does not exhibit a group by menu. This button on the branch header lets you create a new Collection.