The Movie Editor
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The Movie Editor is Avid Studio’s main editing screen for digital movie creation. The editor brings together three main components:
The Library, in its compact view, provides the assets available to your project.
The project timeline lets you organize the assets as clips within a schematic representation of your production.
The Player lets you preview Library assets before adding them to your project. It also lets you view – on a frame-by-frame basis if you like – how any part of the production will actually appear to your audience when you export it (save it as a file or upload it to YouTube).
In addition, the Movie Editor calls upon a variety of tools and windows for creating and editing titles, adding effects, and other purposes.
A portion of the Movie Editor display, with the compact view of the Library at upper left, the Player at upper right (partly visible), and at bottom the timeline and the Navigator.
Disc editing
If you plan ultimately to release your movie on DVD with interactive menus, you will at some point need the special features of the Disc Editor. It provides all the same timeline editing features as the Movie Editor, but also lets you create and work on the disc menus with which users will navigate your production.
Avid Studio lets you smoothly transition a movie to a disc project at any time during development, so it’s all right to start in the Movie Editor even if you end up targeting DVD for output instead of or as well as the other options.
The compact Library
The compact view of the Library, which uses the top left of the Movie Editor screen, is a core feature of the editing environment. If you switch back and forth between the Library and the Movie Editor, you will see that the same location tab is selected in both views, and that the same Library assets are on display.
With the compact Library and the timeline together in the same window, adding assets to your movie becomes a breeze: just drag the items you want from the Library Browser onto the project timeline.
Slideshow productions
In addition to all types of video productions – ‘movies’ – the Movie Editor (and the Disc Editor) can be used for authoring complex slideshows and presentations from still images. The same editing techniques apply in both cases.