Eating your own dog food TRICK

[michaelveloz]

I use a little trick that simplifies my life and may not have occurred to some users, so I thought I'd share it..

Sometimes I find it's hard to work with certain related tracks inside a project of any complexity. For example, sometimes split screen tracks can be fussy to work with, and keeping audio and video tracks in sync as you move one or the other around, can be painful. You might think grouping would come to the rescue bit it doesn't always.

So my trick is to combine these dependent, or tricky, elements together, on their own, and create an output movie file (call it B) from them using VS, then I pull that movie into the overall project, call it A, and that B movie then contains all the elements I wanted to keep together and from that point it's just another video on A's timeline and it can be a lot easier to work with than if it were a bunch of separate but related tracks.

In other words, I use VS to create several simpler movies each containing fussy elements, then bring those in together as single items that I can then put where I want on the timeline.

For example, let's say I have a video and audio track that I've synced up. If I need to move them together on the timeline (to keep them in sync) this can be hard to to in some cases. So what I'd do instead is get them line up in a project on their own, so they are in sync, and then "Share them" as a movie, "marrying" the two as one.

I then open up the project where I want to use that audio/video combination and drop in the movie file I just created. The audio and video are now married and if I move it on the timeline, the audio and video stay together because it's all just part of its own movie file now.

Hope this helps, and surprises! someone, and that I haven't repeated something that's so painfully obvious you are all throwing tomatoes at the screen !

Michael