Summary mode
In a normal view each row or thumbnail in the main window corresponds to precisely one clip in your catalog. In certain situations you might want a different view of your clips however. In a summary view the clips in your window are temporarily replaced by an alternative "consolidated" view.
There are three types of summary mode, which you can access via the View menu:
- Clip Summaries
- Source Media View
- Thumbnail View
Switching to a summary view is just temporary and doesn't alter your original clips. You can toggle between a normal and summary view by pressing Cmd/Ctrl-Shift-S.
Clip summaries
Sometimes a catalog may contain overlapping or duplicated clip definitions, for example if you import logs from completed projects, or if you capture a tape in several segments.
- Use a Clip Summaries view to temporarily combine clip segments and filter out duplicates (this is useful if you have imported clips from multiple sources, eg. as both movie files and projects)
- Summary view usually provides a concise, non-overlapping summary of the contents of a tape.
- You can Copy summary clips and then Paste them into a new catalog as normal clips.
If you capture a tape as a series of regular sized files (using Live Capture Plus or the Whole tape capture log for example) it's very unlikely that all the file boundaries will fall on an exact scene change boundary. Some scenes will end up spanning more than one imported clip therefore. There are different ways to combine these broken clip segments and join them into a single clip for each scene:
- Display a Clip Summaries summary view.
- Use the Auto-join DV clips if scenes are split across files Preference option to automatically join clip segments at the time of importing a DV movie
- Use the Join DV Scene Fragments tool to clean up selected DV clips by automatically merging any start & end segments that come from separate media files but are known to belong to the same scene. This command also tidies the catalog by removing the original long capture clips from the catalog (leaving just the detected scenes).
- Use the Merge command to manually merge two or more contiguous clips into one.
Some of these commands only work on DV clips because DV files contain the timecode encoded in each frame and also include start and end of scene boundary information.
How summary mode works
The changes made by summary mode only affect how clips are displayed and exported. The original clips in the catalog are not altered, so you can safely toggle in and out of summary view as required. Clip Summary mode displays a concise description of the scenes on a tape as follows:
- If a catalog has several clips with the same in and out value (eg. from different projects) these are merged into one
- If you captured several long clips, each of which contains several scenes, the long clips are hidden and only the scenes are listed
- If a single scene is split in two because it was captured as two files these sections are joined up.
Other summary modes:
- Source Media View shows precisely one clip for each source media file.
- Each clip can have any number of thumbnails associated with it. Normally only one thumbnail, the poster thumbnail, is shown for each clip. In a Thumbnail View each thumbnail in the catalog is shown as a separate "clip".