Every week, Frame.io Insider asks one of our expert contributors to share a tip, tool, or technique that they use all the time and couldn’t live without. This week, Avid editor Jack Brown shares how to batch rename files inside a Media Composer bin.
So most Avid Editors—and definitely assistants—will know that metadata plays a big role in what we do. From looking at labels of the sound ISOs, to sending the lens data of clips to the VFX dept, to making our own custom notes and labels, metadata is very much our friend.
There will be times when we need to edit or add metadata across a lot of clips at once. If we’re applying the same info to all these clips this is easy: we select all the clips and then right-click over the metadata column and set the info for that field. This will apply the change to all clips.
But what if we want to do something less consistent. Like removing all those infernal “.copy.01” suffixes avid creates? Or adding prefixes/suffixes of our own? Or even building unique labelling per clip with counters like VFX IDs? This is where Avid Bulk Edit comes in.
Bulk Edit was added shortly after the Avid redesign in 2019 and has had one or two improvements since. Basically it’s a batch rename utility but inside the bin, allowing us to edit vast swathes of data in a few clicks.
Using Bulk Edit in Avid Media Composer
Using Avid’s Bulk Edit is simple:
- Select the clips you want to edit (or not if you just want to edit everything in the bin)
- Right click the selection and choose “Bulk Edit”
You’ll be presented with the Bulk Edit window allowing you to create a chain of renaming tasks and even save them to be reused later on other clips/bins. You can see in my example I’ve got a chain to use metadata from the sound recorder to quickly name all the clips in the format of “SLATE – SCENE/TAKE.”
From the bin you can also run a Find and Replace on data as well. Strangely, this is not inside of the Bulk Edit window but instead an option in the same right-click menu. It appears at the top of the bin, allowing us to replace specific words with anything we like—including nothing, if you just want to get rid of something in the data. This can also be a fast way to insert info/characters in the middle of a clip name of data column, too.
This has been one of my favorite new additions in recent years. With Bulk Edit being added in version 2020.4 and Find and Replace coming in v2020.9.
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