Selects

Keep a range of a shot as a row of its own — with its handles, so you can still trim past the marks.

Keep the good bit

A forty-minute interview has about nine minutes in it. Mark the in and out of one answer in the Source monitor and choose Clip ▸ Keep as a Select…

It asks what to call it, offers the shot's name and the timecode it starts at, and files it in Selects. The bin row shows the select's own length — not the forty minutes of the shot it came out of.

Nothing is copied, nothing is transcoded and nothing is uploaded. A select is a named range of a shot you already have.

It keeps its handles

This is where B/side differs from Avid, deliberately, and it is the difference that matters in a cutting room.

An Avid subclip is a wall at its own edges. Trim past them and there is nothing there; to reach the frames that were always on the card you have to match-frame back to the master clip and start again.

A B/side select is the shot, with the good bit marked. Load it and the shot opens in the Source monitor, parked on the first frame of the select and marked to the last. Press Splice and you get the select. Then trim the cut out as far as the shot goes, because the handles were never taken away.

So a select is a decision you can change your mind about, which is what a select should be.

Cutting from one

• Load it — the shot opens, marked. Three-point editing works exactly as it always does.
• Splice or Overwrite — what lands in the cut is the shot, at the select's in-point, the select's length. The timeline shows the shot's name, because that is what the frames are.
• Trim it — straight past the marks, in either direction, for as long as the shot lasts.
• String out a bin of them — see string-outs. A bin of selects, strung out, is a selects reel: everything worth keeping, in order, in one gesture.

What it will not do

A select of a select. B/side sends you to the shot instead. Marking inside a select and keeping that is the same thing with one fewer link to lose.

Group for multicam. A multicam group carries its own offset into each angle, and a select is a range of something else — a group built on one would sync and be wrong by the select's in-point, which is nine angles that look right and play out by ten seconds. B/side refuses it and names the shot to group instead.

Appear in an AAF as a subclip. The cut you export carries the shots and the frames, which is what everything downstream needs. Avid itself flattens subclips on the way in — B/side does the same when reading an AAF — so nothing is lost that anybody downstream was reading.

If the shot goes

A select points at a shot. Take an import back out of a project, and its selects say so rather than pretending: loading one answers "this is a select of a shot that is not in this project", and a string-out that includes one leaves it out by name. Nothing guesses.