Source Settings
Set a master clip's LUTs and framing once — stack LUTs after its camera conversion, turn it upright, crop it, fit or fill the frame, straighten it, and choose how it is scaled — and every shot of it, in every cut, plays that way in the monitors and the master.
Some things are true of a clip before it is cut: the phone was held on its side, the camera shot log, the DIT sent a look for that day's cards. Source Settings is where you say so — once, on the master clip — and every shot of that clip, in every cut, plays that way. A shot cut in tomorrow arrives already right.
Open it from the clip: right-click it in the bin ▸ Colour, Crop & Rotate…, or Clip ▸ Colour, Crop & Rotate… for the clips selected in the bin (or, with none selected, the clip in Source). With several clips selected, what you set goes on all of them, and the window says so when they were set differently before.
Everything you change shows in both monitors as you change it. Done saves it; Cancel or Escape puts every clip back exactly as it was. As Recorded takes off the LUTs and the framing (the camera conversion stays as it is — it has its own control at the top).
Colour
Camera conversion is the log-to-Rec.709 conversion the clip plays through — usually found for you from what the camera wrote (Colour has how). Change it here, or set it to None — as recorded.
Under it, Add a LUT stacks LUTs after the conversion, applied top to bottom: a show LUT, then a DIT's look for the day, say. Each one has
- an amount, from none of it to all of it;
- a tick box to switch it off without losing it, to see the picture without that one;
- ↑ ↓ to change the order, which changes the picture — a look applied before a show LUT is not the same look applied after it;
- ✕ to take it off the clip.
A LUT is either one of the built-in conversions or one of the project's own LUT files (Settings ▸ Looks, or the LUTs folder that came in with an Avid project). A clip can stack eight.
The whole stack is composed into one table before anything draws it, and the monitor and the master draw that same table — so a stack of three is as exact in the master as a single LUT is.
A shot with a Camera LUT effect of its own plays through that instead of the clip's colour encoding: that is a decision about that one shot.
Framing
In the order they happen:
| Turn | ↺ Left and ↻ Right turn the picture a quarter at a time, for a phone held sideways or a camera mounted on its side. |
| Mirror | Left to right, or top to bottom — the picture as it was recorded, before it is turned. |
| Crop | Takes the edges off the upright picture. What is left is the picture: it is what gets fitted to the frame, so a crop makes the part you kept bigger, not a smaller picture with a hole round it. |
| Fit | How the picture meets the frame: Fit (the whole picture, bars where it does not reach), Fill (blown up to cover the frame, centred), Fill, hold top (where a face usually is), Fill, hold bottom (captions, a scoreboard). |
| Straighten | Degrees clockwise, for a horizon that is not level. Zoom in a little afterwards to lose the corners. |
| Zoom, Position | Where the picture sits after it is fitted, as a shot's own Transform measures it. |
A shot's own effects work on the clip as framed: a picture-in-picture at half size is half of the upright, filled picture, and a shot's crop is a fraction of what the clip's framing left.
Interpolation
How the picture is resampled when it is scaled or turned:
- Standard — what every clip gets unless you choose: bilinear in the monitor, bicubic in the master.
- Bilinear — smooth, in the monitor and the master alike.
- Bicubic — sharper when a clip is blown up, in the monitor and the master alike.
- Nearest neighbour — hard pixel edges, never blended: screen recordings, pixel art, a graphic scaled up by a whole number.
Seeing what a clip has
The bin's Source settings column says it in words — turned 90° clockwise, cropped, fill, 2 LUTs stacked — and so does the clip's right-click menu. Every change is in the clip's history (Version History…), with who made it.