Timeline Editing: Track Patching

In last video, we explored the various ways to move around the timeline.
In this lesson, I will explain the timeline patch panel.
The patch panel, located to the left of the sequence, represents source tracks and destination tracks.
You may find familiarity with other editors, like Final Cut Pro 7 or Media Composer.
The green tabs on the left are source tracks.
The dark grey tabs on the right represent the destination, or sequence tracks.
You click on tabs to connect or disconnect them.
When the two tabs are connected together, Smoke will edit the source clip on to the assigned destination track.
Clicking an individual video tab connects or disconnects it to the corresponding destination track,
SHIFT Clicking a tab applies the operation to all video tabs.
If you’re coming from another NLE, you might be used to patching your tracks by dragging the source tabs
up or down to the desired destination track.
Smoke’s way of patching tracks is a little different, so I’ll give you an example of patching video tracks.
You can see the source video tab is patched to a particular track.
Source video track assignment is controlled by the focus point on the timeline’s positioner.
When the focus point is moved up or down, notice how the video patching will align itself to the track on which the focus point goes.
The benefit of this is that you don’t have to keep checking the patch panel when editing,
if you are working quickly with your attention in the center of the timeline.
Another method to patch the video tracks is to click the boxes in the patch panel.
This acts as a switcher for video patching but also indicates the primary track that you are looking at.
Audio track patching is slightly different.
A typical example you might do everyday is add a stereo music clip to tracks 3 and 4.
Notice my sequence has two empty tracks.
When you place the cursor over the green tab, the cursor changes.
Click and drag to the left and right, and notice you can scroll through the audio tracks in the source clip
and assign the correct one to the audio in the sequence.
You will also notice that if the audio patch number was originally patched to another audio track, they will simply swap round.
When adding audio tracks, you can decide if the new track will be mono or stereo.
This choice impacts what can be patched in the new tracks.
For example, you can patch mono audio to a mono audio track in the sequence.
However you cannot patch a stereo audio clip into a mono audio track.
If you load a stereo audio file into the source viewer and try to edit it into a sequence,
you’ll quickly notice that the patching tabs will not be there.
So the standard way of editing with buttons and keyboard shortcuts will not work in this instance.
However you can force mono into stereo and visa versa.
By using Drag and drop editing from the media library directly into the sequence
will bypass the patch assignment in the sequence, and edit the audio in regardless.
This is similar to the behaviour found in other editing software.
A final function worth highlighting is the track locking.
The padlock icon on each track can be turned on and this will prevent any changes to the particular track from any operation.
In the next video, we look at typical 3 and 4 point editing scenarios.