How to use Assemble with Avid Media Composer

What is Assemble? Text-based video editing so you can highlight the transcript text of soundbites and then drag and drop them into the desired order to form the spine of your story and export back to your NLE a sequence XML/EDL. Learn more.

This guide is to help you use Simon Says Assemble with Avid Media Composer

Notes:

• Import regular clips.

Steps:

1. Import media:
   Import your raw footage, or create h264 low-res MOV proxies, to the Simon Says website: you can upload it directly or import media via a cloud drive such as Dropbox, Box and Google Drive. Ideally proxies have the same filename as the originals so you can easily relink it when bringing the sequence back to Avid Media Composer. (Note: Simon Says has a mac app for importing but it doesn't import the timecode as the macOS native transcoder doesn't read timecode to pass it to the mac app on ingest; instead use the other methods mentioned above.)

2. Pay and Transcribe your clips. New users get free credit.

3. Simon Says Assemble

Once your project is transcribed, you can edit your transcripts and identify speakers.

Once you finish editing your transcripts, go into Assemble mode. You can do that via the dashboard on the website and click on the button that says “Video Assemble Mode”. Or click here.

4. Create an Assemble project

You'll now be in your Assemble dashboard. Create a new Assemble project:

On the left-hand side, you’ll see three buttons.

• The Simon Says logo takes you to your Assemble dashboard where you can create a new project or select an existing one.
• “BIN” is where all of your media will be stored. Right now it’s empty.
• “IMPORT” is where, you guessed it, you can add media from your transcription projects.

Let’s go ahead and select our SV Academy project that we just transcribed.

Important Note: Projects need to contain video; Assemble doesn't support audio-only projects at this time.

5. Working with Media

Click on the Bin and choose the file you want to load into the bin player:

Your file's transcript will load on the bin/player side. Highlight soundbites and click the buttons to move it to the timeline side.

Drag and drop soundbites on the timeline side to order as you like. Use the Play/Pause and Stop buttons to advance the narrative you build. Click the thumbnail next to a soundbite to play your timeline from there.

6. Sharing your project

Now for the good stuff. Click the team icon in the upper right-hand to get a link to share the project, or to invite people via email address directly. You can set the permissions level to either edit, comment, or to simply view.

Teammates with comment or edit access can leave notes on specific soundbites, by clicking on the empty note icon.

7. Export sequence back to Avid Media Composer

Click the Export button at the top right and then choose "Adobe Premiere Pro". An XML sequence file will download.

8. Relink: In Avid, import the EDL you just downloaded from Simon Says and the timeline/sequence will form.

Then relink your clips to the version of media you started with. If you imported proxies but you want to relink the original media, force Avid to link to the original by ignoring extensions.

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