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Next to the right, a real-time performance indicator shows you playback performance. In the center, the title of the currently selected clip is shown, with a drop-down menu to the right that shows you the most recent 10 clips you’ve browsed. To the far right, a Timecode field shows you the current position of the playhead (right-clicking this opens a contextual menu with options to change the timecode that’s displayed, and to copy and paste timecode).
— The center of the Media Pool Preview Player shows you the waveforms in all channels of the currently selected clip, at whatever zoom level is currently selected.
— Transport controls at the bottom consist of a jog bar for scrubbing, Stop, Play, and Loop buttons, and set In and Out buttons.
The preview player in the Media Pool
Bins, Power Bins, and Smart Bins
There are actually three kinds of bins in the Media Pool, and each appears in its own section of the Bin list. The Power Bin and Smart Bin areas of the Bin list can be shown or hidden using commands in the Media Pool Options menu (…): Show Smart Bins and Show Power Bins. Here are the differences between the different kinds of bins:
— Bins: Simple, manually populated bins. Drag and drop anything you like into a bin, and that’s where it lives, until you decide to move it to another bin. Bins may be hierarchically organized, so you can create nested bins, one inside of the other, if you like. Creating new bins is as easy as right-clicking within the bin list and choosing Add Bin from the contextual menu.
— Power Bins: Hidden by default. Power bins are shared among all of the projects in your current project library, making them ideal for shared title generators, graphics movies and stills, sound effects library files, music files, and other media that you want to be able to quickly and easily access from any project. You put whatever materials you want into Power Bins; it’s a manual process. To create a new Power Bin, show the Power Bins area of the Bin list, then right-click within it and choose Add Bin.
— Smart Bins: These bins build “custom collections” of media that use metadata or analysis to automatically populate the bins dynamically, meaning that the contents will change depending on what the Smart Bin is set to focus on. For example, a sound effects Smart Bin will show only sound effects, and the bin’s contents will grow or shrink depending on the number of effects files that have been identified in the project, which may change over time. Smart Bins can allow very fast and efficient organizing of project contents.
There are several automatically created Smart Bin types available (see Preferences > User > Edit Tab > Automatic Smart Bins).