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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 by using the Media Pool option menu and selecting/deselecting 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 a Russian dolls nest of bins 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. These are also manually populated bins, but these 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. 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 are procedurally populated bins, meaning that custom rules employing metadata are used to dynamically filter the contents of the Media Pool whenever you select a Smart Bin. This makes Smart Bins fast ways of organizing the contents of projects for which you (or an assistant) has taken the time to add metadata to your clips using the Metadata Editor, adding Scene, Shot, and Take information, keywords, comments and description text, and myriad other pieces of information to make it faster to find what you’re looking for when you need it.
To create a new Smart Bin, show the Smart Bin area of the Bin list (if necessary), then right-click within it and choose Add Smart Bin. A dialog appears in which you can edit the name of that bin and the rules it uses to filter clips, and click Create Smart Bin.
Filtering Bins Using Color Tags
If you’re working on a project that has a lot of bins, you can apply color tags to identify particular bins with one of eight colors. Tagging bins is as easy as right-clicking any bin and choosing the color you want from the Color Tag submenu.
Using Color Tags to identify bins
Using Color Tag filtering to isolate the blue bins