Understanding Markers and Restrictions

In MediaCentral UX, adding markers is the primary way to log material. A marker is an indicator that you add to a selected frame to mark a particular location in a clip, subclip, or sequence. Markers can have icons of different colors and can be associated with user-defined comments.

Users can add, view, and edit markers in several different Avid applications:

Markers added in any of these products can be viewed and edited by any of the other products in an Interplay Production environment.

In Media Composer v6.0, Avid Symphony v6.0, and NewsCutter v10.0, the term “locators” was changed to “markers” in both the user interface and the documentation.

Spanned markers created on an Avid editing system are not currently supported in MediaCentral.

You can add markers to uneditable sequences (sequences that are colored dark red), edit marker text, and save the markers with the sequence, if you have the proper permissions in Interplay Production. You need to have a read/write role for the folder that contains the sequence and permissions for markers as described below.

A restriction is a span of an asset that indicates a clip, or a portion of a clip, whose use is limited in some way, such as through intellectual property rights management or content compliance. Users can add and edit restrictions only in Interplay Assist and MediaCentral UX, but can view them in the following Avid products:

For information about creating restrictions in MediaCentral UX, see Adding, Saving, and Deleting Restrictions.

To create and modify markers, a MediaCentral UX user’s Interplay Production account must be configured with the following permissions:

Setting	Description
Can create locators	Create markers (formerly called “locators” in Avid editing products)
Can modify locators	Modify and delete markers
Can create restrictions	Create restrictions
Can modify restrictions	Modify and delete restrictions

If a user does not have these permissions, the Create Marker button or the Create Restriction button is grayed out and a tool tip states that the user does not have permission to create a marker or restriction.

An Interplay Production administrator sets these permissions in the Instinct/Assist User Settings view of the Interplay Administrator. For more information, see the Interplay | Engine and Interplay | Archive Engine Administration Guide or the Interplay Production Help.

In MediaCentral UX, you can add markers to clips, subclips, and sequences stored in the Interplay Production database. Markers that you add to a sequence are associated only with the sequence. They are not automatically associated with the corresponding master clips used in the sequence. Similarly, a marker added to a subclip is not added to the associated master clip.

When you add a marker to a sequence, you might notice a delay of a few seconds before you can create a new marker. In this case, the Insert Marker button is disabled (grayed out). When the button is enabled again, you can create a new marker.

If you are creating a sequence in the Sequence pane, you can add markers either by adding clips with markers to the sequence or by adding markers directly to the sequence. See Adding Markers to a Sequence.

In MediaCentral UX, marker text has a limit of 32,000 characters for each marker. If marker text exceeds 32,000 characters, a warning message tells you that the text exceeds the maximum number of characters and that you cannot save the text until the reduce the number of characters. The Save status message shows you the character count until it is reduced to 32,000, at which point the message changes to “Unsaved changes” and you can save the text.