5.5

Understanding Sync Breaks
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To play a limited duration of a sequence:
1. Map the Play Length Toggle button from the Play tab of the Command palette to a
monitor toolbar button.
For information about mapping buttons, see “Understanding Button Mapping” on
page 113.
2. Move the position indicator to the location where you want to start playing the
sequence.
3. Click the Play Length Toggle button.
The Play button and the Play Length Toggle button change to white, indicating the Play
Length Toggle feature is active.
4. Click the Play button.
The sequence plays for the default Play Length, which is 1 minute.
5. To set the Play Length back to play the entire sequence, click the Play Length Toggle
button again.
Understanding Sync Breaks
Sync breaks occur when a frame-accurate relationship between two clips or between the
audio and video tracks within a single clip is offset during editing. Your Avid editing
application provides several features to avoid, track, and remove sync breaks.
In many cases, sync breaks are the unavoidable result of selecting only one track in a synced
relationship (for example, audio only or video only), and performing edit functions that
change the duration of that track when you extract, splice-in, or add or remove frames.
By default, the Timeline displays sync breaks whenever they occur while you edit. They
appear at break points as white numbers indicating negative or positive offset values relative
to zero. The Sync Breaks option also displays match-frame edits as an equal sign (=) on the
edits. For more information on match frames, see “Working with Add Edits (Match
Frames)” on page 700.
Match frames (left) and sync breaks (right) in the Timeline