98 Chapter 4 AVID ADMINISTRATION clips, hold down Shift-Ctrl on Macintosh or Shift-Alt on Windows, and Relink becomes Unlink. Any media that have been captured for this master clip now become offline. The system considers this master clip as never been captured and is not linked to any media or to any sequences. The sequence linking is important because otherwise every use of this clip in any sequence will be changed. You want to change this one master clip, but you proba- bly don't want every use of it to change, too. That is why Unlink is required as a safeguard. You then can modify the duration of the clip, but you must recapture all the unlinked clips. Do not unlink media that have no timecode, and do not modify the master clip because you will be unable to batch recapture. Unlink is extremely useful for multicam projects. After batch capturing Reel 1 from Camera 1, you can duplicate all the master clips, unlink them, and change the tape name (Reel 2, Reel 3, etc.). Now you can batch capture all the other camera angles. Just be sure to duplicate the original clips using Ctrl/Command D and not Alt/Option drag to another bin. You must be working with a true duplicate and not a clone of the master clip before you unlink. There is no way to unlink a sequence using the Unlink com- mand. Sequences have a loose link to media that allows them to change resolutions easily. The best way to unlink a sequence is to duplicate and decompose. You can throw away all the new decomposed master clips and just use the sequence. Because a sequence is loose about linking, you don't really need to unlink most of the time. You can just force the sequence to link to new material (Relink all nonmaster clips to selected online items with both media and sequence in the same bin), and it will automati- cally break the links to the old media. Backing Up and Archiving So, what is your most important job as an editor? Making a great edit, right? Well, if you are a freelancer without a staff IT archivist at your disposal your most important job is backing up! Why? Well, no matter how good an edit is, if the sequence is acci- dentally deleted or the system crashes, that edit doesn't exist and is useless to the client, no matter how brilliant it was. A good friend of mine commented once that he was the fastest editor in the world the second time he edited the job. In other words, when you lose your sequence you better be both brilliant and fast because you're about to do it all over again! Let's look at some back-up strategies.