Consolidating and Transcodes

[Ricky Barrow]

Doesn’t consolidate in effect do a transcode? I know they are different functions but don’t you end up with Avid Media (transcodes) either way and don’t the settings of either allow the user to select video or audio or both? I’m probably confused in my understanding but this seems like it did what it was supposed to do and did so according to settings, probably video only.

Unless you are saying Avid created 2 copies of Avid Meida, a consolidate and a transcode?

Ricky

[Michael Phillips]

Both methods result in linked media becoming Avid managed in the Avid MediaFiles folder, but they are not the same process.

• Transcode is a media conversion process on the media from one codec to another
• Consolidate is a copy and a rewrap for a codec that is “native” to Media Composer.

You can see what codecs are considered native from the list of what you can transcode to.

Michael

[Glenn Sakatch]

A lot of people assume consolidating media will simply copy everything over to the drive of their choosing (putting it into an Avid MediaFiles folder structure. Depending on the source media, Avid will either do this, or simply skip the clip and move on to the next one. If the media is not “consoidatable?” – a native avid codec- it will skip the clip.

Quite often when working on the road, if wanted to move stuff to drives to take home, or move to another box to color correct, i would transcode the media to the second drive. This should create a new version of the media. It seemed everytime i consolidated, i was missing media…then i realized what was going on, some of my media was linked and the wrong format…go pro, or some other secondary camera format.

Consolidate is handy if you have native avid media on an external drive (mxf camera originals) and you want to copy the media used in a sequence over to another drive for clean up purposes, but, if your sequence also has a clip that was brought in from perhaps a graphics render- animation codec or maybe mp4, and linked, that won’t get consolidated. Those clips need to be transcoded first…or imported at the start of the process.

Or if the camera originals are on a temporary transport drive, you could consolidate them – again native media type- and the process should be quicker- as it is now just copying the media, and perhaps take up less space- depending on the codec , than transcoding them. In this scenario, you would be cutting with the camera originals – say xdcam, rather than dnx 175 transcodes, but the clips would all be living in a proper Avid MediaFiles structure, rather than linking to your external drive from the camera department.

Glenn