In this first of a two part lesson, Kevin P McAuliffe tackles probably the most confusing concept when it comes to editing in Media Composer.  What is Consolidating vs What is Transcoding.  In this lesson, we take a look at What Is Consolidating?

I get a lot of questions about Media Composer, and how to do specific tasks, but the question I get asked the most is “What is the difference between Consolidating and Transcoding?”, so in this two part lesson, we’re going to look at exactly what the differences are, and we’re going to start with Consolidating.

What’s important to keep in mind about Consolidating vs Transcoding is that Consolidating is do to media that has been either imported, captured or transcoded already.  By re-transcoding your media, you’re essentially re-compressing, which if done enough, will give you a noticalbe quality loss in your material.  There are three basic tasks you’ll be doing where Consolidating will come into play.  Backing up a sequence to a separate/external drive, moving media from one drive to another, or taking long shots (we’re talking about 30-40 min) and extracting certain parts of it (via subcliping), without re-compressing the clips.  Once you see the proper Consolidating workflow, it will give you a better understanding of exactly how different from Transcoding, it really is! 

 In our next lesson, we’re going to talk about Transcoding, what it is, and why it’s essential to your (AMA) Link To workflow.

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