From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

Using Consolidate - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 110 Fundamentals 2

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Using Consolidate

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- [Instructor] While working on a large complex project, it's possible that your media is going to be stored in multiple locations. And that could be in multiple Avid Media files folders on different drives, or it could be in any folders for that matter. If you have Avid Native Media DNxHD or DNxHR Media, you can link to it just as you can link to other media files. The difference is that only the Avid Native Media is compatible with the full Avid Media database, the Avid Media management tools, and only that type of media can be placed inside the Avid Media files folders. So let's say you've got your media in lots of locations, and you want to move them into a single location just for better media management. Well, there's a tool for that in Media Composer, and it's called "consolidate." To demonstrate this, I'm going to select these three linked clips, which, if you recall, are QuickTime movie files, and then either in the clip menu, under "consolidate transcode," or by selecting the clips and right-clicking on them and choosing the option there, you can bring up the consolidate transcode window. I'm going to talk about consolidate in this lesson and transcode in another lesson because we've got plenty of options to talk about. First of all, you'll notice I can't click the "consolidate" button at the bottom of the window yet, which is kind of like an "okay" button, and that's because I haven't chosen the target drive. What's going to happen when you click "consolidate" is all of the clips that you've selected, or rather the media linked to those clips, all of those files will be gathered up and moved over or copied over to the drive location you choose. And it's always going to be inside the Avid Media files folder. In this list of available target drives, that's the drive you're going to put the media onto. It kind of looks like my C-drive, that would be the Macintosh hard drive on a Mac... And my media drive, they're both selected. Actually, they're deselected on this list. I'm going to click to select the media drive. And now you'll notice the "consolidate" buttons become available. Up at the top, I can specify the types of items that I'm going to consolidate. Again, consolidating is not converting the media, just transferring copies of it. And I can specify to only consolidate linked media, which kind of makes sense because it's only linked media, rather than imported or ingested media, that could be outside of the Avid Media files folders. So with this option enabled, you could just select a whole mix of clips in a bin and know that only the ones that need copying over will be copied. Then we've got a pretty self-explanatory option, "delete original media files when done." It's probably a bad idea, but I suppose if you're in a hurry, you could do it. And we have this option to skip native media files that are already on the target drive. So that's where you've linked to Avid Native Media, and copies of it already exist in the Avid Media files folders, so you're duplicating your content. If we had selected clips of that kind, this option to re-link to the copies of the clips inside the Avid Media files folder would be available. We also haven't selected any group clips, which is a topic we haven't covered yet where you can merge multiple clips into a single item, so that option is grayed out too. Plus, we've got an option to re-encode AVC Long-GOP media to ensure the shortest sub clip durations. This is useful if you're consolidating media that's a long group of picture encoded. That's potentially things like H264 media. By making shorter pieces, it's easier to manage those resulting files. And here we've got some options to convert our audio sample rate and bit depth, and, for that matter, the audio format. You probably won't need to do this, but it can reduce the work required for playback to make sure that the sample rate and bit depth matches your project. So with all of these options selected... And you'll notice that I've chosen almost none of them; I've just really chosen a drive. To consolidate and pull the media into a single location, you just need to click the "consolidate" button. But it's not going to work. I'm getting this notification saying that I can keep the master clips linked to the media on the original drive if I want to or re-link to media files on the target drive. And I suppose the whole purpose of this exercise is to link to new copies of the media at a new location. We're not copying this media to a new location, just for archiving purposes; we're going to continue editing it. And we get a notification about what will happen here. Now I click "okay," and I get a warning. "All the clips were skipped during the consolidate transcode operation. See the console for details." The reason the clips were skipped, of course, is that they're not Avid Native media. So we're going to need to use the transcode option instead, which we'll cover next. In fact, here's a notification telling us just that. So I'll click "okay." And let's take a look at transcoding. In fact, before I do, let's go into the tools menu and load up the console. The console gives you information about what's going on in Media Composer, and each operation you perform results in an item appearing in this window, and you can see we're just getting a confirmation of what the information messages already told us.

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