Transferring and transcoding clips

I want to look in detail at different options for transferring and transcoding media with Prelude. Now, these functions are at a core of what Prelude does, so there's a lot of detailed choices and it's going to be up to you as to how you use them. So, I'm in the interface and I'm already drilled down pretty deep here. It's the same place that we left off in that with any project I've now opened the ingest window. And, I've also drilled down to where I've created this P2 archive in the Exercise Files.

So, there's the pathway if you're looking for it. My Exercise Files are on the Desktop and then Inside Media. There's the folder called P2, which is a P2 archive, the equivalent of a card. And, I can select whatever I want here. I'm going to go back to list mode, and let's just say, I'm going to do a limited set here. Let's say I've decided that these four interview clips are what are coming in in this ingest, because what I really want to look at. Is this top section here. And, our detail choices for both transferring and transcoding clips.

So, you can see that everything here is grayed out. And, if I were to leave it grayed out nothing would be transferred. No new files would be written. I would simply get links to the existing files in my new project. And, and that works well if we're doing these exercise files. And, we don't want to make new copies. But, it really doesn't work at all if you're starting from a physical card and you need to move or transcode the footage. So, once we check this one, everything else comes alive but in fact, let me uncheck everything else so we can do them one at a time. But, we should see that none of these options are available, until I click the governing ones.

That starts all the way up at transfer and if I turn it off, everything is gray, nothing else is available if I'm choosing not to move the files at all. So, as soon as I click the possibility of transferring, now I get some other choices. So, starting with where I want to transfer to. And, in this case, this would go directly to our desktop. And, you know I think i'm going to leave that in place for the moment. It's unlikely in a real scenario. You would probably be assigning this to one of your media drives. I like sort of doing art work for instructional sort of purposes, right out on the desktop.

If you don't want the desktop, you need to browse for location. And, this will be a fairly familiar function of just browsing for where you want to put things. And, I can also do add sub folder and that means that the location of desktop Prelude is going to create a new folder and by default it's going to name it for the date. But, if I want to I could just call it, you know, Media Ingest or something like that, and that folder will be created for me. So, until we get to transcode those are our options. We're going to transfer the media.

Where are we going to put it? Should I make a new folder to put it in? And, that's really no different than making it by hand. Then, here's where things get interesting, which is if I decide to transcode. Okay? So, this is basically saying I don't just want to move the media. I, in fact, want to re-write it in a different format. So, you see once I click transcode. I then get a bunch more choices about the format. So, let's go through this. If I really did have a p2 media, it could be that my workflow required me to transcode it to, let's say, a high quality QuickTime setting.

So, I could choose QuickTime as my format. And then, I have various presets about what type of Quicktime file to make, In this case if were working standard def, which I am I could have it transfer everything to lets say ntsc widescreen 240p dv. The thing to recognize here is this is always going to pull. Pull from the existing presets. And, if you want more choices, the key is to go ahead and make them in Adobe Media Encoder. That's where these presets are made, and then you'll be able to access them from here.

So, here are the ones that are built in. You've got different types of editing and distribution formats, and then you can use more. Just remember this is all about. Adobe media encoder integration, so you can go ahead and make more presets in media encoder and then it will allow you to load them here as well. Clips get stitched together. So, this is when you have what's called a spanned clip that goes across two cards. You have the option to stitch these together and put them in under a new name. We won't have any of these span clips so we can leave that unchecked.

And then finally, I've got a choice to verify, and we have to backup a second because I can't actually verify transcoded media. So, this will be an either, or. So, if I uncheck Transcode, I then get my Verify option where I can do a file size comparison. Prelude will check to see that the size of the files that I've transferred actually match. The size that's started on the card when the move operation or transfer operation is done. I can also do a bit-by-bit comparison or what's called an MD5 comparison just different ways of comparing the final data that's transferred.

Versus the data that starts on the card. So, this is an either or because if you transcode, there's nothing to compare it to. But, if you don't transcode, you can verify that your transfer has happened properly. Now, if both of these things are important to you, it might indicate that you do a two-step process. You could transfer all of your footage to. One location, verify that it worked, call that your master. Then, go into Prelude again, go to the copy that you made and then transcode it in a separate step. But, you can't both verify and transcode, unless you set up separate destinations, which I will talk about in a little bit.

So, let's go ahead and do this one so we can see we're going to transcode to a Quicktime format, widescreen DV and I don't have to worry about anything else. We'll talk about both additional destinations as well as renaming in a different lesson, but now we can go ahead and do ingest, this is going to take a second. Can see a progress bar down here and we'll just speed up to see those files as they're completed. Just want to go back on to my desktop real briefly here, and see that in my enclosing folder called media ingest, because I set up this particular transfer to be a transcode, I've now created new files.

And, they'll come in exactly in the size and format that I indicated. Also back in Prelude, of course, the files have been ingested and they're now part of a Prelude project meaning that I can move them very easily to Premiere or continue to work in Prelude. As you can see, Prelude offers you a lot of different choices for both transferring and trans-coding media. Exactly how you use these choices is going to depend on you, your team, and your workflow.