Avid Crash Course: Importing, Consolidating, Transcoding - Avid Media Composer Tutorial

hello everyone welcome back to another media composer tutorial today we're going to take a look at the very basics of how to get footage into media composer and how avid's media management works so we're going to talk about ama linking transcoding consolidating and importing this video is for everyone who is new to media composer or maybe hasn't worked with avid in a while and wants to refresh their basic knowledge alright first we are going to take a look at ama linking when you link something you connect media composer to the original file there's no converting happening no extra files are being created it's similar to what happens if you drag and drop a file into adobe premiere there are two ways how to link a file in avid media composer you can either drag and drop it into a bin while holding down the option key [Music] or you can right click input source browser and select your file here this little symbol here tells you that this file is linked now if i would delete my original file or move it somewhere else let's do that avid would lose the connection to the file if this ever happens i can easily link it again linking in evid is a tool to get your files into media composer in order to then process them you normally wouldn't want to work with linked-only files unless you are under extreme time pressure and don't have the chance to consolidate a transcode after linking a file we can either consolidate or transcode it in order to understand which option is best for us we have to understand what native codecs are i have two sample files here the first one is a dnx file in mxf wrapper it's the perfect example of a file that we want to consolidate this could be for example a raw camera file or daily from a feature film the dnx codec is native to avid and the mxf wrapper is supported by media composer after linking the file we're selecting it into a right click and select console date transcode we make sure consolidate is selected we choose our target drive and click consolidate here we get the chance to either label our consolidated file with dot mu or label our old file with dot old this is important to pay attention to if we already started working with the linked file because we're deciding here which file is being relinked to evidence new media [Music] so avid just automatically created a new folder called avid media files what just happened is avid split the video file and the audio tracks and copied them into its own folder structure this folder is always in the root directory of a hard drive you can't move it to another folder you can't rename it otherwise your files will be offline there are few exceptions but today i only want to cover the very basics as you can see our new files are basically the same file size as before the video codec wasn't changed or modified let's go back into avid media composer and take a look at our second file this is a perfect example of a file that needs to be transcoded it's a h.264 codec so a highly compressed file inside a mp4 wrapper this is not a professional broadcast standard and therefore not natively supported by avid media composer has to change the wrapper and the codec in order to move it to its avid media files folder okay let's link this file [Music] we select it right click consolidate transcode we select transcode our target drive here we can choose the codec of our choice and decide if we want to keep the source frame rate or convert to the project frame rate if your fire frame rate matches the project frame rate it makes sense to select convert avid is not actually converting the frame rate but you get a bigger codec variety to choose from okay let's click transcode avid is now converting the codec and the wrapper [Music] again we find the new files in the avid media files folder here we have the video file and the two audio files and obviously this time the file size has completely changed after consolidating or transcoding you see that avid is changing the little symbol here that's the easy way of telling if a file is linked only or actually inside evid's media file folder structure ok let's take a look at our third example this is a original camera file in the original camera folder structure you shouldn't just select the individual clip it's better to select the folder above the camera folder structure this camera recorded a xavc codec in mxf wrapper we could just consolidate the file if we ok working with the 10 bit codec and a high data rate with a powerful workstation and hd files this is usually no problem as long as you have enough storage if you want to work with an offline online workflow you would add the required metadata and then transcode the file probably to something like dnx36 or dnxlb in this case you would definitely want to keep the ama linked file after transcoding in order to relink later to the camera original there are a lot more codecs that work natively with avid other than dnx or xavc for example prores xd cam avc intra and so on the list is long it's getting longer almost every year let's take a look at importing files when you import a file avid is not linking anything it's immediately converting the file and copying it into the media files folder structure in order to import you do right click input and either go to import media or select the source browser again and here select import instead of link this used to be the only option to get digital files into avid but today there's almost no reason anymore to ever import anything the only files that are still typically being imported are audio files video files with alpha channels pictures or placeholders so a lot of files we're going to overcut at some point anyways we have a bunch of options when importing for however it is processing the colors the image size the alpha channel and the audio tracks after selecting your target drive you click on import media composer is now converting the file and again copying the converted file into the avid media files folder the easiest way of replacing the file later with a better codec is by batch re-importing them another way of importing is to set up your import settings first go to settings user import change your settings here click ok and then just drag and dropping your file there's one other way of importing files and it's called fast import this only works with files that have a native avid codec and match your project settings in terms of frame rate and frame size this is a bit similar to consolidating the file but again there's almost no reason anymore to import files in most cases you want to link first and then proceed with the appropriate method if you think you might possibly ever have to relink back to your original files i would definitely go the ama route instead of importing again the exceptions like dealing with dailies and things like aafs but we can talk about those in another video if this video helped you feel free to subscribe to my youtube channel and check out my other tutorials as well i would really appreciate that thanks so much for watching and see you next time you

Channel: Hans The Editor

Views: 11,282

Keywords: import avid, ama link avid, consolidate avid, transcode avid, should I link or import in avid, how to import footage avid media composer, how to transcode avid, how to consolidate avid, link or import avid media composer, how to ingest files in avid media composer, what's the difference between linking and importing avid, difference linking and importing avid media composer, what's new in avid media composer, avid media composer 2020, avid media composer 2021, how to import avid

Id: hy0q5vu42ac

Length: 8min 14sec (494 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 16 2020