From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Intro to MC 2020: Part 3 relinking media - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Intro to MC 2020: Part 3 relinking media

- [Instructor] If you have downloaded the media assets associated with this course, your media files will be stored probably in a different location to the place that I put them on my system while recording. And that means that Media Composer's not necessarily going to know where the files are. We'll be getting into detail later on working with media files, but I want to just take a moment before we get started to show you a couple of tips on relinking, that's reconnecting the project that you're working on in Media Composer with the media files in your storage. You may find that you want to check back on this video later. If you encounter any issues accessing your media throughout this course. To give you an example, I'm going to go into one of these projects, I'm just going to Double Click to go into the project. Don't worry, at this stage too much about what we're looking at in the Media Composer interface. We'll go into all of that detail later. What I want to draw your attention to is that if I view these clips, I can tell right away that they're online because I've got pictures. It's pretty obvious when your media is offline and not connected because again, don't worry about how I'm getting here, but you'll notice that these thumbnails do not have pictures, they're just described as media offline. I can double click to open these just as you might double click to open any file on your computer and see the contents. And what I'm getting here is media offline. So it's pretty obvious that the contents not available. Offline in this context doesn't mean that you're in an early stage of the edit or any other of the many meanings of the word offline in post production. It just means that Media Composer doesn't know where the files are. It knows that they exist but it doesn't know where they are. I'm going to select these two items. I'm just Clicking and Dragging to make marquee selection. I'm going to Right Click and I'm going to choose relink, so I have selected the items I want to reconnect with the media, Right Clicking and choosing relink, there is a relink to files option that's grayed out and you'll find this is usually grayed out this nowadays only applies to certain types of media. In this case, we actually don't need it, I'm going to go to relink and I get all of these options. And it can be a little bit overwhelming, trying to work out what you should do to just connect the media and carry on working. And you're definitely going to want to do this because otherwise you won't have the same content to work with that I'm showing on screen. The good news is that you can't break anything by getting these options wrong. And if you just start at the top and work your way down, you'll usually find out what you need to set to reconnect your media. First of all up at the top, you can specify which drive you want to use to search for your media. If you choose all available drives, Media Composer will search through everything. You might as well have the load media databases option on that's going to get Media Composer to check whatever information it has already about the media on your system, you're going to relinked selected master clips that's what these are. And we're not going to choose relink only to media from the current project. Media Composer actually knows which media was imported into which project originally. And if you turn this option on, and the media was imported into a different project, which actually is the case here, it'll reject the media. So you don't want that option on for the media associated with this course. Next up, you've got this relink by option. How is the system going to identify the files that it needs. And the time codes not too important for the files that were working with but what you will probably want to do is make sure this menu is set to tape name or source file name. Because we're working with media that was imported from files. You're probably going to want to ignore the extension that's the .mov or .nxf, or .mpg part of the filenames. And down here under video parameters, choose relink to any video format, or any HD video format, if you're working on other projects in the future where you want to have high quality. But for this project, any video format is fine. Leave the relink method on highest quality. Everything else can stay the same. And we'll Click OK. Before I do I want to mention that relinking your media in Media Composer can be fun and games and you might find yourself going back into this menu several times to find exactly the combination of settings that you need in order to relink. This time it's worked and I've now got pictures as thumbnails for my media rather than that offline indicator

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