Reconforming video only...the easy way

Software: Avid Adrenaline
Platform: Windows / Mac
Skill Level: Intermediate

The following tip was a revelation to me, but may be quite old hat to some of you. So if this is bleeding obvious, my apologies, but I use this tip every single day. Thanks to Julian at Backyard Blitz for this ripper.

One of my very common workflows is to capture material at a low res (i.e. 15:1s), cut the offline and then recapture the video only at full res (i.e. 1:1). Obviously, reconforming the audio is a waste of time because audio is at "full res" already.

My previous method of doing this was to:

1. Select the Video layers only
2. Make a subsequence in a new bin
3. Decompose the new sequence with whatever handles are required
4. Batch digitize the decomposed master clips
5. Edit the video layers back over the offline vision to create a hi-res master.

Now, this is still a good method if you have a lot of source tapes, or you want to be able to pause the reconform and resume it easily. But if you have a small number of sources then there is another way.

1. Open your Capture settings, and choose the Batch tab.
2. Deselect the setting Capture the tracks logged for each clip and choose OK.
3. If you want to keep a copy of your offline sequence, select the original sequence and press CTRL-D (win) or APPLE-D (mac) to duplicate it.
4. Open the Capture window, and make sure only the V1 and TC tracks are selected.
5. Select the duplicated copy of your sequence.
6. Choose Clip > Batch Capture, unselect the Offline media only option and change the handles to whatever you require then choose OK.

Avid will now redigitize the video only and ask for each source tape in turn. Rememeber that you will need to use Batch Import as well if you have imported graphics in the sequence.

One note: At the end of capture, Avid will tell you that the Batch capture was incomplete, but this is simply because it has skipped digitizing the audio based on your settings.

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