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Chapter 5 High Definition
Quality Ranks
Cautionary note:
Unless you have a very good reason for making a change, always keep these quality ranks set to Normal
wherever you find them. For more information, see the next section.
The quality ranks do not affect the video’s image quality
when capturing!
“Quality” is a subjective rather than an exact variable. The final decision belongs to you or your cus-
tomer. A scale of five levels (ranks) is provided for differentiating among the various materials you work
with in Avid Liquid, where Lowest is the worst acceptable quality and Highest is the best. You will find
these quality ranks in the Logging Tool, clip Properties and Timeline properties. These ranks can be
assigned to any media formats (codecs), regardless of HD or SD.
But note the following: The final decision is entirely up to you. We offer you only a prepared list of possi-
ble designations for these ranks. It is not until you capture one or more clips with the media format I-
MPEG2 5 Mbit/s and designate them as Medium High quality rank that they really adopt this rank. Or to
put it another way: The preset quality ranks are not permanently linked to any particular media format.
Also, even if you use the Highest rank to digitize a DV tape in the Logging Tool, the visual result will be no
better than if you had digitized using the Lowest rank.
If you do not want to work with different material “quality ranks”, you would be better off leaving the
default as is (Normal). Then you won’t have to adjust the setting in other modules and will not encounter
any problems due to filtered-out media data (page 404).
So why use quality ranks?
They help you differentiate among different versions of the same material. The individual ranking results
in a hierarchy of media files. This is useful, for example, when you perform offline editing. Or in the case
of:
 Problems with storage media capacity. First select a format that requires less storage space.
 Shortage of bandwidth in the network. Formats with a lower data rate require less bandwidth.
A typical offline-online workflow involving quality ranks might look like this:
1 Select a quality rank (Logging Tool).
2 Capture the material in a format with a low data rate (e.g. DV (AVI)). Assign each clip the
“Medium Low” property, for example.
3 Edit the Sequence(s) on the Timeline.