Right, I’ve just run a one minute long clip through the full editing pipeline, from source, to conversion, to editing, to rendering. Just to see if I’d hit any snags. It’s all good news - conversion and rendering are lossless so we’re losing no quality or colour information. My editor is reading my 23.976fps converted file as 25fps and I’ll need to remind myself how to fix that issue (it’s common), and right now I’m not outputting the center channel in my render so we’re losing some audio, but that’s likely just a matter of settings - I don’t understand surround sound audio settings yet so I’ll upskill soon.

But the very good news is that, as Smudger9 informed me recently, there’s no music in the center channel. Editors of other sources will recognise this as a rare treat! When you’re editing, you have the video track, and one or more audio tracks - but usually voice and sound effects have music on their track, so if you’re trying to fix some simple dialogue for example, it can break the music in the background, and sound obvious. So it’s great to confirm that for the Clone Wars DVDs, the voice/soundFX is split from music/ambient. (Weirdly, it wasn’t perfect, in the clip I viewed there was one voice line in the music channel, but it looks rare.) This gives me way more flexibility for trimming and reordering dialogue, but also for changing dialogue (e.g. Moraband > Korriban).

I’ll muck about with those couple of issues, but this is looking good.

Plan now is to finish my watch through - probably tonight - then get to work on Cloak of Darkness / Lair of Grievous, because that episode is going to require all of the skills at my disposal, so it lets me refine them while sharing the content with you to get ideas together and collect feedback. Then I’ll probably take a breather, maybe watch over the series again in a preferred order, before starting the edits properly.