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# About Processing and Publishing

Processing is a convenient means of ensuring real-time playback when creating complex effects. Publishing allows you to share media with other applications and users. Before using the process and publish features, it is important to understand some underlying concepts and principles.

In the context of processing and publishing, you are dealing with media and clips.

The term media refers to images, video, or audio that can reside either on the Autodesk storage device or outside, on a shared storage.

The term cliprefers to a collection of media-specific metadata that is native to Autodesk products and that, unlike media, cannot be stored on the shared storage. This includes any soft effects, timewarps, or dissolves that are applied to the existing media, but not yet processed.

A clip residing on Autodesk storage can reference media that is stored outside the framestore. This type of clip is referred to as a clip with unmanaged media.

A processed clip consists of new media that incorporates whatever soft effects, timewarps, and dissolves that you applied. Processing renders the effects and writes new images to storage. In situations where you are not achieving real-time playback, you can selectively process elements in the timeline (or the whole timeline) to restore it. Soft effects remain editable after processing; that is, the processing does not remove the “soft” part of the effect.

A published clip consists of media that resides outside of Autodesk storage (in a shared storage device or area) and a clip that references that media. The original clip from which you published the media is not linked to the published media. Publishing a clip is like a regular export operation, creating a new clip with unmanaged media.

If you have a Burn® license, you can take advantage of the background processing system to process clips containing soft effects, timewarps, and dissolves.

You can save time by applying effects to proxies, and then processing only the proxies rather than the full-resolution images. You can refine an effect using proxies and process the full-resolution images when you are finished.

You can also write media to the framestore with the Store tool to make your version inaccessible in the shared storage area. This tool converts the clips with unmanaged media into clips with managed media that is written to Autodesk storage.