Hi Mark,
I suppose I differentiate between 'professional' and 'consumer' and between ' technical' and 'pragmatic'.
Technically any video rendering/conversion (unless completely lossless) acts to 'reduce' quality, so re-rendering sub-project videos, when assembling a final project, may reduce quality - depending on the codecs, software, hardware etc. Professionally, the technically best solution may be the one of choice.
However, my pragmatic approach works along the lines of "can I see a difference?". This, of course, depends on my playback kit, my input video quality, my output file format, my mother's/sister's/friend's TV etc etc.
For 'consumers', set against any perceived loss of quality, is the ease (or not!) of production.
Using consumer camera hardware, it is becoming common to deal with HD video but the processing and graphics power required to edit and produce HD in a relaxing and pleasurable way is often beyond some of us.
So, rather than suffer the frustration and extended time scales, freezes, crashes etc that are commonly the subject of posts here, the judicial use of smaller sub-projects doesn't (subject to many variables, I know) necessarily result in a perceptably poorer final product and may make a video editor's life a bit more bearable.
Given that I'm 56, really grumpy, 5 grown up but still around children, dislike working, need the money etc etc - there are times to compromise
Cheers
Adrian
Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated. (see below)
Confucius
AMD Phenom IIX6 1055T, win10, 5 internal drives, 7 usb drives, struggling power supply.