Hi,

  I have many projects in my database, and I am now realizing that many (talking hundreds) of clips on my media drives are incorrectly associated with the wrong projects.

  Even when I show the project heading in the bin window that I am in, it says its not even the project I'm working on.

  My question is, how can I correctly set these clips to say the correct project?

Thanks
Lucas

In short, you can't. Media association is given during the creation of the media. So the moment you digitized or imported a clip, it is automatically associated with the project. If you open a bin from another project and captured it, it will be associated for the current project. The only to change it is generate the media again either by digitize or consolidate. Open a bin and consolidate the media. The consolidated (duplicated) media will  be associated with the current project.

If you feel the association is an application error, try rebuilding your media database (search in how to delete 'PMR' and 'MDB' files). This will scan the media drives and check for project association (that information is stored within each media file itself).

HTH

A workaround that I've used in the past on MC is to modify the clip source tape.  Note, I haven't tried this on XP (or MC in years for that matter) but it should work.

Let's assume that your tape is from project XYZ, called tape 123, and you want it to be attached to project ABC.  Click on the clip you want to change and choose Clip->Modify...  Chose Tape source in the modfy options and click OK.  You will now see all of the tape names associated with your project.  Create a new tape name and call it 123.  Select it and assign it to the clip, following the dialogue prompts.

So what's really happened here?  The tape name that Avid uses (but doesn't display) can be regarded as XYZ:123.  By changing it to the same name in the new project you've changed the name to ABC:123.

Good luck.  Let us know if it works for you.

Unfortunately changing the tape name did not work.  I don't know if this has anything to do with it, but for one project in particular there was no tapes to digitize... it was all imported motion graphics.

I initially tried deleting the database files from the Mediafiles directory and letting it re-scan, but that didn't do it.  I'm wondering if this is what caused the problem in the first place?

The scary thing about this is that I found out about this problem as I was cleaning up my projects, deleting media using the Media Tool.  Since Media Tool said I had a lot of files that were from a long finished project on my drives, I was about to delete them.  Luckily I did not delete them cuzz that would have completey destroyed my current projects that are actually using the footage.

And as an additional note, the clips that are incorrectly associated were never used with the projects it says that are with.  i.e. I never opened the bins in other projects, never imported them to each other, etc.

This is very worrying.  Avid shouldn't do this at all.  Dom's suggestion is the one to follow.  Open each of your media folders and delete the .pmr and .mdb files and let Avid rebuild them.  That should sort out your problem.

As an aside, you might like to check your media with MDV if you haven't already.  This allows you to scan your media drives, ignoring Avid's database files.  This should show you the correct project associations for all your media.

OK, I fixed my problem, and this is how it went down.
I did find MDV earlier and used it for the process.

By going into most of my projects and seeing which files were affected I realized at some point that all the offending files were on 1 drive in particular, Z (I have 3, labeled X, Y, Z)

Using MDV, I was able to see the name of the files as they are labeled in the bin of the Avid project (as opposed to just the file name.mxf).  For most of them, I was able to determine which project they were supposed to be from by doing this.

I went into all of my projects, and went through all of the bins, and made every file viewable (precomps and renders, etc.) and also turned on the "project" heading in each bin window.  From this, I could see which files in each bin were labeled with the incorrect project.  I then Consolidated any and all clips that were incorrect onto a different drive, and told it to delete the old ones.  This created new media and also updated the project label to the correct project.

All this consolidating obviously took up most of the day.  After all was said and done, there were only 3 or 4 straggling files I couldn't figure out so I just moved them into a "mystery files" folder and await the day a project might have media offline.


Some notes:
- MDV also gave the incorrect project names, so it was something written to the files themselves.

- Some of the files that MDV located were coming up 'media offline' in the Avid project they were in.  And those offline files did NOT have the incorrect project label.  But, when I relinked them, the project label changed and became incorrect upon relinking.

- Can I correctly assume that all files in the mediafiles folder will be seen in MediaTool?

-  I read a lot about MediaTool not always deleted every file when you want it to.  Is MediaTool still the best way to clear off an entire project from your drives when you are done?

thanks,
Lucas

Lucas:

Yes, always use the media tool for deleting media. If at any time you launch the media tool and the window is empty, rebuild the database files. I would always recommend selecting current project rather than multiple projects at one time. The media tool allows you to delete both associated media files AND pre-computes you have created along the way - they eat up a lot of space as well. Select "current project", the appropriate drive(s), select all three display options and all of those files will be displayed for the project at hand.

Regarding shared media between projects, I always build a "Common Elements" project for shared footage, shared graphics, music, titles, effects, timeline templates, etc. Use open bins to retrieve this material in any local project. Later, when the local project and it's associated media and pre-computes are deleted, everything from "Common Elements" remains online.

Something's gone seriously off the rails here, Lucas.

If this were my system behaving this way, I'd wait for a reasonable working break then do a complete new clean install.  That is either format the boot drive and reinstall Windows, or better still, get a new HD and install Windows to that.  Then put back eveything needed and finally replace the project files.  Let Avid rebuild the settings files.

The reason for installing to a new HD is not because I think that there's anything wrong with it.  HDs are comparitively cheap, and by doing things that way you have a complete working, bootable backup should something go wrong.  As a bonus, once everything is reliably working you have a spare backup drive.

And as to the question about media tool, I use MDV for that purpose because it seems to leave less behind.  I prefer the way it handles "orphan" files too, and I find it faster when deleting a group of projects.