Hi all,

I'm brand new to Avid and new around here as well.

Our company just purchased 2 Media Composer suites with 1 up & running a 2nd to be installed soon.  We produce about 1000 30-second commercials a year.  In the past, after creation of the commercial, a dub was made for airing & the original project offlined to DVD or some other storage area.  These archived files are frequently retrieved for revising or reactivating commercials so keeping them accessible is important.This would appear, upon just glancing at the manuals, to be not so easy to do with the Avid way of doing things -- I gather Avid likes to keep everything in one place?

What would be the best, most efficient way to extract individual projects & files for archivng & easy retrieval?

P.S.  We currently do not have batch capture capabilities so simply storing meta data would not fit the bill.  (ie. restoring an EDL & recapturing clips would not be an option)

Check the manual for the Consolidate feature.  This will allow you to extract the exact media used for a given sequence.

Yeah, I've just been reading a bit about Consolidate but it looks to my untrained eye like that is more of a space-saving function. 

We're moving from a Speed Razor (now you know WHY we are changing over to new equipment ;-) system where each project resides in its own directory/folder.  It was a simple matter to just drag & drop to another location ALL the elements used in the original project, including the raw clips (I guess called Master Clips in Avid).  This was handy in case a shot needed to be extended or replaced with another from the raw selection.

How does Avid manage projects?  Does it maintain a single database of all projects?

(sorry for the NOOB questions)

Avid maintains a database for each media drive. Each drive is shared for all projects unless you  proactively manage that. Most don't.

If you want ALL the media related to a particular project...

Open the Media Tool (in Tools)

Check the right parameters (drive, project and media type). For media type-  select master clips and precomputes (aka render files).

It will generate a list for you off all the media related to this project.

Use the consolidate command. Point it to a new drive.

Consolidate copies media over. If used on master clips, it copies all the media over. If used on a sequence, it will only copy those portion used in the sequence.

If you want media only related to a sequence, open Bin Display in the bin Fast Menu. Activate 'Show Referenced Clips'. This will reveal all the media being used in all of the sequences in a given bin (so you may want to make sure only one sequence is in this bin to prevent confusion). From here you can consolidate.

 If I want to archive something that I might need to access in the future, I use 2 methods depending on the project.

1. For long form, I just keep the meta data and any imported material, and maybe I'll consolidate and keep just that media. I do this of course if I have athe source tapes and can batch capture.

2. For short form, if I want to back up everything I've used, I'll consolidate with handles and delete any unused pre-computes and source footage. I also archive the source files for all imported material.

Here's a handy freeware tool that I use ALOT in managing material with Avid. It's pretty useful for deleting and managing all of the media for a particular project. It can't do fancy things like dleting unused renders and consolidate but it's good for everything else.

Here's the app.

http://fiool.nm.ru/progz/

Here's a thread talking about it.

http://community.avid.com/forums/p/7209/40223.aspx

It looks like there is no analog to the old Speed Razor drag 'n drop routine.  As you say,"Avid maintains a database for each media drive...,", this could turn into a storage nightmare after a year or so (I believe we have only 1 drive per suite - 1 or 2 TB).

Looks like I'm in for a lot more reading.

Thanks everyone for the advice so far.  Once my suite is up & running, I assure you all, I'll be back :-)

 Once you get your head around Consolidate you will find it works very well.  I do mostly training/safety/corporate communications programs.  A typical 12-15 min program might have up to 2 dozen tapes utilizing file footage.  I find it easy to use the consolidate method for archiving.  I have a number of external hard drives and each finished program with its project file, digitized media and other media (graphics, music etc) are all brought together in a separate folder on the external hard drive.  Restoring a project is as simple as copying the files to the appropriate place on your edit computer.

Run thru the process with a short test (and expendable if the train falls off the tracks) project a few times and you will develop a work flow that fits your needs.

Good luck

Kevin

Once I find the power button on this thing, I'll give your idea a try.

Thanks Kevin!

Chris 

Scott is right, use the software he suggested to locate media belonging to different projects, if You digitize mxf instead of omf You can have several subfolders in the AvidMediaFiles folder to keep all Your stuff in its own directories.