Hi

Just wanting to describe my planned workflow for a new series and see if anyone has suggestions or can see problems. I've been using MC3.1.3 and just jumped to MC4, but want to use AMA as I'll explain.

There will be two editors working on the show so I want to make a duplicate of all of the media and the footage bins.

The footage is all XDCAM and EX3.

So my plan is to simply copy each disk and card into it's own folder on the hard-drive, link to it and work from there. So over the course of the series I'll end up with a hundred or more folders which will each be a virtual volume in my project.

When I make my duplicate set for the other editor I hope to just copy the folders of raw media to his hard drive, along with a copy of the bins, and hopefully he'll just open the bins on his Avid and relink to the virtual volumes.

There are a couple of resaons I'm thinking of doing it this way rather than consolidating to the Avid Media Files folders. One is that as new disks and cards come in it will be easy to identify which ones have been duplicated to the other system if they are still in folders.

The other is that the camera guys don't usually give the disks names in the camera, and since there are several shooters there is sometimes confusion as to which number disk they are up to. Rather than importing from a disk labelled "Untitled" it seems neater to put it into a folder that I can name meaningfully and have that as come up as the source.

So my questions are these:

1. Is it ok to use AMA virtual volumes for the length of a whole series - several months of editing - or is the idea that you should just use them temporarily and consolidate as soon as you can.

2. Is there a problem with having large numbers of virtual volumes? I have 14 disks and 5 cards after the first 2 weeks of shooting...

3. Are there any other problems with using AMA virtual volumes that people have come across?

4. Or should I stick to the tried and true method of giving all the clips a Tape as the source and then copying the media through the Finder when I make the duplicate set for the other editor.

Look forward to your comments and advice.

cheers

Campbell

Hi Campbell,

I'm half way through my second week of collating rushes by AMA with 4.02 on the Mac. I'm transcoding to 10:1 in my case and have noticed that If I give the cards Tape Name sources, they will NOT relink. However the Link to AMA command is different so you may not have this problem.

1. The view seems to be that AMA is not ideal for long jobs with lots of media. I can tell you from the jobs I've done with it, peformance is certainly not as good, though it depends on whether you're doing something with straight cuts or lots of effects.

2. Not sure of the answer to this. I've used about 30 cards at once so far and it's been fine. What I have noticed is that when I have do lots of 'Link to AMA volume' commands to several locations, my memory usage gets high quickly. But once you've done this and don't move the folders, you don't have to do it again EXCEPT when you need the clips to appear in Media Tool.

4. See my thoughts above about Tape Names. I have no experience with using duplicate AMA media, but my understanding is that each clip has a unique identifier or UMID, so it may work without problems.

As to reorgansing into folders, that's what I've been doing and it works well. If you move the AMA volume you then just do Link to AMA again and it will find it.

Ollie

My experience on a short project with about 20 disks and working at a finishing resolution:

It was best for us to consolidate full length to Avid drives. NOT transcoding (so it's pretty much as quick as a folder copy) but they do get to be blessed avid media files. Didn't worry about any tapeID voodoo, didn't have to relink. Took up lots less space than DNX too.

(You might want to copy disks to virtual folders first - so you don't need to tie the avid up for that - then link to all those folders and consolidate lots of folders overnight. Also gives you the backup of the original virtual folders which you *should* presumably be able to link back to.)

Thanks for the feedback. It sounds like for a big project consolidating is the way to go. A couple more questions.

1. To keep track of new media as it gets imported I was thinking of just adding a new number folder into the Avid Media Files\MXF folder. So the first days importing goes into folder "1". Next week I get a bunch more disks so I make a new folder "2" - will Avid automatically put new media into the numerically highest available folder? (I will try this out but I thought maybe someone might know how this system works). That way when I duplicate the media I just copy the "2" folder to the second editors media drive and I know he's got all the new footage.

2. I can't copy my XDCAM disks to a hard-drive because we only have a PDW-V1 player, just doesn't seem to allow it. Also won't allow me to relabel disk names because it can't write to the disk. I can do both these things when I use the camera but of course I won't usually have that in the edit suite. This means that ALL my XDCAM disks mount up as "Untitled". Does anyone know if this are any consequences down the line if I lose media on the hard drive and have to relink to the original disks? Again I can test it out but if someone has some experience of this or understands how it works and can advise me it would be great.

cheers

Campbell

Just did a tapeless show with 400 hours of footage. We tracked the original filename (AVCHD) in a field in the clip info so we had a trail of breadcrumbs in case of trouble. We were working all high res so we didn't have to go back but it's always good to prepare for disaster.

Can't help on the XDCAM but I can tell you that consolidation is definitely the way to go, and if it was my gig, I'd come in full res and then transcode the offline and back up the high res til online. That may or may not be practical in your shop but it is way easier than 2 trips off the card.

Great, that sounds like what I'll do. Is there any way of copying the original filename automatically to another field, or did you have to manually copy and paster every clip?

Select the entire column containing the original filename entry and hit CMD-D. That will allow you to choose a column to paste that data into.

gumbycat99:

will Avid automatically put new media into the numerically highest available folder?

Job ter Burg:

Select the entire column containing the original filename entry and hit CMD-D. That will allow you to choose a column to paste that data into.

great thanks. love learning new tricks!

Job ter Burg:

IMHO it would be better to number 101, 102 etc, then have the Avid write its renders/precomputes into 1, 2 etc.

Is there any way of controlling that? My plan was to send renders/precomputes to a separate drive to avoid confusion. But I just need to be able to keep track of new media that gets imported/digitised. Since I'll have someone else doing the digitising work I'd like to have a system I can set up for him that he doesn't have to think about!

I guess I'll be able to go through the finder and check the creation date of the media files against the new master clips and identify them that way, but if I could be sure that they would go into a certain folder it would make things simpler.

thanks.