Avid Media Composer - Mac

Re: P2 Question

Bill Nelson — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:47:53 GMT

Between Avid's AMA architecture and Calibrated's P2 QT codec, my P2 media is instantly accessible across my production pipeline. A great coup for Avid and for my shop!

Re: P2 Question

switthaus — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:51:53 GMT

As much as it amazes me, I agree with "andrew" (alert the media)! :-)

I just finished a PSA that was shot P2. We offloaded all the cards into one folder on a FW 800 dirve. I then made a copy of this folder onto the internal media drive on my MacPro (now the FW drive served as a backup), pointed AMA to that drive and I was off to the races. No need to ever relink. I did do an offline, so I sent the FW drive to a shop with a DS where they converted the P2 to DNxHD. I sent an .AFE of my project and the "online" in DS was pretty instant, and we focused on color and graphics. Dead on nuts, as it were. AMA has become part of my standard operating procedure and has already brought back projects to Avid that I would have done on FCP.

Re: P2 Question

AndrewAction — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:21:44 GMT

This worked for me. Client walks in with 800GBsof P2 media on mini personal FW 800 hardrive. He tells me he has the original copy and backup safely stored on harddrives elsewhere . (in all 3 harddrives for $600)

I connect the drive via FW 800 to MC 4.02 and link to the media with AMA. The edit is spread over 4 days working with the full res clips. The client takes his drive home with him each night. During the edit I use local storage for all renders as there is not that free space on the clients drive.

The finished project is mixed down to DNxHD on clients drive. A DNxHD Quicktime is exported to the clients drive for ongoing compression formats he may want. I use a QT ref file from the mixed down sequence to make DVD via Compressor.

Really could not be much easier. No offlining so relinking was never cosidered. Great first experience with larger ongoing project using AMA.

Re: P2 Question

Kenton.VanNatten — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 16:49:51 GMT

You certainly don't want to get rid of your original P2 media (one of my biggest complaints with P2 is that there really is no "permanent" solution for storing the media - it feels to me like placing it on a drive is still a bit precarious)

Storage is fairly cheap and by my calculation you'd only need roughly 80-100GB/hr to store DNx185. (I don't have a calculator for 185x, but it shouldn't too far off that mark).

Weigh the cost of adding extra storage (a G-RAID @ 4TB would be about $650USD) vs. spending a large chunk of your edit time dealing with linking to the AMA volumes.

You could dump all the 185x onto the G-RAID, then Transcode that and store the low-res on your EditShare. Then when the time comes to up-res it, it should just be a simple matter of "hiding" the low-res media and doing a relink on your final sequence with the 185x storage connected.

Re: P2 Question

fiendish — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 15:02:27 GMT

Thanks, Kenton, those are all very sensible and valid points. The problem we have on this job is that we are very limited in storage due to small budget. We have a 10TB external raid enclosure, and 2TB Editshare, to serve two suites. This limited shared storage means we need to transcode to a offline res (we're going with 10:1) and so I figured the simplest way was to bring everything in via AMA, and transcode.

Given that we have to transcode to 185x prior to export to VFX when the cut is locked, it would probably make more sense to transcode everything to that res first. However our limited storage means we wouldn't have space for that without getting rid of the original P2 media, which we're not keen to do.

Re: P2 Question

Kenton.VanNatten — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 14:11:44 GMT

Couldn't you at the end of the edit day, Consolidate the media onto one (or a few) of your storage drives?

In my mind, AMA works best for those times when you want to start going through the footage right away, either because you're on a short deadline, or have a lot of material. If you're on a short deadline you're likely starting and finishing the job in one edit session which AMA would make total sense. But, if you're just cutting it as normal and are looking at a couple of days/weeks/months of post-production, then it would make sense to me if you were to use AMA to quickly scan and organize the footage, then categorize it within the project. Then you could Consolidate the media and you wouldn't have to worry about linking to the AMA volume each time. It would just be part of your normal storage.

Of course, you would keep you AMA volume in tact as your source Masters, but to have to deal with linking every day for a week to few months seems a bit cumbersome.

Re: P2 Question

fiendish — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 10:20:19 GMT

Wel I've done some more tests, and it seems like you have to 'Link to AMA Volume' for all the media your relinked sequence will be referencing. I think this has been mentioned before, but it doesn't seem an obvious step when all the AMA media appears already to be online, as it was for me. The giveaway is it whether it appears in Media Tool or not. Tape name does not seem to make a difference, though I'm sure some have said it is essential.

So if you have gonna have at least 17 days of four to five 32GB P2 cards as I will on this project, there is still some thinking to do on how to organise your cards at the volume that AMA will reference. I have been putting each day's cards in its own folder, then telling AMA to point to that and create subfolders, which works fine. But to do my relink to the HD media, I will first have to tell AMA to link 17 times.

Added to that, memory is up to about 35% with 16 cards I have indexed so far...so I wonder, will I have enough RAM to enable all the cards to be referenced?

This is on a dual quad 2.66 Nehalem Mac Pro with 6GB ram.

Re: P2 Question

fiendish — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 09:36:00 GMT

Doing this on 4.02 by the way. Am also noticing slightly odd behaviour with AMA that I never noticed on the PC. Perhaps it's normal, but clips appear in Media Tool the first time you link to them, then after a subsequent close / open of project, they do not. They do however appear in their bins.

Re: P2 Question

fiendish — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 09:56:40 GMT

Hi Bob - I'm just starting a 13 part show, shot AVC intra 100. Getting rushes already, so doing tests with the offline / online workflow.

Is it a good idea to assign each folder a tape name? I've read conflicting ideas about this. I'm getting bare drives every day which I'm copying to a external raid enclosure, then linking via AMA, then transcoding to 10:1.

I did a test, after assigning tape names, and relinking didn't work. Then I did 'Link to AMA' again, despite the fact that the AMA bins were already online. Then relink worked on some clips but not others! Very odd.

Incidentally, the link at the bottom of the Avid Resources page here is broken.

http://www.avid.com/p2/

Ollie

Re: P2 Question

switthaus — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 21:16:27 GMT

thanks Bob. So by movng the project file over to my laptop and attaching the FW drive with the exact copy of the P2, the Link to AMA command will bring everything back up...good stuff.

Re: P2 Question

BobRusso — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:31:36 GMT

Using AMA the Media Composer will relink to footage if the media is transcoded, deleted or the project is moved to a different system and it needs to be recreated.

Each P2 clip has an UMID (Unique Material Identifier). The UMID is being read by AMA and it along with the timecode is being used to relink the clips.

So at any point the P2 folder can be reindexed using the Link to AMA command and the media will be online.

Re: P2 Question

switthaus — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 01:32:09 GMT

P2/AMA question:

The most recent spot I am editing was shot on P2. I copied all the files to an external FW drive then copied that to my media drive on the MacPro where I have started the edit using AMA. Can I move the project file over to my laptop and keep editing at a different location using the same P2 files on the FW drive? Kind of like I do when dealing with the same media on both drives in MXF-land. Do I have the same portability via AMA as I would have with MXF? Is there a special relink process to go through with AMA/P2 on the second system? Thanks in advance

Re: P2 Question

byahseeker — Fri, 29 May 2009 23:18:32 GMT

Ok another update. I've been able to get some of the clips to relink and not others. After doing some snooping I realized that the old AE assigned tape names to the transcoded clips but not to the original master clips. This is causing the transcoded clips to not relink. All the clips that weren't modified and given a tape name are now relinking fine but any one that was modified won't relink. Is there an easy fix to this? If I go to the master clips and do a modify/set source on them will it mess all sorts of things up, we have groups and all that jazz so there is no way I am doing this sort of thing without being given some advice. I can't understand why they would use the tape field for the tape names and not some un used field

Re: P2 Question

byahseeker — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:39:43 GMT

Another post since the edit function doesn't work. When I select the clips in the transcoded bin I only have the option to relink offline master clips to to online media files. Would it be better if I attempted to try and relink the whole sequence with the highest quality setting as opposed to testing this on clips?

Re: P2 Question

byahseeker — Fri, 29 May 2009 01:34:24 GMT

So today I went in just to see what I was in for and ran into some snags. The system has seperate media drives setup for the transcoded p2 clips and the Full Resolution P2 which appears to only have been shot at DV50 (When I run the media tool the clips pop up as DV50). Now in my 30i project when I go to a P2 file that has been transcoded (10:1m) and try to relink the clips with the full resolution dv50 clips on the other drive the avid tells me that there are no clips to relink. Not quite sure what is going on here, I tried using all drives and then tried targeting only dv50 as a resolution (dv50 because this is what the clips show up as in the media tool). Am I missing something stupid here??